'Women who imitate men lack ambition, goes the old phrase.' Lyndall Gordon,
'Mary Wollstonecraft: a new genus,' P. 452.
There are feminists who have aims such as the correction of specific
injustices, real or imagined - very often, real - or whose aims are subject
to considerable {restriction}: (scope) but many feminist claims are very
wide-ranging. Some claims go well beyond such matters as social and economic
organization, such as marriage, family norms and employment law and
practice, and matters of personal life and extend to nature and the
structure of reality. See, for example, Sandra Harding and Carolyn Merchant:
the rape of nature.
Objections can be made to the less comprehensive and the more comprehensive
forms of feminism by presenting arguments and evidence. To defend the more
comprehensive feminist claims the arguments and evidence provided by
feminists have to be very comprehensive. Again and again, it's found that
feminist argument and evidence is anything but comprehensive: instead, the
monotonous diet of feminism.
Feminists who claim that science is 'patriarchal' never seem to go beyond
the broad claim and engage with specific areas of science and explain why
specific areas of quantum theory, for example, are defective - or to set up
a feminist body of scientific knowledge, some of which can be applied in
engineering and which has predictive power.
Lyndall Gordon's statement is mentioned in passing, but to give it without
any attempt to justify it was reckless and stupid. The clear implication is
that men's achievements are limited and that women can easily surpass them.
Without any doubt, this is a very comprehensive claim and it would need a
very comprehensive examination for Lyndall Gordon or another feminist to
defend it.
Lyndall Gordon is a Senior Research Fellow at St Hilda's College, Oxford.
The bibliography of her book is over 20 pages long but is the opposite of
comprehensive: a prime example of the 'monotonous diet,' with hardly any
materials which would give an account less tinged with hagiography. My own
account of Mary Wollstonecraft, obviously a much shorter one, is an attempt
to put her in a much wider context than the one supplied by Lyndall Gordon.
Any case for the remarkable achievements of men (not 'Man') which is more
than a bare outline of selected achievements and the men responsible for
them in one area, let alone many areas, would need a vast amount of space
and a vast amount of time to compile it. Obviously, it would be impossible
to give even a list of any length here. On this page, I mention scientists
and engineers in various places, but without any detail. Their staggering
achievement can only be appreciated by exploring the detail and undertaking
an examination in depth - something which feminists who minimize male
achievement should do, but won't. I realize, of course, that there are
feminists who are accomplished or very accomplished scientists and
engineers.
Mathematics is another fruitful field and again, I realize that there are
feminists who are accomplished or very accomplished mathematicians.
I'd be very surprised if a feminist mathematician claimed that a woman
who imitated these male mathematicians, in the sense of wanting to
surpass their achievement, was lacking in ambition (obviously, a much larger
number of examples could easily have been given):
Karl Friedrich Gauss (1777 - 1855), who contributed to and transformed
virtually every area of mathematics.
Leonhard Euler (1707 - 83), the most prolific of all mathematicians.
I'd be very surprised if a feminist physicist claimed that a woman who
imitated these male physicists, in the sense of wanting to surpass their
achievement, was lacking in ambition (again, a very much longer list of
examples could easily have been given):
Erwin Schrödinger (1887 - 1961), the founder of wave mechanics.
Paul Dirac (1902 - 84), a major contributor to quantum mechanics.
Michael Faraday (1791 - 1867), also a chemist of genius, who created
classical field theory and invented an electric dynamo, motor and
transformer.
James Clerk Maxwell (1831 - 79), who produced a unified theory of
electromagnetism and the kinetic theory of gases.