Sexual Science by Cynthia Eagle Russett

I suppose it’s only right to begin by giving you fair warning: Sexual Science is chapter one in a new series we shall informally call “Ana reads a lot of nerdy and hard to find, expensive or niche books from the awesome academic library she currently has access to, because she’s mourning in advance the loss of said access come September.” I’m dealing with this approaching loss by a) compiling long lists of library books I want to read (which include titles such as Victorian Suicides: Mad Crimes and Sad Histories, Victorian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, Readers, etc. Hmm, do we have a pattern here?) and b) daydreaming of a world where every reader has access to every library. September is of course a long way away, but it will be hard to find time to pursue this list because of the other list I really have to get through: my list of dissertation-related books. Which I’m also excited about, of course. But as always, the books you don’t have to be reading are a little bit shinier.

Anyway: Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood is, as the back cover so well puts it, a “chapter in the annals of human folly”. Cynthia Eagle Russett takes a close look at how Victorian science, particularly biology and emerging disciplines like psychology and anthropology, was used to maintain and justify the gender status-quo. Scientific claims that naturalised the ideology of the separate spheres – the domestic as the feminine domain and public life as the realm of men – were regularly made.

The justifications of why women were not suited for public life or for professional and intellectual pursuits were varied: some were rooted in brain size and weight, others on phrenology, on the menstrual cycle, on the reproductive system, and so on. The conclusion, however, was always the same. Man was master and Woman his companion. This was a Biological Fact, and therefore it was useless to argue with it.

The Victorians clearly had a passion for stiff hierarchies that told everyone their place. Though race isn’t the focus of this book, Russett acknowledges that there were many parallels between the construction of femininity as a less evolved version of masculinity and the construction of the lesser, “savage races” who were supposedly ages behind white men in terms of evolution. Sexual Science is not only an analysis of this process, but also an analysis of the particular moment in history in which it took place. As Russett puts it,

The rise of sexual science needs, accordingly, to be seen both as part of an ongoing inquiry into the varieties of human existence and as a response to the particular historical moment in which women were asserting new claims to a life beyond the domestic hearth.

The fact that science was used to give a cloak of authority to the status-quo is not, of course, the result of a conspiracy by scientists to keep women behind locked doors: “Scientists never engaged in a conscious conspiracy against women, and they were by no means uniformly misogynist.” The reasons why this happened are far more complex than that, and have to do with the fact that we can never fully dissociate ourselves from the cultural climate in which our ideas come into being. To quote Emerson, who naturally put it better than I could, “[we] cannot wipe out of this work every trace of the thoughts amidst which it grew”.

The logical consequence of acknowledging the complexity of this process is that we’re force to pause to consider the ways in which this is very much still happening today. This is why Sexual Science reminded me so much of Delusions of Gender (which was where I first heard of it, in fact), even though well over one century separates the scientific claims each of them examines. But in Cordelia Fine’s always wise words, “If history tells us anything, it is to take a second, closer look at our society and our science.” This is as valid now as in the nineteenth-century.

Sexual Science is not, therefore, a book that invites us to laugh at the past while patting ourselves on the back for being oh-so-much-cleverer today. On the contrary: it invites us to examine the continuity of this process. It is also not a book that takes its deconstruction of the scientific process too far – Russett writes with complete respect for the scientific method and for these scientists’ commitment to making sense of the world around them as best as they could. I am leery of postmodern critiques of science that cross the line into well-nothing-is-real-anyway territory; or even worse (pet peeves of pet peeves) misread Heisenberg and then use him to attempt to distort the way the scientific method works. Sexual Science is fortunately not one of those books. It acknowledges that science is pretty awesome, but scientists are only too human.

Interesting bits:

The phenomenon of menstruation was alone fully sufficient to explain why women could never hope to stand on a level of social and professional equality with men. Whatever may have been the reality of the menstrual cycle in Victorian women’s lives (and it would be reasonable to suppose that burdensome clothing, scant exercise, physiological ignorance, and a culture that encouraged female invalidism increased their discomfort), scientists and medical men wrote of it more as a primal curse than a natural process. (…) [James McGrigor] Alan believed menstruation an insuperable obstacle to feminine aspirations in the intellectual realm: “Even if woman possessed a brain equal to man’s—if her intellectual powers were equal to his—the eternal distinction in the physical organisation of the sexes would make the average man in the long run, the mental superior of the average woman. In intellectual labour, man has surpassed, does now, and always will surpass woman, for the obvious reason that nature does not periodically interrupt his thought and application.”

Hardheaded Henry Maudsley sniffed, “Village Hampdens, mute inglorious Miltons, and bloodless Cromwells do not sleep in the graves of the rude forefathers of the hamlet.” As for gifted women, that potential legion of “Shakespeare’s sisters”, their case was the same. They “suffered no other hindrance to the exercise and evolution of their brains and their intellect than those that are derived from their constitution and their faculties of development”. No obstacles hindered, no customs entrapped them: “in poetry, music and painting, if not also in history, philosophy and science, the field has always been open to both.” Indeed, “women by tens of thousands have enjoyed better educational as well as better social advantages than a Burns, a Keats, or a Faraday; and yet we have neither heard their voices nor seen their work.”

(Hahaha. Oh Mr Maudsley.)

Lombroso was particularly struck by the propensity of criminals, like savages, to adorn themselves with tattoos, frequently of an indecent or lawless nature. (Some of Lombroso’s evidence as to the lewdness of criminal tattoos was admittedly inconclusive. Stephen Jay Gould cites one example: “Long live France and French fried potatoes.”)

(Have you posted about this book too? Leave me your link and I’ll be happy to include it.)