Originally published 12 September 1994
Two stories from the Science section of Time magazine:
1) Dr. Helene Deutsch, a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital, has published a scholarly tome called Psychology of Woman, based on 30 years of research.
According to Deutsch, the normal feminine woman is passive and masochistic by nature. She enjoys her own suffering. She is always conservative and matriarchal.
“Woman’s intellectuality is to a large extent paid for by the loss of valuable feminine qualities,” writes Deutsch. “Everything relating to exploration and cognition, all the forms and kinds of human cultural aspiration that require a strictly objective approach, are with few exceptions the domain of the masculine intellect, or man’s spiritual power, against which women can rarely compete.”
The intellectual woman is masculinized, says Deutsch; she has yielded her warm intuitive knowledge to cold unproductive thinking. An aggressive woman is often concealing a fear of her own femininity.
2) Chemists announce the discovery of an extraordinary insecticide that promises to eliminate many of humanity’s woes.
Sprayed on a wall, the new chemical kills any fly that touches the wall for as long as three months afterward.
A bed sprayed with the chemical remains deadly to bedbugs for 300 days.
Clothing dusted with the chemical is safe from lice for a month, even after eight launderings.
As a crop protector, it is deadlier and longer lasting than other insecticides, particularly against potato beetles, cabbage worms, fruit worms, and corn borers.
It is deadly to such common household pests as moths, roaches, termites, and dog’s fleas.
A spokesperson for the US Surgeon General’s office exclaimed that the insecticide “will be to preventive medicine what Lister’s discovery of antiseptics was to surgery.”
So great is the potential of the discovery that seven US laboratories and hundreds of biochemists are concentrated upon it. Manufacturers are now turning out about 350,000 tons a month.
Does something seem fishy about these stories? They are from Time magazine, all right, but from the issue for June 12, 1944, reissued this past summer to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the landings at Normandy. They offer a salutary lesson in taking science with a grain of salt.
Dr. Deutsch thought she had doped out the essential nature of woman, but few psychologists today would uncritically accept her view that women are by nature passive and masochistic. She is sometimes accused of having given a stamp of inevitability to self-denigrating female behavior. The feminist writer Kate Millet has attacked Deutsch for advocating a “doctrine of female subjugation.”
Of course, Deutsch’s Psychology of Woman, like all science, was a product of its time. She was a female psychiatrist working in a world of mostly male professionals, dominated by the influence of the great male myth-maker Sigmund Freud, whose student she was. The world was at war — a war presided over and fought by men. Women were peripheralized as at few times in history. All of this personal and social history is undoubtedly reflected in her work.
The miracle insecticide extolled in 1944 by the Surgeon General’s office was DDT, which Time called “one of the great scientific discoveries of World War II.” A great discovery it was, but not quite an unmitigated boon.
Can you imagine sleeping in DDT-dusted pajamas, on a DDT-sprayed bed, in a room with DDT painted on the walls, after a dinner of DDT-treated potatoes, cabbage, fruit, and corn? No bedbugs, for sure, but not the healthiest environment either. Never mind, manufacturers were cranking out 350,000 tons of the stuff a month for the Army, and when the war ended other markets were speedily found. Anti-DDT crusader Rachel Carson came along not a moment too soon.
If science sometimes gets it wrong — as in the case of Deutsch’s psychology of women and the unrestricted use of DDT — then why should we pay attention to science at all, or to the Health & Science pages of this newspaper? Will the stories that we read here today also seem naive or wrongheaded 50 years from now?
Perhaps, but that’s no reason to turn off on science. What’s called for instead is confidence hedged with a modest degree of skepticism.
Science is not a perfect instrument. Sometimes we take a step backwards for every several steps forward. But for those of us with faith in progress, science represents the best human hope for a healthy, prosperous future.
Helene Deutsch’s science may have been flawed, but she was herself a woman of impressive force and intellectuality. She grew up in a time and place — the Austro-Hungarian Empire — when women were denied access to higher education and important clinical positions. Nevertheless, she carved out for herself a considerable reputation in international psychiatry, and had a long, productive life as analyst, spouse, and mother.
The place of women in society was advanced by the dynamism and courage of women like Deutsch, and by the kind of enlightened thinking that science engenders. And chemical pesticides — including safer descendants of DDT — today help many people on the planet survive in otherwise hostile environments.
Science isn’t a perfect instrument of progress, but it’s the best we have.
