Download Feminist History of Colonial Science

Feminist History of Colonial Science
LONDA SCHIEBINGER
This essay offers a short overview offeminist history of science and introduces a new
project into that history, namely feminist history of colonial science. My case study
focuses on eighteenth-century voyages of scientific discovery and reveals how gender
relations in Europe and the colonies honed selective collecting practices. Cultural,
economic, and political trends discouraged the transfer from the New World to the
Old of abortifacients (widely used by Amerindian and African women in the West
Indies).‘
Historians like to date things, and we date the origins of feminist history
of science to the publication of Carolyn Merchant’s Death of Nature (1980),
though, of course, Christine de Pisan in the fifteenth century and Christian
Harless in the 1830s had interesting things to say already centuries earlier.’ Early
feminist history of science sought to answer the challenge that women-by
their very nature-were incapable of creating great science by cataloguing
the achievements of scientists such as Marie Curie, Lise Meitner, and Barbara
McClintock-exceptional women who made Nobel Prize winning contributions
to their fields (even if they did not themselves always garner the Prize). Like
historians of women, feminist historians of science soon turned from emphasizing the achievements of exceptional women to analyzing structural barriers
to women’s participation in science. Margaret Rossiter’s two-volume Women
Scientists in America (1982 and 1995),for example, set the history of individual
women scientists firmly in a rich cultural history of American scientific institutions (see also Abir-Am and Outram 1987; Pycior, Slack, and Abir-Am 1996;
Henrion 1997).
Historians gradually shifted their focus from women (of various ethnic and
class backgrounds) to gender, moving beyond issues surrounding the recruitment and retention of women to analyze how gender operates in the broader
Hypatia vol. 19, no. 1 (Winter 2004) 0by Londa Schiebinger
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Hypatia
culture and ethos of the sciences. The point was to understand why, despite
many good-willed efforts, government and university programs designed to
entice more women into science had not flourished. Feminist historians, working closely with philosophers and scientists, sought to uncover what was, in the
1980s,called “masculine science” (see Keller 1985;Haraway 1989;and Harding
1991). Scholars focused on different aspects of the historical conflict between
cultural ideals of femininity and of science. Many traced this conflict to the
deep gulf between the public realm of science, presumably bristling with masculine reason, impartiality, and intellectual virility, and the private sphere of
domesticity, radiating with feminine warmth, tender feeling, and quiet intuition
(see Schiebinger 1989). Others sought the origins of the masculine grip on scientific culture in the hotnosocial bonding said to fire inale creativity (see Noble
1992; Biagioli 1995). Still others viewed the masculine character of science as
an outgrowth of the early scientific societies and their economy of civility that
relied on gentlemen of independent economic and social standing as guarantors
of truth (Shapin 1994).While the catch phrase “science is masculine” angered
a number of women scientists for a variety of reasons, institutions of science in
the 1990s implemented numerous reforms to overcome the historical tendency
to design scientific culture (as professional culture more generally) to fit the
needs of male heads-of,households.
Much critical work was also done in the 1980s and 1990s on another feminist
project, namely uncovering sexism in research results. This crucial step unmasked
the claim that science is gender neutral and underscored how gender inequalities have been built into the production and structure of knowledge itself (see
Hrdy 1981; Hubbard 1990; Leonardo 1991; Gero and Conkey 1991; FaustoSterling 1992;Schiebinger 1993;du Cros and Smith 1993; Squier 1994; Spanier
1995; Potter 2001). Even more recently, historians have reversed the negative
fault-finding characteristic of some of this literature to emphasize instead the
potential creativity of feminism for science. Scholars have begun to ask how
feminism-conceived both as B political and social movement, and as an academic perspective-has brought new questions and priorities to the sciences.’
Biomedical research, for example, is the one place in American science that
feminist innovations have been institutionalized at the highest level. These
new research directions have often been simple in their conception (neglected
females hecame subjects of inquiry) but dramatic in their results: women’s right
to inclusion in basic medical research is now secured by federal law (see Fee and
Krieger 1994; Ruzek, Olesen, and Clarke 1997; Schiebinger 1999).
Feminist history of science, like feminist history more generally, has developed into an exacting subdiscipline. While this has advantages, it also has the
disadvantage that its subject matters are often confined to books on women
or gender, to separate courses on women or gender, or to separate units added
an to survey courses at the end of the semester, perhaps right before a similarly
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235
conceived unit on race. There is still a need to train students in methods of
critical gender analysis in order to mainstream the study of gender into science at
large. While most would agree that a student needs to be trained in primatology
or physics in order to excel in those fields, many seem to believe that one can
just “pick up’)an understanding of gender along the way. Understanding gender
and other social aspects of science, however, requires research, development,
and training, as in any other field of intellectual endeavor. Students across the
university need to be equipped with tools of gender analysis that they can apply
in basic research (see Schiebinger 1999). Anne Fausto-Sterling, who teaches in
the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Biochemistry at Brown
University, has developed a model course, “Embryology in Social Context,”
designed to teach comparative vertebrate embryology in relation to key ethical
and social issues. Without losing “the science,” she has devised ways to discuss
how, for example, scientists decide what is “normal” and. “abnormal”development, issues surrounding genetic counseling, abortion, the birth of anencephalic
children, and so forth. Her course challenges science students to understand
where scientific questions come from in the first place and how they relate to
society and on-going moral debates: in short, she requires future scientists to
consider the cultural complexities of scientific knowledge in an effort to produce
socially responsible science (Fausto-Sterling 2003).
