Rebels in White Gloves (24 page)

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.”

But what begins to seem like an argument for “natural” motherhood quickly takes one of McClintock’s characteristic turns. To say that a female is hardwired to attend to relationships does not mean that she is better fitted to parenthood. “You might argue that being exquisitely sensitive has negative effects, causing you to be overprotective. Maybe the less attentive parent promotes adventurousness by letting the kid do something he or she is scared to do, because the parent simply doesn’t perceive the kid’s fear.”

In other words, one should mistrust reductionist stories, particularly those that turn out to justify the status quo. McClintock scoffs at stories like Robert Wright’s about the greater innate drive in males for dominance and how it might explain their persistence at the corporate top. “These stories are so glib, and so biased; they’re always told from the point of view of the alpha male. Look, imagine you’re studying baboons and you drive out in your Land Rover. This is what you see: a dominant male, hugely bigger than the females in his harem. There might be a few subpuberty males hanging around, but the other adult males are pushed to the edge and don’t approach. When any female is in heat, the dominant male does all the mating. You think, Okay, there’s no cultural bias in this description: it’s a clear male hierarchy.”

But that is not the story told, McClintock says, by the work of her colleague Jeanne Altmann, chair of the committee on evolutionary biology at Chicago. For several years running, Altmann has returned to the same group of baboons. “And what do you know? She found the same group of females, but each year she found a different dominant male. She also saw that some females get access to water first, that some get their babies snatched and others don’t. It turns out that whether a female has power is of vital biological importance, affecting the mortality rate of her offspring and therefore the survival of her genes. So, do you take your yearly snapshot and describe a male hierarchy, or do you say, Here’s a matrilineal coalition where the key hierarchy is among the females. Do you use the word
harem
, which conjures up
Arabian Nights
and sex solely for male pleasure and all kinds of cultural meshegos, or call it a
female coalition
with a clear, linear dominance hierarchy and transient studs? Then the question becomes, Why would females form coalitions? and suddenly you’re spinning a very different story.” Wright’s description of a male who comes and goes as he pleases is inverted: Now the females have agency, using the male as long as they need him and then
sending him on his way. Armed with such primate evidence, an evolutionary psychologist might argue that for females with adequate resources, single motherhood has proven a successful strategy—that it is a behavior “in our genes.”

McClintock herself would be cautious in proposing such extrapolations, having seen her own science too often turned to foolish ends. Thirty years after proving the function of pheromones in humans, she is blackly amused by an ad for Jovan perfume, which claims to combine the pheromone androstenol with beautiful floral notes to send “attractant signals so powerful that there can be only one response.” Androstenol, she points out, is a compound produced by the male pig that causes the female to stand motionless so he can mate with her. Cans of it are sold through veterinary catalogues, with instructions to spray it directly into the nostrils of the sow. “To extrapolate wildly from insects to pigs to humans this way runs counter to everything good and powerful in science.”

McClintock was equally dismayed when her rat sex study was branded a feminist paper, because, she says, “to say I did feminist science suggests that I had a political agenda ahead of time to demonstrate that female rats could be independent and assertive, just like males, and then designed studies to prove that hypothesis. That would be bad science. The fact is, my studies could be repeated by the most misogynist, chauvinist scientist, and he would be forced to come to the same conclusion.” She does believe, however, that her work can and should serve political ends, that she is actively rewriting the biological doctrine that has been so powerful a force in defining women’s nature and lives. “I am a feminist and I do science and I think my good science can certainly be used for feminist purposes. I think it’s fun to subvert the dominant paradigm.”

McClintock’s history is proof of one of the central tenets of the feminist analysis of science: that a woman scientist’s experiences will often lead her to ask different questions or to see phenomena previously overlooked or to interpret data differently. She would not have discovered the role of pheromones in humans if not for her own experience menstruating in synchrony with the other women in her Wellesley dorm. Her lab is often disproportionately populated by women students, and she has supervised their studies of such “female subjects” as girls’ inhibition
in competition; the perception of domestic violence by perpetrators and victims; self-esteem in mothers; and the psychology of daughters caring for elderly parents.

Martha attended Wellesley at her mother’s urging. “She said, ‘Whether you marry or not, you’ll depend on women and should go somewhere you’ll learn how to do that.’ She said that with a good education I’d have something interesting to think about while folding diapers, which has also proven true. I had no plans when I arrived there, beyond maybe being a first-grade teacher. I was fourth-generation Wellesley, and thought the women who’d gone before me were what I’d grow up to be—a well-educated mother and community volunteer. My grandmother got engaged at Wellesley and knew she would move to western Massachusetts, where my grandfather farmed. She took astronomy because she figured in the country she’d see the stars and could teach her children their names.”

After Wellesley, Martha found the “no-woman’s-land” of Harvard’s graduate program in sociobiology disconcerting. “Title Nine hadn’t happened yet. I wasn’t allowed to eat in the faculty club with my chairman or to use the stacks in some libraries or the squash courts. I was explicitly told by faculty that they admitted me only because the field needed people to do parametric studies, which are essentially the housework of the discipline, and that women kept nice neat lab notebooks. There were no women faculty, which was demoralizing.”