by Miriam Horn
The artifacts Reeder assembled were designed to alert the men of Athens to the dangers of an ungoverned woman, but also to demonstrate that her sexuality could be brought under male control. In the end, in these illustrated morality plays, the Greek heroes slay the she-monsters, break the spells, exact revenge for women’s sins. The defeat by a male hero (Heracles, Theseus, Achilles) of the Amazons—those fierce female archers who refuse to marry, have sex when it suits them, slay their enemies, and rear their children without men—is a favorite tale, ending as it does with the proper restoration of male domain.
The marriage rite was, for the Greeks, the most important symbolic enactment of the taming by man of the female will. Performed at the onset of puberty, when a girl awakened sexually, the ceremony culminated in the groom’s grasping the bride’s wrist in a gesture of abduction while she, trained by older women to show submission, disarmed her most potent weapon by dropping her gaze. Through the transformative power of art, the female predator is thus made prey. Her reproductive powers were also ritually usurped: After each birth, the child’s father decided whether the infant would be reared or abandoned in the woods to die, overriding the power of her womb with his legal authority.
Over the course of the century traced by Reeder’s show, the advance of Greek culture brings a refinement of this triumph by civilization over the natural sexual order. Archaic period vase paintings of Odysseus’s encounter with Circe focus on her power to seduce him, while later classical vases capture the moment he makes her submit to his will. The myth of Pygmalion marks man’s ultimate triumph through culture over female nature: The sculptor who despises real women carves of ivory a perfect female, entirely subject to his control.
Whether or not Reeder’s work provides a convincing rebuke to Darwinian theories of coy females, it does suggest that claims to document universal qualities of female nature by resort to history and anthropology require more subtlety of interpretation than the evolutionists sometimes bring. A vase painting of a husband abducting a wife is not, as Reeder shows, a historical account of “natural” fifth-century B.C. sexual behavior—proof of the coy female who must be forcibly taken—but an example of the central function of art and ritual: to assert man’s will against the state of nature, to school the minds of the public to accept civilization and its discontents. Wright misses that distinction when he claims that the view across cultures of libidinous women as aberrant is proof that a powerful female libido is abnormal. Surely it is equally possible, as Freud suggested, that a culture’s definition of female lasciviousness as aberrant, its need to impose a taboo, suggests not the absence of a natural impulse but the reverse, an impulse so powerful and dangerous as to demand social control.
Reeder’s work illuminates other careless uses of the archaeological record. The dependence of females on male resources in hunter-gatherer society is assumed in most “nature” arguments about her sexual selectivity, but such dependence was not always the case. Massive climactic and technological changes during the last 2 million years more than once radically altered the human economy and women’s place in it. Bronze Age women, Reeder points out, produced most textiles and therefore controlled an important segment of economic life. And though during ice ages women and children did depend heavily on what men could hunt, much recent archaeology suggests that for most of prehistory, female gatherers were the primary “breadwinners.” The evidence that women had a crucial provider’s role was long overlooked, says Reeder, because of academics’ bias: She recalls digs on which senior archaeologists simply tossed aside Neolithic female figurines as uninteresting. Women’s place in Greek society was similarly obscured, she says, because of a scholarly preoccupation with politics and war, both activities reserved for men. The record of sexual behavior has been particularly distorted by archaeological bias; until recently, “obscene” artifacts were frequently destroyed.
Of course, selective interpretations of cultural history are not the exclusive province of biased males. Mary Lefkowitz has written an entire book aimed at undoing reductionist accounts by feminists of antiquity, including efforts by acolytes of the goddess movement to make cartoon heroines of the complex women of Greek myth and tragedy. Her scoldings earned her the distinction of being cast in one of Wellesley alumna Carolyn Heilbrun’s Amanda Cross mysteries as that “damn classics prig” who disparages the Amazons and Antigone.
Martha McClintock was just twenty years old when, perched at the edge of a room full of the world’s top biologists, she broke into their conversation with an observation that would become the basis for a study of major scientific importance. It was the summer after her junior year at Wellesley, and Martha was invited, with a handful of other students, to attend a conference at Jackson Laboratory in Maine. The scientists were discussing pheromones—chemical messages that pass between organisms without their conscious knowledge—and how they cause female mice to ovulate all at the same time. McClintock recalled the event for Chicago magazine: “Driven by curiosity despite my self-consciousness, I mention that the same thing happens in humans. Didn’t they know that? All of them being male, they didn’t. In fact, I got the impression that they thought it was ridiculous. But they had the courtesy to frame their skepticism as a scientific question: ‘What is your proof?’ I said it was what happened in my dormitory. And they said unless you address it scientifically, that evidence is worthless.”
Her Wellesley faculty adviser, Patricia Sampson, encouraged Martha to take up the challenge, and the 135 women in her dorm agreed to participate. Each woman recorded the dates of her menstruation and also how often she spent time with men. The data confirmed that the cycles of roommates and friends became synchronous, and that women who had little contact with men (“You could only do this study at Wellesley,” Martha jokes) had longer cycles, suggesting that ovulation was not taking place and was perhaps influenced, as in mice, by casual contact with males. She wrote up her results as her senior thesis and the next year, in graduate school at Harvard, was urged by E. O. Wilson, the sociobiologist famous for his studies of chemical signaling among ants, to submit her findings to Nature magazine. Published in 1971, when Martha was twenty-three, the paper was the first scientific evidence ever presented of the functioning of human pheromones.