FEMINIST
STUDIES
OF COLONIAL
SCIENCE
While feminist historians of science have added much to our understanding of
gender in U.S. and European science, little is known about gender in colonial
or postcolonial science! My current work analyzes gender in the voyages of
scientific discovery. Given that voyagers were overwhelmingly men (two, perhaps three, women traveled as naturalists between 1699 and BOO), is it possible
to discuss gender dynamics (vs. monochromatic masculinities) in Europeans’
efforts to globalize their understanding of nature? When one approaches a
project with “gender eyes,”strategies for study begin to emerge. In what follows,
I will focus on some of my findings that relate most directly to feminist history
of science. Much of my larger project, however, mainstreams concerns about
gender into a variety of topics: voyaging, crosscultural encounters, linguistic
imperialism,proprietary secrets, knowledge transfers, classification schemes, and
so forth (Schiebinger forthcoming). Feminist historians, like their counterparts
in philosophy or science, draw creative sparks from a wide range of socially
responsible methodologies and epistemologies.
While my current project treats gender, I have two other major purposes.
First, I ask historians to consider the cultural politics of plants. Plants rarely
figure in the grand narratives of war, peace, or even everyday life. They are,
however, important cultural artifacts, often at the center of political and eco-
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nomic struggles. When the Nazis occupied the Netherlands during World War
11, for example, one of their first acts was to seize the world’s supply of quinine
(extracted from the bark of the Cinchona), leaving the allies with virtually none.
As a consequence, more U S . soldiers died from malaria during the war in the
Pacific than from Japanese bullets (Balick and Cox 1996).Throughout the early
modern period, plants were moved around the world-in vast quantities and
to great economic effect. Already on his second voyage, in 1494, Christopher
Columbus brought sugarcane cuttings to Hispaniola, along with citrus fruits,
grape vines, olives, melons, onions, and radishes (Crosby 1972; Brockway 1988,
52-53). I will argue here that in the West Indies of the eighteenth century,
where much of my story is set, plants played a major role in political struggles
surrounding slavery.
Second, my project seeks to contribute to rethinking how the history of
botany has been written. A longstanding narrative has emphasized the rise of
modern botany as the rise of taxonomy, nomenclature, and “pure” systems of
classification.While there is much to recommend this line of argumentation, it
does not capture the realities of botanizing in the eighteenth century. Botany
was a matter of state, important strategically for emerging nation states vying
for land and resources. Curators of botanical gardens-both in Europe and its
colonies-collected rare and beautiful plants for study and global exchange, but
they also specialized in cultivating plants, such as cinchona, crucial for European
colonizing efforts in tropical climates. It is significant that the colonial gardens
in St. Vincent and elsewhere were administered not by scientific branches of the
Britishgovernment, but by the war office (Drayton 2000,66; McCracken 1997,5).
Gender history asks both historians and scientists to understand the broad
political and cultural origins and implications of their subject matters.
This essay tells the story not of a great man or a great woman, but of a great
plant. The plant whose history provides the leitmotif of this essay, the “peacock
flower” (Poincianapulcherrima or Caesalpinia pulcherrima), is not a heroic plant
of the historical stature of chocolate, the potato, quinine, coffee, tea, or even
rhubarb (Hobhouse 1985; Foust 1992; Jarcho 1993; Zuckerman 1999; Terrio
2000). Nonetheless it was a highly political plant, deployed in the struggle
against slavery throughout the eighteenth century by slave women who used it
t o abort offspring who would otherwise have been born into bondage. 1 lavish
attention on this plant not only because it is exquisitely beautiful and grows in
stunningly inviting places, but because, as I will discuss below, naturalists from
three separate cultures-French, English, and Dutch-independently identified
it as an abortifacient widely used in the West Indies. Each voyager observed
Amerindian or slave women employ the plant effectively, and recorded that
knowledge.
My attention was first drawn to the Poinciana by a moving passage from
Maria Sibylla Merian’s magnificent 1705 Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamen-
Londa Schiebinger
237
sium,wherein she recorded how the African slave and Indian populations in
Surinam, a Dutch colony, used the seeds of this plant (which she called the
fzos pavonis or “peacock flower”) as an abortifacient: “The Indians, who are not
treated well by their Dutch masters, use the seeds [of this plant] to abort their
children, so that their children will not become slaves like they are. The black
slaves from Guinea and Angola have demanded to be well treated, threatening to refuse to have children. In fact, they sometimes take their own lives
because they are treated so badly, and because they believe they will be born
again, free and living in their own land. They told me this themselves” (Merian
1975, commentary to plate no. 45). This passage is remarkable for several reasons. First, it was written by a rarity-the German-born Merian was one of
the few European women to travel on their own in the eighteenth century in
pursuit of science. Women naturalists rarely figured in the rush to know exotic
lands: Jeanne Baret, the first woman to circumnavigate the globe, sailed with
Louis-Antoine de Bougainville disguised as the valet and botanical assistant
to Philibert Commerson, the ship’s botanist and the father of her illegitimate
child (Guillot 1984,36-40). In the nineteenth century, women, such as Lady
Charlotte Canning, more often collected botanical specimens but as colonial
wives, traveling where their husbands happened to take them and not in pursuit
of their own interests (Shteir 1996, 192).
