Virginia Woolf and the Study of Nature: Laboratory coats and field-glasses: Virginia Woolf and the modern study of nature

Woolf's most frequently cited comment on science is her assertion in Three Guineas that ‘science, it would seem, is not sexless; she is a man, a father, and infected too. Science, thus infected, produced measurements to order’ ( TG 360). This declaration has been interpreted by many as a wholesale rejection of science. Sue Curry Jansen, for example, reads this statement as proof of Woolf's conviction that ‘androcentric bias is a constituent principle of the modern, Western, scientific outlook’. Woolf's disdain for the taxonomic tradition, outlined in the last chapter, might be taken as further evidence of such a conviction. However, as is suggested by the fact that even in the above statement she employs a feminine pronoun in her reference to science, Woolf's views on science are more complex than this. It is, after all, to a scientific perspective that Woolf attributes the discovery of the infection in science itself: she praises Professor Grensted as ‘an impartial and scientific operator’ for having ‘dissected the human mind’ and discovered as a result the ‘germ’ of the ‘“infantile fixation”’ (to give the infection ‘[i]ts scientific name’) (341). Not all scientific perspectives appear to Woolf infected by patriarchal bias. Woolf's dismissal of infected science in Three Guineas is offered specifically as a judgement upon craniology, already by the early twentieth century a discredited science, as demonstrated by Bertrand Russell's comment, cited by Woolf, that ‘[a]nyone … who desires amusement may be advised to look up the tergiversations of eminent craniologists in their attempts to prove from brain measurements that women are stupider than men’ (360).