Animals, Science and Gender: Animal Experimentation in Britain, 1947-1965

This thesis is an historical analysis of the culture of science and its use of animals in experiments by the British military and in medical scientific research, and its regulation by law, during the period 1947 to 1965. The overall aim of this thesis is to demonstrate the gendered nature of scientific experimentation on animals in mid-twentieth century Britain. To do this, it addresses two aspects of animal experimentation; firstly, exploring how scientific research forms power-knowledge relations through the use of nonhuman animals. Secondly, this thesis analyses the intersection of animal use in science with that of the broader socio-cultural context, asking was science in mid-twentieth century Britain gendered? As a consequence, it explores the effects of this knowledge production upon animals and women. My findings are twofold: that the construction of scientific knowledge through the use of nonhuman animals was one that created subject-object binaries, and this had powerful and detrimental consequences for nonhuman animals. Secondly, this objectification of the nonhuman had resultant power-knowledge effects that reinforced the continuation of specific kinds of scientific knowledge and its associated masculinist ontology of positivism. Consequently, the effects of these power-knowledge relations were gendered and had implications for (and intersections with) normative representations of women at the time.