Merian’s passage is also remarkable for what it reveals about the geopolitics
of plants in the early modern period. Historians have rightly focused on the
explosion of knowledge associated with the scientific revolution and global
expansion, and the frantic transfer of knowledge and especially plants between
Europe and its colonies (Bknassy-Berling 1986-1994; MacKenzie 1990; Pratt
1992; Jardine, Secord, and Spary 1995; Laissus 1995; Grove 1995; Miller and
Reill 1996; Rice 1999). While much literature on colonial science has focused
on how knowledge is made and transferred between continents and heterodox traditions, I explore here an important instance of the non-transfer of
important bodies of knowledge from the New World into Europe. In doing so,
I develop a methodological tool that historian of science Robert Proctor has
called “agnoto1ogy”-the study of culturally-induced ignorances (1995, 8 and
forthcoming). Agnotology serves as a counterweight to traditional concerns for
epistemology, refocusing questions about “how we know” to include questions
about what we do not know, and why not. Ignorance is often not merely the
absence of knowledge but an outcome of cultural and political struggle. Nature,
after all, is infinitely rich and variable. What we know or do not know at any
one time or place is shaped by particular histories, local and global priorities,
institutional and disciplinary hierarchies, personal and professional myopia, and
much else as well. I am interested in understanding how bodies of knowledge
have been culturally produced, but I am more interested in analyzing culturally
induced ignorances of nature’s body.5
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Hypatia
My research strategies in this work include the following questions: How did
gender relations in eighteenth-century Europe and its colonies influence naturalists’ collecting practices in the exotic wilds of the West Indies? A number of
key issues informed debates and political initiatives surrounding women’s social
status in the eighteenth century, including struggles over civic rights for women,
experiments with women earning doctoral degrees from European universities,
women’s attempts to become members of scientific academies, as well as the
mercantilist pro-natalist policies aimed at increasing national populations and
state wealth. How did these factors consciously or unconsciously guide naturalists as they explored other lands, peoples, and their knowledge traditions?
ABORTION
I N T H E WESTINDIES
Merian was, indeed, bold to travel to Surinam in search of exotic insects. Moral
and bodily imperatives kept the vast majority of Europe’s women closer to home;
the German anthropologist Johann Rlumenhach was typical in warning that
white women taken to warm climates succumbed to “copious menstruation,
which almost always ends, in a short space of time, in fatal hemorrhages of the
uterus’’ (1969, 212, n. 2). There was also the often-expressed fear that women
giving birth in the tropics would deliver children resembling the native peoples
of those areas. The intense African sun, it was thought, produced black babies
regardless of the parents’ complexion.
Despite warnings from the mayor of Amsterdam, who had lost four daughters
in Surinam, Merian deposited her will and set sail for Dutch Guiana in 1699
at the age of 52, only a decade after political upheavals in that colony left the
governor dead, shot by his own soldiers. Merian traveled accompanied only
by her daughter, L>orothea, trained from a n early age to work as her mother’s
assistant. (Merian, like the astronomer Maria Margaretha Winkelmann after
her, and their daughters provide examples of scientific training being passed
from mother to daughter.) For two years Maria Sibylla and Dorothea collected,
studied, and drew the insects and plants of Surinam (Schiebinger 1989,66-101;
Davis 1995, 140-202).
In her passage about abortion, Merian tells us that she learned about the
abortive virtues of the Pos pauonis directly from the enslaved women of Surinam.
I, along with historians Edward Shorter, John Riddle, and others, had originally
assumed that abortion numbered among “women’s secrets” in this period, and
that male physicians and naturalists had only rudimentary knowledge of such
things (Shorter 1991; Riddle 1992;Leibrock-Plehn 1992; Klepp 1994,68-113). In
Europe and on European plantations in the New World, physicians or surgeons
(all male) were typically called to attend females only when things went very
wrong and a woman was in danger of dying. T h e notion that male physicians
did not know about abortives, however, proved incorrect. Interestingly, Hans
Londa Schiebinger
239
Sloane , working in Jamaica a decade before Merian’s voyage to Surinam, also
reported the abortive qualities of a plant he called the “flour fence of Barbados.”
He identified this plant as Merian’sflos pauonzs, and cited her work in an appendix to his book (published after her voyage). Sloane compared his “flour fence”
to savin (Juniperus sabina), women’s herbal abortifacient of choice in much of
Europe, and wrote that “it provokes the Menstrua extremely, causes Abortion,
etc. and does whatever Savin and powerful Emmenagogues [pennyroyal and
rue, for example] will do” (Sloane 1707-1725, vol. 2,49-50, 384).
The abortive qualities of the flos pauonis were, therefore, discovered independently in the West Indian colonial territories of England (by Sloane), the
Netherlands (by Merian), and France (among others by Michel Descourtilz, a
French naturalist working in Saint Domingue, now Haiti) (Sloane 1707-1725,
vol. 2, 49-50; Merian 1975, commentary to plate no. 45; Descourtilz 1833,
27-30). Did this knowledge eventually transfer into Europe?
