Measuring Manhood: Race and the Science of Masculinity, 1830-1934 by Melissa Stein

Abstract

Reviewed by: Measuring Manhood: Race and the Science of Masculinity, 1830-1934 by Melissa Stein Liam Oliver Lair MEASURING MANHOOD: Race and the Science of Masculinity, 1830-1934. By Melissa Stein. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2015. In this impressively researched book, Melissa Stein documents how scientists in the late 1800s and early 1900s naturalized racial hierarchy. As she explains: "this book is a story about how categories of human difference are created, maintained, and contested and the role of science in that process… not just categories of difference… they were, and often continue to be, categories of sociopolitical exclusion" (24). Ethnologists and sexologists in particular adapted ideas about race at the intersection of gender and sexuality to fit new social cultural and political circumstances, solidifying a mutually constitutive relationship racial science, politics, and culture. While the politics of these professionals differed, one constant theme among their work was the notion of "a natural racial hierarchy" grounded in white supremacy (269). Unlike other historical works concerning manhood in the late 19th century that focus on popular discourse and cultural texts, Stein's unique work begins with a consideration of how ethnology emerged as a field of study and the central role of men—and patrilineal descent—in questions regarding the origins of humankind. The confluence of ethnology and white masculinity served as a foundation for ethnological conclusions about race in justifications for slavery. Pro-slavery defenders grounded their logic in paternalistic rhetoric and utilized gendered arguments when it benefited their aim, often de-gendering Black folks or likening black men and women to children (77). What was so dangerous about these assertions is that many ethnologists raised their "innate prejudices to the level of scientific truth[s]," truths that shaped law, policy, and social opinion (124). These trends were exacerbated in the post-abolition era when concerns over two things: 1) citizenship—particularly for Black men, and 2) what racial scientists saw as the "threat" of miscegenation (93, 107). As Stein argues, "white supremacy depended on white men maintaining their dominion over white women" and whites believed that if Black men were to access political equality, they would also want social equality; that is, "equal access to white women" (159). General concerns about race, sexuality, gender, and the boundaries of whiteness converged in these moments, but Stein demonstrates the specificity and interconnectedness of these discourses. She focuses on the role of manhood, finding that in order to denigrate "a particular race or immigrant group" one only needed to "impugn[] manhood within the group" (165). Manhood, of course, was synonymous with reproductive heterosexuality, since the "fate of the nation depended on the superior race 'outbreeding' the inferior" (168). Thus, any white person who was not heterosexual was a "threat to the whole race and, in turn, American civilization" (168). Racial science and ethnology directly impacted other fields of medical research as well as attempts at legal and social control of those deemed "less evolved." The emergence of sexology is one key example, where concepts of "sexuality and sexual difference [were] shaped by the country's racial context" (178). This occurred, in part, because many ethnologists also conducted research as sexologists, using their 'expertise' gleaned from their work on race. Sexologists' defined inverts and homosexuals as not just reflective of deviance from the norm, but also reflective of a devolution or evolutionary regression. The results of these scientific inquiries alongside the emergence of eugenics as a specific iteration of scientific racism directly shaped not only the future of assessments on race and sexuality within the fields of medicine, but directly impacted the law and extra-legal violence. In her analysis of lynching, for example, Stein notes that "racial science and popular discourse on lynching shared language, imagery, and a highly charged set of assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, and power in America" (219). The influence of eugenics facilitated the use of castration as an "increasingly central component in [End Page 123] the practice of lynching" but both "served the same ideological and practical functions; intimidation, containment, and social control" (239). Stein's research is particularly salient given our current political moment and the contemporary "resurgence of scientific interest in biology and...