Deepening the History of Masculinity and the Sexes

Robert S. McElvaine. Eve's Seed: Biology, the Sexes, and the Course of History. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001. viii + 453 pp. Notes and index. $27.95 (cloth); $16.95 (paper).

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.

McElvaine bases his understanding of modern American masculinity on "deep history"—sociobiologist E. O. Wilson's term for the evolution of the human species. ² Under this view, contemporary cross-cultural masculine and feminine traits are part of a universal human cognitive structure shaped by the two million years spent as Pleistocene hunter-gatherers. Evolution of psychological design is a slow process. The 10,000 years since the scattered appearance of agriculture is a very small stretch in evolutionary terms, about 1 percent of human history. Therefore, as the argument goes, it is improbable that the species evolved complex cognitive adaptations to agriculture, let alone to industrial or post-industrial society. With this periodization in place, evolutionary psychology—the vanguard of sociobiological thought and scholarship central to McElvaine's book—examines the recurring environmental demands faced by male hunters as opposed to female gatherers, which leads to the explanation of late-twentieth-century violent hypermasculinity, for instance, as a trace of what heretofore would have been called "pre-historic" thought. ³ What this boils down to is finding gender difference in human nature, a concept McElvaine in no way shies away from. Eve's Seed speaks routinely of the human "biogram"—another sociobiological term—which includes, according to McElvaine, a "propensity" for both war and love.

In addressing his study's central question of why "the subordination of women to men is something approaching a cross-cultural universal," McElvaine argues that throughout history men have excluded and taken power from women in overcompensating for their primordial envy of female capacity to carry, bear, and nourish a child (p. 1). This "non-menstrual syndrome" or "notawoman" definition of manhood, as McElvaine calls it alternately in his penchant for label-making, stems from the psychoanalyst Karen Horney's 1926 essay "The Flight from Womanhood" and the anthropologist Ashley Montague...