Seven women were part of a trailblazing network of feminist scientists  in the Boston area during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.

Christa Kuljian is a science writer and historian of science who focuses much of her research on issues of science and society, gender, and race. She’s the author of two previous books of narrative nonfiction, Sanctuary (Jacana Media, 2013) and Darwin’s Hunch (Jacana Media, 2017). In her new book, Our Science, Ourselves (University of Massachusetts Press 2024), she focuses on the life stories of the seven women. The following is an interview with The Conversation.

How did you choose the scientists you focused on in the book?
I grew up in the Boston area in the 1970s, and in high school, my parents gave me a copy of the revolutionary guide to women’s health, Our Bodies, Ourselves, first published in 1970 by New England Free Press, which developed into the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. In the early 1980s, I studied the history of science at Harvard and took a course with Ruth Hubbard called Bio 109: Biology and Women’s Issues.

Hubbard, in 1974, was the first woman to achieve tenure in biology at Harvard, and she is featured in the book. Her course taught about how scientists, including Charles Darwin, promoted stereotypes and myths about women’s biology. The idea for Our Science, Ourselves grew from that formative experience in Hubbard’s course.

But it also had roots in another, more recent experience. In 2016, I published Darwin’s Hunch: Science, Race and the Search for Human Origins, about the history of paleoanthropology in South Africa. The book explores questions that some of my history of science professors might have asked. What influence did the social and political context of colonialism and apartheid have on the search for human origins?

After it was published, I was struck by several stories that brought science and sexism into the popular media. In July 2017, James Damore at Google wrote that “the gender gap in tech” likely existed because of biological differences between men and women, and he received support from popular psychologist Jordan Peterson.

In September 2018, an Italian physicist, Alessandro Strumia, said that the low number of women in physics was proof that women were innately less capable than men. He suggested that male scientists were being discriminated against to give opportunities to women.

These statements reminded me of what former Harvard president Larry Summers had said back in 2005. Drawing on the work of psychologist and popular writer Steven Pinker, Summers spoke of women having a “different availability of aptitude” in science and math.

Why were these myths about women’s biology still having an impact in the 21st century? I decided to go back to my class notes and look more closely at Hubbard’s research. Who had she worked with at the time? What were other scientists with a feminist awareness saying in the 1970s and 1980s?

As a result of many interviews and research in the archives, I discovered a fascinating network of women, all of whom contributed to feminist critiques of science and, ultimately, to the field of feminist science studies.

Our Science, Ourselves follows the lives of Ruth Hubbard, Rita Arditti, Evelyn Fox Keller, Evelynn Hammonds, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Banu Subramaniam, and Nancy Hopkins.

None of these women scientists were born in Boston, but they all moved there to study, take a job, conduct research, or network with other scientists. Part of what made Boston interesting to me was the critical mass of colleges, universities, and scientists, but also the presence of social movements that influenced these women, including Science for the People, the Combahee River Collective, and others.

Could you tell us about one or two of these women’s stories?
One of them is Rita Arditti. An Argentinian geneticist at Harvard Medical School, she led a protest in December 1969 at the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston. Along with 12 colleagues carrying posters and pamphlets, she arrived unannounced at a special luncheon for women scientists, calling for an end to discrimination against women in science. Most of the women ignored Arditti, but Hubbard was in the audience and paid attention. The protest did have a ripple effect on the association.

Rita Arditti in the lab, circa late 1960s. Courtesy Federicho Muchnik.

Over time, Arditti and Hubbard became friends, became active in a new organization called Science for the People, and began to write not only about discrimination against women scientists but also about how science portrayed women’s biology in stereotypical ways.

Ruth Hubbard and student Kathy Kleeman in the lab, circa early 1970s. Photography by Starr Ockenga, courtesy Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.

Another is Evelynn Hammonds, who studied physics at Spelman College, a historically Black women’s college in Atlanta. In 1976, she read an important report, “The Double Bind: The Price of Being a Minority Woman in Science,” co-authored by Shirley Malcom and published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Evelynn Hammonds at the podium, 1994. Courtesy MIT Museum.

With Malcom’s encouragement, Hammonds applied to and was accepted at MIT in the Boston area. Over time, she joined a growing network of women who were critiquing their science. She became a teaching assistant for Hubbard, rented an apartment from Arditti, and became a foundational influence in gender, race, and the history of science.

Hammonds emphasized that when speaking out against scientific sexism it was important to speak out against scientific racism as well, and that it was critical to address both.

How do the current U.S. administration policies on science and diversity relate to your book?
Sudip Parikh, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said in testimony before the U.S. Senate appropriations committee on April 30, 2025, “The scientific community is in paralysis right now.”

The current attack on science has had a major effect, ending funding for important scientific research. Young scientists and science students are concerned for their future. The U.S. administration’s policy of cutting funds to any programs related to diversity or equity is an onslaught on decades of progress in this area and will have a grave impact on the scientific research agenda.

There is a growing list of words that have been scrubbed from U.S. government websites and documents, including “women,” “race,” “racism,” “feminism,” “activist,” and “bias.” The use of any of these words in scientific research proposals can result in federal funding being cut. For example, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) published an announcement in mid-2024 that discussed the importance of diversity in clinical trials. That document is no longer available on the website.

The women in Our Science, Ourselves made important contributions by highlighting how scientific institutions historically have been exclusionary. They also shined a light on how scientific research questions and analysis can be biased (rather than always neutral or objective), thereby affecting the knowledge they produce.

The tools that feminist science studies have developed are critical to the sciences because they ask new questions and develop new methodologies that help science account for gender and racial bias. Who is doing science? Who decides on the research questions? Who offers analysis, and who benefits?

The U.S. administration’s actions are a major setback for science and scientific research, as well as gender, race, and sexuality studies which have made vital contributions to science, medicine, and technology. The history of these fields, and the life stories of some of the dynamic women in them, can offer readers inspiration for the present moment.

Our Science, Ourselves is available from University of Massachusetts Press and Amazon in the U.S., on Kindle, and from Love Books in Johannesburg, South Africa.

This interview was published June 1, 2025, by The Conversation.