Applying McIntosh's Five Interactive Phases to Math and Biology

In 1983 Peggy McIntosh, Director of the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, speculated "about a theory of five interactive phases of personal and curriculum change that occur when new perspectives and new materials from Women's Studies are brought into a traditional curriculum or a traditional consciousness." Using the example of the discipline of history, she described her interactive phases as follows:

Womanless History
Women in History
Women as a Problem, Anomaly, or Absence in History
Women as History
History Redefined or Reconstructed to Include Us All

As she herself recognized, "The Phase 1 syllabus is very exclusive; Phase 4 and 5 syllabi are very inclusive" (Peggy McIntosh, Interactive Phases of Curricular Re-Vision: A Feminist Perspective, Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, Wellesley, MA, 1983).

Rosser and Countryman (see Bibliography) have suggested the following applications of McIntosh's five interactive phases to biology and mathematics:

Phase	Biology	Mathematics
1.	biology without women	math without women
2.	inclusion of women biologists like Rosalind Franklin and Barbara McClintock (Vivian Gornick, Women in Science, Simon and Schuster, 1983)	inclusion of women mathematicians (Lynn Olsen, Women in Mathematics, M.I.T., 1974)
3.	women as a problem or anomaly in biology - e.g., biological determinism, as exemplified by hormone research, animal behavior (focusing on behavior of males only)	surfacing of female feelings of being at a disadvantage relative to males in doing mathematics
4.	fundamental changes in primate research	synthesis of emotion and rationality, intuition and logic; students tell their own stories of doing math
5.	inclusive biology humanistic mathematics

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