A World Without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture of Western Science

The Washington Post (Sunday, March 19, 2006) asked Deborah Tannen -- the author of "You Just Don't Understand," "Talking from 9 to 5", and "You're Wearing That?" -- to gather a shelf of her favorite books on women's issues. Her first choice was this book. This is what she said about it: When I first read this book, I could talk of little else for a long, long while. Noble shows that the exclusion of women from Western scientific and educational institutions was not the inevitable outgrowth of historical forces. Rather, it came about because early universities were seminaries and early scientists were either clergy or steeped in a Christian clerical culture. The Latin church, with its hierarchical structure, used the stigmatization of women in its power struggle to gain control of the monasteries in which women and men prayed and studied as equals in the first millennium of the Christian era.

This is a historical examination of the inter-relationship between the history of the Catholic church and of academic science. The theme is that the tendecies towards misogyny and towards expecting monastic devotion to one's work can both be traced back to the clerical origin of academic study.