Deepening the History of Masculinity and the Sexes

Abstract

The turn of the twenty-first century has brought a tentative yet potentially seismic shift in feminist studies towards re-integrating biology into critical understanding of the behavioral differences between women and men. 1 Until Robert S. McElvaine's book, this movement has barely registered among historians of women and gender. For at least the last thirty-five years, academic historians have made a sharp, principled distinction between sex as a physiological designation and gender as the contingent mental traits, behaviors, social conventions, and institutions that have formed around sex difference. A few important historical works do consider the issue of whether biology influences more than primary sexual characteristics: Gerda Lerner's The Creation of Patriarchy (1986) maintains that the initial division of labor between women and men emerged from different roles in sexual reproduction; Carl Degler's In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (1991) provides a valuable analysis of the recent social scientific scholarship that finds innate psychological and behavioral differences between the sexes; and David Courtwright's Violent Land: Single Men and Social Disorder from the Frontier to the Inner City (1996) explains the exceptional levels of American violence through the "sociobiological impulses" of the nation's inordinately large number of un-married men. But, as its title suggests, McElvaine's Eve's Seed: Biology, the Sexes and the Course of History re-synthesizes the full sweep of human history around the concept of sexual difference; it also offers a timely account of what historians risk in continuing to ignore advances in evolutionary biology. Through its attempt to apply "biohistory" to twentieth-century U.S. masculinity, Eve's Seed may presage a second-wave of men's historiography. While I have considerable misgivings about some of the book's particulars, it should be appreciated as an imaginatively written and highly interpretive polemic. It's revisionist history in grand form. [End Page 135]