While Merian, Sloane, and Descourtilz all mentioned abortifacients, they
placed the peacock flower in very different social contexts. Descourtilz and
Merian both located it within the colonial struggle, Descourtilz stressing the “ill
intentions” of the “negresses”who used them, she emphasizing the importance
of this plant for the physical and spiritual survival of Surinam’s slave women.
Slaves in Surinam endured extreme brutality: the Scottish mercenary Lieutenant John Stedman reported (in the 1770s) a “revolted negroe” hung alive upon
a gibbet with an iron hook stuck through his ribs, two others chained to stakes
and burned to death by slow fire, six women broken alive upon the rack, and
two slave girls decapitated (Stedman 1992, 26, 271-72).
Sloane, physician to the governor of Jamaica, was well aware that slaves “cut
their own throats” to escape such treatment. He did not, however, place his
discussion of the abortive qualities of his “flour fence” in this context but that of
the growing conflict between doctors and women seeking abortions. Concerning his practice in Jamaica, he wrote: “In case women, whom I suspected to be
with Child, presented themselves ill, coming in the name of others, sometimes
bringing their own water, dissembling pains in their heads, sides, obstructions,
etc. thereby cunningly, as they think, designing to make the physician cause
abortion by the medicines he may order for their cure. In such a case I used
either to put them off with no medicines at all, or tell them Nature in time
might relieve them without remedies, or I put them off with medicines that
will signify nothing either one way or other, till I be furthered satisfied about
their malady” (Sloane 1707-1725, vol. 1, cxliii).hSloane finished his passage on
abortion with a strict warning: “If women know how dangerous a thing it is
to cause abortion, they would never attempt it. . . . One may as easily expect
to shake off unripe Fruit from a tree, without injury or violence to the Tree,
as endeavor to procure Abortion without injury or violence to the Mother”
(1707-1725, vol. 1, cxliii). Sloane did not discuss the social or political status
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Hypatia
of the women he treated in this regard, whether they were English, creole, or
slave. Rather he accused “dissembling”women in general of seeking abortions
from unsuspecting doctors. His attitudes were shared by other European physicians at this time. The German physician Johann Storch boasted of “tricking” a
pregnant woman, whom he suspected to be seeking an abortion, by prescribing
only a mild laxative (Shorter 1991, 181; McLaren 1990, 160).
European physicians who discussed abortion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries tended to emphasize its dangers. And, indeed, this was
reasonable. Abortion lay largely within the domain of midwives and women.
When all went well, medical and legal authorities learned nothing of it. If
something went wrong, however, and the woman was in danger of dying, a
physician was called. Hence, to physicians, abortifacients appeared dangerous
(James 1743, vol. 1, S.V. “abortus” or “aborsus”;see also Wilson 1985, 343-69). A n
eighteenth-century physician had to have a good knowledge of abortion and
abortifacients; therapeutic abortions were often necessary, and it was customary in Europe in this period that a physician attending a difficult pregnancy
or birth gave preference to the life of the mother. One sees in the published
record eighteenth-century physicians who shared the opinion of the infamous
anti-abortionist of the following century, Ambroise Tardieu, who wrote, “There
IS no physician who does not know the methods of abortion”; they do not wish,
however, to expose these methods for fear that the “ill intentioned” will commit
new crimes (Tardieu 1868, 2 ) .
Sloane himself noted that when an abortion was absolutely necessary, he
preferred “the hand” (a method dating back at least to the first century A.D.)
to herbal preparations. According to this method, a physician positioned the
expectant mother on her back across a bed where she was to be held down by
three women with her knees pushed up to her chest (as advised by the French
man-midwife Franqois Mauriceau). The doctor, sitting on a stool, anointed
his hand well with oil, fresh butter, or unsalted lard, and gently introduced
his fingers, one after the other, through the cervix and into the uterus until
the whole hand slid inside. Hermann Boerhaave suggested giving the woman
opium to relax those parts. Once the physician’s hand was in the womb, he
broke the membranes, took hold of the feet of the fetus, and “pulled it away.”
Next he separated the placenta from the womb with his fingers and extracted
it. A French physician suggested that in the first few weeks of pregnancy, one
finger, bent like a “blunt hook,” would suffice to draw the embryo from the womb
(Sloane 1707-1725, vol. 1, cxliii; James 1743, vol. I, S.V. “abortus” or “aborsus”;
see also Shorter 1991, 190). In addition to the hand, other non-herbal methods
were used to induce abortion, including excessive bloodletting, administering
various douches, vigorous jumping and horseback riding, and applying pressure
to the main artery in the thigh (a technique known as the Hamilton method)
(Ersch and Gruber 1818, S.V. “Abtreibung”).
Londa Schiebinger
241
To what extent was contraception and abortion practiced by the native and
slave populations in the Caribbean and South America?There is good evidence
that the indigenous populations of the Caribbean-the Tainos, Caribs, and
Arawaks-made extensive use of abortive herbs well before contact. The first
accounts from the New World describe how Taino women aborted in face of
extreme circumstances. Bartolome de Las Casas, who sailed with the conquistador Gonzalo Ferngndez de Oviedo to the New World in 1502, perhaps exaggerated how the horrors of Spanish cruelty-the fierce attack dogs, the swords
used to disembowel or to hack off arms, legs, noses, and women’s breasts-caused
Taino mothers to drown their infants from sheer desperation. Nonetheless he
chose to frame Taino response in terms of abortion: other women, when they
felt they were pregnant, he continued, “took herbs to abort, so their fruit was
expelled stillborn” (Las Casas 1951,206). An Italian adventurer, Girolamo Benzoni, who traveled to the New World in 1541, recorded how the Spanish extinguished the Taino in Hispaniola, causing such grief that the indigenes sought
relief in suicide, infanticide, and abortion: “Many, giving up hope, went into
the woods and hanged themselves from trees, having first killed their children;
. . . the women, with the juices of some plants, interrupted their pregnancies,
so as not to give birth” (Benzoni 1967,94).
