physical object, offers new possibilities. CLOSENESS AND CONFLICTS Different intellectual perspectives provide suggestive hypotheses about why women tend to adopt the approaches that we have clustered under the rubric soft . Some perspectives, such as the psychoanalytic account, place the roots of difference at an early stage of human development. If the earliest and most compelling experiences of merging are with the mother, the process of differentiation takes on gender meanings. Experiences where boundaries are not clear are associated with something female. Differentiation and delineation are male. The psychoanalytic focus on early experience does not necessarily undermine a more sociological perspective, where the emphasis is on our culture's sharp gender division of parenting roles and on the very different socializations of men and women. As a birthday gift, a boy receives toy tanks and soldiers; a girl receives dolls, presented to her, not as objects to command, but as children to nurture. In our culture, girls are taught negotiation, compromise, and the capacity for intimacy as social virtues, while models of male behavior stress decisiveness, cool impartiality, and the imposition of will. It would not be surprising if women felt more comfortable, more "themselves," with negotiation and compromise among elements of thought, and men preferred to make decisive plans and impose principles on a separate reality. From its very foundations, objectivity in science was metaphorically engaged with the language of male domination and female submission. Francis Bacon used the image of the male scientist putting the female nature "on the