Emily Martin (anthropologist)

Martin wrote the book The Woman in the Body, which won the first Eileen Basker Memorial Prize from the Society for Medical Anthropology.[3] The book was first published in 1987, and then re-published with a new introduction in 2001 by Beacon Press. In this book Martin examines how American culture sees the process of reproduction. Emily Martin uses fieldwork to structure her arguments throughout this book. One key focus is the metaphor of economy that she analyzes in depth. She does this in order to show her readers that the social structure of the world she is examining is dependent on this metaphor in order to function efficiently.

Reviewing the book in American Anthropologist, Linda C. Garrow wrote "Overall, the book is strongest when it remains close to women's statements... Martin draws strong conclusions about the amount of resistance expressed by women that are not supported by the data... However, the insights, hypotheses, and challenges... will undoubtedly stimulate much research and make the book essential reading across a number of areas in medical anthropology."[4] In Isis, Anja Hiddinga called it "daring, well argued, and thoroughly supported by a wide range of references."[5]

The most notable element that she produced in this book is the idea of seeing the woman as a machine that is there to create a product. Martin explains how the women's body is used over and over again in order to produce a child (product). Martin explains that this metaphor of labor dehumanizes the experience. The women is not taken into account for as a human being but her uterus is only seen as a tool that allows doctors to get closer to producing a new product. “Uteruses produce ‘efficient or inefficient contractions’, good or poor labor by the amount of ‘progress made in certain periods of time.[6]’” The women being there only for mechanical reasons creates a dichotomy that connects women to their bodies, while men are more connected with their head. Men are delivering these babies and are thus in control of the situation. This metaphor of labor is also reproduced in hospitals by making it an economical situation. The idea of scheduling appointments to have a baby is an attempt to have this experience done in the fastest manner so that it is convenient for the doctor, as well as the company as a whole. In attempt to be as efficient as possible, hospitals’ focus is not on the experience of the woman in labor but creating a predictable experience that gets a woman out in ample amount of time and to continue to work as a machine and produce the product.[7]

Emily Martin describes the relationship between premenstrual syndrome and the work place. She focuses on the idea that every single person experiences this time of month differently but examines that the Marxist way of thinking interferes with how an employer adapts to this situation. “An owner's profit is based on how much value can be squeezed out of laborers' work, the amount of time laborers would have to work and what they did (down to the precise movements of their hands and bodies) would be con- trolled by factory owners.[8] Martin argues this idea is what needs to be changed. People are not black and white, situations occur but the fact that people are driven to produce the most they can in the shortest amount of time is the thing that needs to be changed. Martin does not propose that only women need to be treated better but all people in the workforce need to be accommodated- the young, the old, and the sick.[9] Her argument is that although women and men experience hormonal surges, women are easier to target because they can attribute women's hormonal surges to their menstrual cycle.

In the 1991 article, The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles,[10] Emily Martin approaches scientific literature from the perspective of an anthropologist. She analyzes the metaphors that are used to teach biological concepts and makes the claim that these metaphors reflect the socially constructed "definitions of male and female".[11] She focuses on analogies made in fertilization with the roles that the egg and sperm play, and points how words such as "debris", "sheds", and "dying" as opposed to "amazing", "produce", and "remarkable" insinuate that as "female biological processes" are inferior to male biological processes, so then must women be "less worthy than men".

Therefore, Martin argues that the female's reproduction system is portrayed as a failure because during their menstrual cycle, they are expelling one gamete per month while the male's reproduction system is producing millions of sperm each day. Martin describes the scientific accounts of reproductive biology, stating that they produce images of the egg and sperm often relying on stereotypes that prove to be key to our cultural definitions of male and female. These accounts, Martin claims, imply that the female biological processes are less worthy than that of the male. The language to describe the egg is more feminine, waiting to be rescued, while the sperm is described with a more masculine vocabulary.

However, Martin dispels this stereotype through research that proves that the egg is more aggressive than it has been previously described. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University ask the question about the mechanical force of the sperm's tail and concluded that the sperm is weak; therefore the female egg is more aggressive due to its adhesive molecules that can capture a sperm with a single bond and clasp it to the zona's surface.[11] Research also conducted by Gerald Schatten and Helen Schatten gives credit to both the egg and the sperm being mutually involved, but continues to use traditional vocabulary describing an aggressive sperm.

These studies simultaneously show scientists making an effort to change the previous analogies. But in the attempt to shift the passive imagery of females, scientists have gone to the opposite extreme to depict the egg as a “dangerous” “spider woman” and the sperm as the “victim”, in concordance with another Western culture gender stereotype. Martin poses the idea of using gender neutral analogies instead.

When traditional metaphors are actively used, they project the image of the cellular level to the social level, making it “seem so natural as to be beyond alteration.” These interpretations become “self-reinforcing” and can skew observations. One way is as researcher Scott Gilbert describes: “if you don’t have an interpretation of fertilization that allows you to look at the eggs as active, you won’t look for the molecules that can prove it.” The way that scientists choose to view their studies “guides [them] to ask certain questions and to not ask certain others.”[12]

A solution to these negative imageries is not to just increase the number of females in biology, but rather to be aware of the biased metaphors.[12]