But use of abortives (and contraceptives) was also part of Amerindian everyday life, as women regulated the time and number of births. During his travels in
the Americas in 1799 and 1800, Alexander von Humboldt reported extensively
on the Macoes and Salivas living along the “Oroonoko” (Orinoco) river that
flows through modern-day Venezuela and Colombia. The first to describe the
plants of this region, Humboldt deplored the young wives who did not wish
to become mothers and their “guilty practice . . . of preventing pregnancy by
the use of deleterious herbs.” He deplored further the use of “drinks that cause
abortion.” Humboldt reported being surprised that “these drinks do not destroy
health.” As was typical of the learned men of his day, he assumed that abortion
ended in death. To his surprise, after using these herbs, the Amerindian women
he observed were still able to bear children (Humboldt 1821, 28-32).
We know very little about when or how natives of the extended Caribbean
developed abortive techniques. Humboldt reported that they did so so that
women could time pregnancies precisely, some women thinking it best to preserve their “freshness and beauty” when young and to delay childbirth until late
in life in order to devote themselves to domestic and agricultural labors. Others,
he noted, preferred to become mothers when very young, thinking this the best
way to “fortify their health” and “attain a happier old age” (Humboldt 1821,
31-32.) Further north in Virginia, Thomas Jefferson reported that Amerindian
women “learned the practice of procuring abortion by the use of some vegetable”
because they attended their men in war and hunting, and child-birthing was
inconvenient for them (Jefferson 1964,58).
242
Hy pat ia
African slaves in the Caribbean also practiced abortion-but within a colonial economy. Slave women practiced abortion in relation to their condition as
slaves, not as wives and mothers regulating fertility. Slave women’s willingness
to undergo the trials of abortion resulted from two aspects of the distinctive
colonial sexual economy: the pressure upon women to “breed” slaves in order to
enhance plantation property and wealth; and the pressure upon slave women to
provide sexual services to planters, European soldiers and sailors abounding in
the islands, and also their own husbands and lovers in a n economy where slave
men outnumbered them sometimes 5 to 1. In aborting, slave women were well
aware that they saved their future children from a life of servitude; n o matter
who the father, the child inherited its slave mother’s legal standing (Gould
1996, 298-314; see also Goslinga 1985, 529).
Merian’s poignant report of the use of the peacock flower that I cited above
placed abortion squarely within the colonial struggle, identifying it as a form
of political resistance. Contemporary observers and present-day historians have
identified various forms of slave resistance, but have tended to emphasize maleled armed insurrection. The inveterate observer of Surinam society John Stedman, for example, drew a vivid portrait of guerilla warfare in Surinam, where
in the late eighteenth century the Dutch employed 1,500 mercenary soldiers
in the hopes of keeping in check the 75,000 slaves within the colony and to
tight against the “inaroons” (slaves escaped into the hinterlands) who were said
to burn plantations, slice open the bellies of their former mistresses large with
child, and poison entire plantations-Europeans, slaves, cows, and horses-with
invisible substances carried under a single fingernail (Stedman 1992,266).Other
observers emphasized the daily resistance of slaves, who shammed sicknesses,
feigned a n inability to do simple tasks, were disruptively insolent, disobedient,
and quarrelsome. Some slaves even committed suicide to spite their masters and
release themselves from extreme suffering. They were known to swallow their
own tongues, to eat dirt, and to leap into cauldrons of boiling sugar, “thus at
one blow depriving the tyrant of his crop and his servant” (272). Abortion is
another example of slave resistance. As historian Barbara Bush has emphasized,
in an economy where planters sought to breed “Negroes” as well as horses and
cattle, refusal to breed became a political act (Bush 1990).
In addition to his “flour fence,” Hans Sloane reported a second plant used
for abortion in Jamaica: the Caraguata-acanga (Bromelia pinguin). “It grows,’’
he noted, “very plentifully in the Carihes and Jamaica. It is very diuretick, and
brings down the Catamenia very powerfully, even in too great a quantity if
the Dose be not moderate. It causes Abortion in Women with Child, of which
Whores being not ignorant make frequent use of it to make away their children”
(Sloane 1707-1725, 248); Here Sloane attributed the use of abortifacients not
to the cruelties slaves endured but to what he saw as the natural licentiousness
of “Negroes” (248; see also Bush 1981, 244-62; Higginbotham 1992, 251-74;
Nussbaum 1995).
