Measuring Manhood

Race and the Science of Masculinity, 1830–1934

2015
Author:

Melissa N. Stein

A major new history of scientific racism in the United States

Covering a wide range of historical actors in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, Measuring Manhood analyzes how race became the purview of science and reveals the role of gender, sex, and sexuality in the scientific making—and unmaking—of race.

Measuring Manhood is the book we’ve been hoping for. For two generations, historians have talked about the ways that race, class, and gender are interlocking and co-operational. Carefully and thoughtfully, Melissa N. Stein gathers these plots and lays out a story of intersecting interests and ideologies: a story of knowledge gone mad that is deeply resonant in our time.

Matthew Pratt Guterl, Brown University

From the “gay gene” to the “female brain” and African American students’ insufficient “hereditary background” for higher education, arguments about a biological basis for human difference have reemerged in the twenty-first century. Measuring Manhood shows where they got their start.

Melissa N. Stein analyzes how race became the purview of science in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America and how it was constructed as a biological phenomenon with far-reaching social, cultural, and political resonances. She tells of scientific “experts” who advised the nation on its most pressing issues and exposes their use of gender and sex differences to conceptualize or buttress their claims about racial difference. Stein examines the works of scientists and scholars from medicine, biology, ethnology, and other fields to trace how their conclusions about human difference did no less than to legitimize sociopolitical hierarchy in the United States.

Covering a wide range of historical actors from Samuel Morton, the infamous collector and measurer of skulls in the 1830s, to NAACP leader and antilynching activist Walter White in the 1930s, this book reveals the role of gender, sex, and sexuality in the scientific making⎯and unmaking⎯of race.

Melissa N. Stein is assistant professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of Kentucky.

Measuring Manhood is the book we’ve been hoping for. For two generations, historians have talked about the ways that race, class, and gender are interlocking and co-operational. Carefully and thoughtfully, Melissa N. Stein gathers these plots and lays out a story of intersecting interests and ideologies: a story of knowledge gone mad that is deeply resonant in our time.

Matthew Pratt Guterl, Brown University

Smartly conceptualized and engagingly written.

Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences

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 inter-
sectional analysis.

Men & Masculinities

A masterful work on the way racial theory, gender and science came together in the long nineteenth century.

Social History of Medicine

A noble effort to reveal the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in the history of American science.

American Historical Review

Smartly conceptualized and engagingly written.

Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences

A well-written narrative, Measuring Manhood is a welcome contribution to the histories of science and medicine, race, and sex and sexuality as well to the interdisciplinary fields of American studies and gender studies.

Journal of American History

Anyone interested in how American science used studies of masculinity to aggravate social fears about race would do well to start with Measuring Manhood.

Journal of the History of Sexuality

Melissa Stein offers a meticulously researched history of biological essentialism. Her explicitly intersectional approach is a timely contribution to our understanding of how race and gender together informed the emerging sciences of ethnology, biology, and medicine from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century.

African American Review

Measuring Manhood is a sobering reflection on the fallacies of “objective” research and the role science has played in shaping social and political life. In this present era of advanced genetic research and considerable sociopolitical turmoil, this is a cautionary tale.

New Genetics and Society

Measuring Manhood is an excellent study of the development of the science of masculinity and its roots in race science in the United States during the long nineteenth century.

Journal of American Ethnic History

Measuring Manhood is convincing and thoroughly engrossing from the first chapter to the last. Stein’s writing is engaging, vivid, and uncluttered.

Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association

Contents

Introduction: Making Race, Marking Difference
1. "Races of Men”: Ethnology in Antebellum America
2. An “Equal Beard” for “Equal Voting”: Gender and Citizenship in the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Redemption
3. Inverts, Perverts, and Primitives: Racial Thought and the American School of Sexology
4. Unsexing the Race: Lynching, Castration, and Racial Science
5. Walter White, Scientific Racism, and the NAACP Antilynching Campaign
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Appendix. Charting Racial Science: Data and Methodology
Notes
Index