Though she now works in a $12 million laboratory built by the University of Chicago to house her research, Martha McClintock has for three decades continued to pursue the question first posed in the Wellesley study: How do social interactions and environment affect female reproductive physiology? And, more broadly, how does the mind work on the body? Her top-down, outside-in approach inverts the usual link explored by scientists between biology and behavior, and complicates the notion of biology as destiny. “A common bias among biologists is to approach reproduction from the bottom up. Someone interested in the timing of ovulation begins with the hypothalamus, then individual neurons in the hypothalamus, then proteins that regulate one calcium channel in each neuron,” McClintock explains. But as demonstrated in the Wellesley study, a woman’s social behavior also affects the neuroendocrine mechanisms that regulate the timing of ovulation. Though “the molecular level of analysis is important, so are higher levels.”
The notion of mind over body is a favorite of the New Age but one rarely studied with the scientific rigor that McClintock brings. In 1995 she was invited to join the MacArthur Foundation’s Mind-Body Network, which sponsors collaborative studies among specialists in psychophysiology, endocrinology, and immunology of how states of mind affect health. With psychiatrist David Spiegel of Stanford University, McClintock has built on her lifelong interest in the protective function of strong social relationships by studying the effects of group therapy on women with metastatic breast cancer. The studies have shown that terminal patients who clearly voiced their needs and discussed their fears of death lived twice as long after the study began as those who did not, results comparable to those patients who take tamoxifen, a drug made to slow tumor growth. “It wasn’t Nor
man Cousins, ‘Will away your cancer, envision yourself cured,’ ” says Martha. “If it suggested anything, it was that denial is toxic.”
From the outset, McClintock’s interest in the effects of environment on biology has required her to invent unconventional experimental strategies. At the University of Pennsylvania, where she did her Ph.D. (and was also a resident in psychiatry), she decided not to study the specially bred rats used by every lab in the world, hypothesizing that their behaviors did not mimic that of rats in the wild. She asked a “kindly Mr. Herbert,” who supervised the Philadelphia public health patrol, if he could live-trap twelve rats for her from the sewer. He delivered them dead, not believing that anyone could want his vermin alive.
Mr. Herbert was finally persuaded to deliver live rats to McClintock, which presented a second problem: how to house the creatures, which can bite through quarter-inch steel, in something resembling their natural habitat. The daughter of an engineer, McClintock contrived for her rats a home built of sticks, rocks, and wire mesh, with trails and places to nest and hide, all monitored by cameras so that even while the rats scurried through heaps of litter and nooks and tubes, they could be constantly surveilled. Tagging the rats posed another problem, since the marker used on the typically albino domestic strains of rats was invisible in the wild ones’ gloomy fur. McClintock tried bleaching fur patches with Clairol Nice ’n Easy, but nothing happened. “In such a case, scientists consult an expert,” she told Chicago. “So I called Bonwit Teller’s hair salon. I said, ‘I’m working with animals, how do you bleach their’—I didn’t want to say it was rats, so I used the word pelts.” They transferred her to their colorist, Mr. Andre, who advised shampoo, followed by peroxide and then dye. “He said, ‘Why don’t you bring the animals in, so I could help?’ I had fun thinking of taking sewer rats to the salon, but said, ‘Thank you. I couldn’t possibly.’ ”
Keen to observe rat sex as practiced in nature, McClintock again created a little piece of home for her subjects at the University of Chicago, where she joined the behavioral sciences faculty in 1976. Until then, scientists had studied rat sex by putting a single male and female together in a small cage, unconsciously reflecting human norms. The male rat’s behavior—pursuing and copulating repeatedly with the female—became the basis for numerous conclusions about sexual initiative and relative appetite in females and males.
But this behavior, McClintock found, was almost entirely a construct of the artificial environment. By examining hundreds of hours of videotape, often a frame at a time, she found that a female rat was not at all passive or coy. In fact, it was she who initiated sex by entering a male’s personal space. Scientists observing rats in small cages had never witnessed this behavior, because the female was already within that space. The male’s response was misunderstood as initiative.
Still more intriguing was her discovery that sex was not a private matter between two consenting rat adults but a kind of orgy, with females working as a group to maximize each of their chances at conception, enticing the males and then passing them around. McClintock discovered yet another instance of female reproductive choice in the rats’ postcoital behavior. If she has succeeded in being inseminated by a dominant male, a rat rests so the sperm can get to the uterus. If she has ended up with “a loser,” she immediately seeks a new mate and interrupts the sperm transfer. The male attempts to influence her decision by urinating pheromones communicating his status and by crying at a pitch that turns out to be just at the threshold of hearing for a woman in her twenties. (When McClintock first reported the cry to her senior colleagues, all of them men for whom the pitch was inaudible, they thought she was nuts.)