Londa Schiebinger
243
Edward Long, Sloane’s countryman writing in Jamaica a half century later,
also saw abortion in these terms. “The women here,” he intoned, “are, in general, common prostitutes; and many of them take specifics to cause abortion in
order that they may continue their trade without loss of time or hindrance of
business.” Furthermore he assumed, as was common among learned European
men at the time, that such numerous and “promiscuous” embraces necessarily
hindered, or destroyed, future conception (Long 1774, 2,436). Janet Schaw, a
Scots woman who traveled with her brother and kinsfolk to Antigua in the
1770s, similarly denounced the “young black wenches” who, in her words, “lay
themselves out for white lovers” and remarked that in order to prevent a child
froin interrupting their pleasure “they have certain herbs and medicines that
free them from such an incumbrance” (Schaw 1922,112-13). Governor Edward
Trelawny of Jamaica, added that these “Wenches” lie with “both Colours, and
do not know which the Child may prove of” and, to avoid difficulties, procure
abortions (Trelawny 1746, 35-36).
The English physician Edward Bancroft, following this line of reasoning,
discounted the hard work, poor food, and even the extreme corporeal cruelty
as causes of abortion among slave women. Coarse food and hard labour, he
reminded his readers, “are ever accompanied with the blessings of increased
health and vigour.” Bancroft blamed the want of natural increase and the need
to import successive supplies of slaves from Africa on the “young wenches”
who did not wish to lose their income from prostitution to the inconveniences
of pregnancy. He wrote in 1769: “The ‘true cause’ of [slaves’] decrease results
from the intercourse of the Whites with the young wenches, who derive no
inconsiderable emolument therefrom; and as child-bearing would put an end
to this commerce, they sollicitously use every precaution to avoid conception;
and if these prove ineffectual, they ever procure repeated abortions, which
incapacitate them from child-bearing in a more advanced age, when they are
abandoned by the Whites” (Bancroft 1769,371-72).
One question that must remain open is whether women owned by freed
blacks or free persons of color-either men or women-aborted at the same
rate as those owned by whites. Because records of abortions were not kept, this
question cannot be answered. We have, however, no reason to believe that the
treatment of slaves by free persons of color was any kinder than that by whites.
Free women of color regularly branded their slaves, sometimes in bold letters
across their chests, just like their white counterparts (Socolow 1996, 279-97).
European women in the colonies were no kinder. Stedman in Surinam told of a
plantation mistress, a Mrs. Stolker, who, disturbed by the cries of a negro baby,
held it underwater until it drowned (Stedman 1992, 148). According to Stedman, these women detested the quadroon and “negro” girls for taking European
men for their husbands and “persecute[d] them with the greatest bitterness and
most barbarous tyranny” (22). A doctor Jackson, who went out to Jamaica in
1774, could not say enough about the cruelties of creole women (he did not
244
Hypatia
specify, but probably of European descent). He reported them flogging slave drivers with their “own hands” if the drivers did not punish slaves harshly enough.
Some slaves were tied down, stretched between four stakes on the ground. To
accommodate a pregnant slave, “a hole was dug to receive the belly.” A n owner
who killed a slave by such treatment was not punished but thought merely to
have sustained a tragic loss of property (Lambert 1975a, 54-55).
Overwhelming evidence exists that women in the colonies, especially West
Indian slave women, practiced abortion in this period. Concern about abortion
intensified toward the end of the eighteenth century when European states
threatened to cut off the planters’ supply of slaves from Africa. Until this time,
slave women had been used primarily as “work units,” and not as “breeders”
(Sheridan 1985, 224; McClellan 1992, 53). From about the 1760s on, planters
began to recognize that although it was more costly to breed slaves in the
islands, “creole negroes,” as they were called, were much less often sick than the
imported “salt-water negroes,” and physicians joined with planters to improve
“breeding” practices (Grainger 1802, 15).
Historians today have attributed the low rate of natural increase among
West Indian slave populations to many things. Some emphasize the high death
rate; life expectancy for slaves in French colonies was between 29 and 34 years,
compared to 46 years for Europeans in this period in France. Other historians
stress low female fertility rates among slaves. Amenorrhea and sterility among
female slaves were caused hy hard labor, poor living conditions, and long periods of suckling that suppressed ovulation (Blackhurn 1997, 291; Gautier 1985,
122-23). Abortion also played a role: Robert Thomas, who practiced surgery for
nine years (from 1777 to 1785) in the islands of Saint Christopher and Nevis,
listed “frequent abortions” as the second major cause of the decrease of slave
populations on sugar plantations (“free and early intercourse” among slaves he
signalled as the first cause; “epidemical diseases,” alcoholism, and long periods
of suckling followed as lesser causes) (Lambert 1975b,25~2).~
Whether driven by
high death rates or low fertility rates, conditions were such that planters were
continually forced to purchase new slaves from Africa. By modern calculations,
Caribbean slave populations would have disappeared every century unless
steadily supplied from Africa (Gautier 1985, 122-23).
OF
THETRANSFER
A N D NON-TRANSFER
PLANTSA N D KNOWLEDGE:AGNOTOLOGY!
