Abstract
In 1998, Nancy Stepan wrote a promissory note in the form of an essay that for the first time examined the intersections between science, race, gender, and citizenship (1998). In the ensuing seventeen years scholars have circled around Stepan’s project. A new set of methods—intersectionality—developed to analyze the intertwined relationships between bodies that are at once sexed, raced, classed, gendered, and sexually preferenced (Cole 2009; McCall 2005). But Measuring Manhood is the first in-depth scholarly exploration of just how the history of racial science, sexual science (including scientific accounts of gender and human sexuality), and citizenship intertwined and mutually constituted each other over the course of a tumultuous century in American history. Using new sources, especially the army technical manuals and reports produced during the civil war and the writings and articles of American sexologists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Measuring Manhood: Race and the Science of Masculinity 1830–1934 makes good on Stepan’s promise.
The first two chapters, which cover the antebellum era through the turn of the century, take us over what on the surface seems to be familiar ground—the scientific racism documented by Gould (1981), Stocking (1987), Jordan (1968), and others. Stein takes this same territory, adds new archival material, and weaves a gendered analysis into the story. She demonstrates a flow of racialized and gendered body parts that shifted over the century. In the 1830s and 1840s, for example, ethnology often concentrated on presumably gender neutral structures such as skulls, hair, and skin. But as the ending of the civil war lead to debates about citizenship both for former male slaves and for all women, the construction of manhood concentrated on sex characteristics such as the beard. Scientists of this era contrasted the flowing beard of the white man to the nearly beardless man of African descent. On a linear scale of masculinity, the comparison placed the black man in a spot intermediate between white men and women, proving that nature herself could not justify the abolitionist call for equal (male) citizenship. By the turn of the century, scientists had also added reproductive organs to the lists of bodily differences that simultaneously warranted denying full citizenship to women and constructed black manhood as dangerous (sexually and otherwise) and of lesser capacity.
At the turn of the century, racial politics drove scientific models of same-sex sexuality. Stein argues that this should come as no surprise given that the same key scientists wrote both about racial and sexual science. This is a point missed by past historians who focused on the one hand on American race science and on the other on British and European sexology. But in early twentieth-century United States, the Peculiar Institution of the nineteenth century extended its reach into a combined science of race and sexuality. Class also intertwined in this story. Scientists characterized sexual perversion that existed among nonwhites and the lower classes as “vice, indicative of the physical and moral degeneracy of the group” (p. 23). In contrast sex perversion or inversion, as it was often labeled, resulted from individual pathology or disease when it appeared among the white middle and upper classes. Furthermore, scientists and social commentators argued that “race suicide” would inevitably result from same-sex coupling, just as it also resulted from breaking gender barriers. The most infamous example of the latter was the idea that allowing women to obtain higher education would injure their ovaries, leading to sterility, and the decline of the white middle and upper classes (Clarke 1873).
Stein argues that the science of race and sex also lies at the heart of one of the darkest periods of American history—the wave of lynching that began after the civil war and abated (but did not totally stop) only with the antilynching movement championed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) starting in the 1920s. Literal emasculation was a frequent practice of the lynch mob, justified by claims that black men were hypersexual and could barely restrain their impulses to rape. In this period, race–sex scientists recommended surgical castration as an alternative to the horrific violence of lynching. Stein writes that “the ‘castration remedy’ represented a culmination of scientists’ intersecting concerns with race and sex …” (p. 24).
Measuring Manhood is well-written and complexly argued. It will be a useful text for courses in the history of medicine, gender, and sexuality studies; American history and science and technology studies. It provides an example of how to do intersectional analysis. Future scholars should follow suit and let go of approaches that separate studies of race, gender, and class into separate canons.