Her discovery that females were initiating and controlling sex brought great notoriety to McClintock’s study. Because it made much previous work obsolete, it took years to get published and then, to her dismay, was dubbed the “rat feminist” paper. To McClintock, female initiative was only the second most interesting finding; the first was the role the group played in female reproductive success. Observing that her rats, like her Wellesley classmates, synchronized their estrus with pheromone cues, she set out to find out why. The first advantage she observed was that females who ovulated together could not only cooperate sexually but could also give birth together and nurse their litters communally, freeing each mother to spend more time foraging. The more critical advantage was the prolongation of the female’s reproductive life span. Rats in isolation, she discovered, entered menopause 30 percent sooner. They also got sick and died sooner, of breast cancer and even of infectious diseases, despite their isolation from contagions.
Interested in the implications for humans of her rat studies, McClintock devised a study to see whether women also behaved in ways to enhance the success of reproduction. She radio-collared couples, beeping them randomly over the course of the woman’s menstrual cycle to find out what they were doing and feeling. Sure enough, in the days prior to ovulation, when sex was most likely to lead to pregnancy, female initiation of sex increased sharply.
McClintock also set about isolating what she calls “eaudor,” or “eau d’ovulating rat”—the pheromone that synchronizes estrus by delaying or accelerating ovulation. If she could distill the chemical signals, she would have compounds that affect ovulation directly and could be used to treat infertility or for contraception. In 1998, she published the results of a similar experiment with human females in Nature. She found that by exposing a group of women to a whiff of the pre-ovulatory or ovulation-phase sweat of other women, she was able to shorten or prolong their menstrual cycles by as much as fourteen days. She has also looked at humans to see if they enjoy the same protective effects of the group on reproductive success. Though human menstrual synchrony might, as in rats, have emerged through evolution to facilitate communal child rearing in lean times, McClintock has come to believe that synchrony is in fact a side effect of a mechanism that extends the length of reproductive life as much as 50 percent.
Well aware that her work on female sexual behavior and the biology of “difference” enmeshes her in several contentious debates of the day, McClintock has written many times on the ideologically motivated misuses of “science,” particularly on the new biodeterminism. Her own consistent attention to the “openness” of biological systems makes clear the fallacy in claims to genetic predestination of intelligence and other complex traits. Genes are not “master molecules”—untouchable totalitarian rulers sending out orders that shape an organism’s immutable fate. Rather, genes are themselves malleable participants in a complex, interactive system of hormones, environment, and mind.
In fact, women and men are almost identical in their genes: Just 2 percent of their total genetic material differs. What generates most difference are the hormones that regulate those genes, but even with those endocrine effects, innate sex differences remain small. “As a rule of thumb,” says McClintock, “only about 15 percent of variance comes from gender and 85 percent comes from individual differences within gender.” The nature argument is complicated further by the particular difficulties in assessing which sex traits are inherited and which learned, “because males and females immediately enter different environments the moment someone answers the question ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ ”
McClintock began her efforts to clarify what it means to speak of gender traits as “genetic” or “innate” two decades ago in a piece on sex differences in parenting published in Signs: Journal of Women and Culture, a University of Chicago publication that has been a principal forum for feminists writing about science. McClintock challenged the evolutionists’ argument that females are “naturally” more invested in their young. She disputed, first, the claim that there are universal maternal behaviors: “Of the various interdependent mating and parenting strategies … which is taken by the male and which by the female varies widely among species and across cultures.” She also challenged the premise of a dramatic sexual division of labor among humans in prehistoric societies, citing
evidence that maternal and paternal roles were far more alike in agricultural and hunter-gatherer cultures than in modern industrial society, adding that “it may be that a return to less sexual difference in parenting would be more successful in the context of new selection pressures created by the changing social structure.” Far from violating the natural order, she wrote, a move toward more equally shared parenting would continue “the evolutionary process which selects behaviors in the context of many social and physiological systems.”
Married since 1982 to Dr. Joel Charrow, head of clinical genetics at Chicago’s Children’s Memorial Hospital, Martha has two children—a son, Ben, born in 1986, and a daughter, Julie, adopted seven years later. She chose to stay home with each for the first six months, and says she would have “fought her husband” if he’d pressed for that role. In explaining her more powerful desire to care for her infants, she dismisses the classic account of “maternal attachment” rooted in pregnancy and nursing. “I know from my own experience that lots of what people attribute to pregnancy really comes just from being wildly in love with your child.” Her explanation is that it is both nature and nurture. “I think there is a strong inborn component. And it’s the way I was raised.”
McClintock does believe “that females are hardwired to pay attention to relationships.” She describes watching her daughter playing with her older brother’s action figures. “She puts them in the bucket of his front loader and rocks them like a cradle. They’re his figures and his front loader and he never did that. She does it because she has two X chromosomes and ovaries and hormones, and also because from the moment she was born, culture came crashing in. Her genes are interacting with a high level of hormones in a very particular environment of caretaking; it’s extremely interactive.”