Importing exotics from Europe’s West Indian colonies was big business
(Schiebinger and Swan, forthcoming). Already in the 1680s, cotton, tobacco,
indigo, various gums and resins, and Amerindian commodities such as hammocks promised substantial profits (Goslinga 1985, 268). By 1688, Surinam,
for example, was exporting seven million pounds of sugar annually. Commerce
Londa Schiebinger
245
in medicines was a trickle by comparison, yet important. Europeans exuded
enthusiasm for the many New World riches used in eighteenth-century “physic,”
as it was called: sugar, tobacco, ginger, cassia, gums, aloes, sassafras, guaiacum,
cinnamon, balsams de Tolu and Peru, bezoar stones, ipecacuanha, blood of
dragon, pineapple, jalap, and water of Barbados, and, of course, Peruvian bark
(quinine). Were plants used to prepare contraceptives and abortifacients among
the precious cargoes brought into Europe?Was trade in such plants considered
lucrative or desirable?Given that European women already had effective abortifacients, perhaps there was no need to introduce new anti-fertility drugs from
tropical colonies into Europe? But everywhere Europeans continued to search
for the best medicines the world had to offer, and many people, then as now,
were simply taken with exotics. To what extent did knowledge of the peacock
flower’s abortive virtues transfer into Europe?
The flaming yellows and reds of the elegant peacock flower, sometimes also
called Barbados Pride or the Red Bird-of-Paradise,made it a favorite ornamental
among the Europeans. Seeds and live plants were taken regularly into Europe,
first from the East Indies and then from the West, “to enrich the researches
of voyagers and diverse gardens” (Desfontaines 1829, intro.; see also Joncquet
1666, 3; Catalogus Plantarum 1766, 228; Boerhaave 1720, 57; Linnaeus 1748,
101; “Catalogue”). From about 1666 onward, the peacock flower was cultivated
in major gardens all across Europe, including the Jardin du Roi in Paris and the
Horto Academic0 in Leiden. Philip Miller, at the Chelsea Physic Garden outside
of London, noted that “the seeds of this plant are annually brought over in
plenty from the West-Indies.” Proud of his gardening prowess, he announced
that with proper management the Poinciana will grow much taller in England
than in Barbados. See The Gardeners Dictionary 1768, s. v. “Poinciana (Pulcherrima).”
Even though the peacock flower itself moved easily into Europe, the knowledge of its use as an abortifacient did not. Merian’s report of the abortive qualities of the flower was published in 1705. Caspar Commelin, director of the Hortus
Medicus and professor of botany in Amsterdam, prepared bibliographical notes
for her book and was intimately familiar with its content; despite this, knowledge of its abortive qualities did not grow and flourish. Hermann Boerhaave, a
leading authority on Europe’s materia medica and professor of botany at Leiden
(just down the road from Amsterdam), reported “no known virtues” of this
plant in 1727 (Boerhaave 1727, 488-89). Boerhaave knew abortifacients well;
he warned that “ecboliques avortifs” be used “with reserve” because they were
dangerous not only to the fetus but also to the mother (1727, 391).
Nor did Sloane, who returned to London to become a renowned practicing
physician, future president of the Royal Society of London, and royal physician
who oversaw the preparation of London’s 1721 Pharmacopoeia, introduce the
use of this plant into his practice. Sloane popularized several colonial products
246
Hypatia
in England, one being a Jamaican hark used against malaria, the other being
milk chocolate employed for stomach upset and consumption.
I do not want to make too much of the contrast between Sloane and Merian.
Merian, to my knowledge, discussed only one abortifacient. Her chief interest
was insects, and she described plants primarily in their relationships to them.
Whether women “do science differently” is currently a topic of heated debate;
distinctions, however, should not be drawn too sharply between individual males
and females (Schiebinger 1999).Many European women-plantation owners or
governors’wives, for example-had little interest in their newly adopted countries, and most apparently came and went without collecting any information
from the indigenous populations or cultivating any special sympathies toward
the women of the region.
Larger historical forces, however, can make gender an important historical
factor. The curious history of the flos pauonis shows how voyagers selectively
culled from the bounty of nature knowledge responding to national and global
policies, patterns of patronage and trade, and moral and professional imperatives. What were the agnotological fissures that impeded the transport of the
knowledge about the uses of abortifacients, such as the peacock flower, into
Europe? What were the economics and politics of this form of cultural ignorance?
First, what we would call first-trimester abortion was never technically
illegal in Europe until banned by centralized states in the nineteenth century
(Keown 1988; Stuckenbrock 1993, 19-20; Jiitte 1993; Flugge 1998; Jerouschek
199.3, 11-26). The consensus in early modern Europe was that a woman was
not pregnant-not truly with child-until the child “quickened” or was felt to
inwe in the womb, usually between the sixteenth and eighteenth weeks after
conception (or, according to Aristotle, forty days after conception for a male
child and ninety days for a female child). And, even then, physicians, jurists,
and churchmen had to rely on the mother to say when that happened (Aristotle
1991, 583b; see also Duden 1993; Riddle 1992). Before it quickened, the fetus
was not considered a person, but simply a part of the mother’s own body (ein
Theil miitterlicher Eingeweide) (Frank 1784, 61). Yet, early abortion was never
smiled upon. It was done quietly and often secretively. Consequently it would
have been difficult to have the kind of noisy public debate about the use and
safety of West Indian abortifacients that characterized the introduction of other
exotic medical techniques, such as the smallpox inoculation, or medicines, such
as the Peruvian hark.
The culturally induced ignorance of abortifacients resulted also part and
parcel from the shift in the management of birthing in this period away
from midwives toward professionalized obstetricians. Abortion had belonged
traditionally to the domain of midwives. As obstetricians sought professional
standing they distanced themselves from potentially tainted practices and
knowledges. The eighteenth century saw the rise of widespread medical testing
Londa Schiebinger
247
of pharmaceuticals. Eighteenth-century experimental physicians stood at a fork
in the road with respect to abortifacients. They could have chosen the road
toward development and testing of safe and effective abortive techniques. They
chose, however, the road toward suppression of these knowledges and practices.
