OVERCOMING CONCEPTUAL LIMITS: WOMEN IN SCIENCE (Atena Editora)

Abstract

In the mid-19th century, black people and women did not have the same rights as white European men. Many of these inequalities were based on measurements of the skull and brain. The last half of the 19th century gained enormous value in the Theory of Social Darwinism. It asserts that the political and social order, and the people within it, evolve according to Darwin's laws of natural selection. According to this, women possess an "innate temperament", maternal, pure, pious, compassionate; by virtue of which, their fundamental roles within society are reproduction and motherhood. The discourse of sociobiology defines male aggressiveness, female passivity, dominance hierarchies, sexual roles, territoriality, racism or xenophobia as natural biological tendencies. This approach describes the female scientist as exceptional, the woman who defies convention to claim a prominent position in an essentially male world. Many of the historiographical works on women scientists frame them as contributions within the "History of Great Men". Biographical studies have located Marie Curie's achievements, for example, within the male world, demonstrating that women are capable of generating important contributions to science. This work aims to show that women are capable of great contributions to science and need to be included with the aim of bringing scientific production closer to the “lay female public” through information and dissemination, worrying about contributing to the visibility of female participation in the generation of knowledge.