Ambroise Tardieu spoke for many when he proclaimed that the medical-legal
community was in the best position to suppress abortion-by the early nineteenth century often labeled l’avortement criminel provoque‘ (criminally induced
abortion) (Tardieu 1868). One way to do this was to exclude this class of drugs
from pharmaceutical testing. Finding safe abortifacients was simply not a priority
for European medical communities in this period.
In addition, culturally induced ignorance of abortifacients can he traced
t o the relationship between science and the state in this period. Historians
of science have converged in emphasizing the importance of plants for the
economic expansion of western European states (Gasgoigne 1998; Koerner
1999; Drayton 2000; Olarte 1993).Across Europe, eighteenth-century political
economists-from English and French mercantilists to German and Swedish
cameralists-taught that the exact knowledge of nature was key to amassing
national wealth, and hence power. Naturalists saw coffee, cacao, ipecacuanha,
or Peruvian bark as immediate money makers for king and country (and, often,
themselves). Herbal abortifacients, however, because of their links with sexuality
and often promiscuity, were viewed as problematic-not scientifically interesting
or economically lucrative.
Finally, the desire to control births ran counter to a mercantilist devotion
to increasing “manpower.”Mercantilist expansion mandated pronatalist policies celebrating children as “the wealth of nations, the glory of kingdoms, and
the nerve and good fortune of empires” (Raulin 1768, “6pitre au roi”). Physicians-empirically oriented and publicly engaged-promoted public health to
increase the vigour, strength, wealth, and prosperity of the state. City hospitals
and lying-in hospitals were expanded and improved in efforts to decrease morbidity and mortality among the poor and working populations. In the view of
many, abundant population was a key factor in securing national prosperity.
Jean-Baptiste Dazille, French royal physician in Saint Domingue, expressed
these sentiments in his book on how best to cure the special illness of African
slaves. It is especially an abundance of “the Negroes,” he wrote, that enriches
a colony; without ‘Negroes’there is no production, no harvest, and no riches”
(Dazille 1776, 1-2). In such a climate, agents of botanical exploration-trading companies, scientific academies, and governments-had little interest in
expanding Europe’s store of antifertility pharmacopoeia. Colonial administrators were most often interested in medicines to protect traders, planters, and
Trading Company troops.
As the case of the 00s pavonis shows, gender politics lent recognizable
contours not to a distinctive body of knowledge but to a distinctive body of
ignorance. The same forces feeding the explosion of knowledge generally associ-
248
Hypatia
ated with the scientific revolution and global expansion led to the implosion of
knowledge of herbal abortifacients. Contrary to other trends, where naturalists
assiduously collected local knowledges of plants for medicines and potential
profit, no systematic attempt was made to introduce into Europe abortifacients
gathered from cultures around the globe. European awareness of herbal antifertility agents such Merian’sflos Dauonis declined over the course of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. In contradiction to other mainstream drugs, development and testing of abortifacients did not become part of academic medicine
or pharmacology as these fields developed in this period. Consequently, drugs
deemed dangerous remained dangerous because they were not submitted to
rigorous testing. Bodies of scientific and medical ignorance, in turn, molded
the very flesh and blood of real bodies, as nineteenth-century European women
largely lost control over their fertility.
NOTES
1. For detailed treatments of topics treated in this essay, see Schiehinger (forthcoming).
2. It is not my purpose here to review feminist science studies; 1 have offered an
overview of the field in my recent book (Schiehinger 1999). For additional overviews
and evaluations, see Keller and Longino (1996); Lederman and Bartsch (2001); Wyer,
et al. (2001); Mayberry, Suhramaniam, and Weasel (2001); and Creager, Lunbeck, and
Schiebinger (2001).
3. Working scientists haave long brought feminist insights to bear o n their work
and have also contributed to key aspects of feminist theory and practice. In addition to
the literature mentioned above, see Bleier (1986); Fedigan (1997); and Zihlman (1997).
For a discussion of the problem of working across the Women’s Studies/science divide,
see Mayberry, Subramaniam, and Weasel (2001, section 1); Bug 2003.
4. Gender has received some attention in the history of eighteenth-century anthropology and travel literature, and in the history of slavery. See Stepan (1986);Schiehinger
(1993); Nusshaum (1995); Fausto-Sterling (1995); Beckles (1999); and Moitt (2001).
5. Literature on the social construction of science is important and massive; for
example, Shapin and Schaffer (1985); Schiebinger (1989, 1993); Laqueur (1990); and
Biagioli (1999).
6. Other great “dissemblers” of illness, according to Sloane (1707-1729, were
servants, “hoth Whites and Blacks” (1707-1725, vol. I, cxliii).
7. Like most of the drugs naturalists discussed in this era, the Caraguata-acangahad
many uses; it was thought that it cured “feversand cures worms” (Sloane, 1707-1725, vol.
2, 248), for example. It was also considered good for making wine and healing mouth
ulcers.
8. John Williamson, a physician in Jamaica from 1798 to 1812, also commented
that abortion was “common” and “frequent” among the slaves (Williamson 1817, vol.
I, 198, 200).
Londa Schiebinger
249
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