Measuring Manhood: Race and the Science of Masculinity, 1830–1934 by Melissa N. Stein (review)

In this history of ethnology, sexology, and related medicoscientific fields of inquiry in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, Melissa N. Stein seeks to situate the (mostly) white men who published these studies in their social and political context. The result is a particularly rich intellectual history that skillfully demonstrates how enmeshed these scientists were in controversies over slavery, African American citizenship, and lynching. Placing antebellum debates about whether or not whites and blacks were separate species alongside late nineteenth-century debates over the causes of sexual “inversion” could at first seem like a stretch. Indeed, as Stein points out, few scholars of the history of sexuality may even know that the first American scientists to discuss homosexuality and other “perversions” were often the same men whose anthropomorphic studies proved whites and blacks were two races; previous scholarship has instead cited better-known European sexologists for origins of the field before moving to the United States to cover celebrity sexologist Alfred Kinsey. But Stein’s unique focus pays off. She finds that many of the same white men who measured African American recruits’ head sizes and studied their nude physiques in order to evaluate their fitness as soldiers later (during Emancipation) referred to supposedly limited cranial capacity to claim that newly freed slaves were incapable of citizenship. Later still, when scientific trends shifted to sexual perversions, they stressed black men’s “natural” sexual aggressiveness. Stein convincingly argues that these studies fed directly into the quantity and nature of the lynching spectacles that devastated African American communities at the turn of the century, notwithstanding the efforts of these scientists to promote a “castration remedy” as a more “civilized” response to the dangers posed by black men. Though challenged regularly—often by African American intellectuals whose very presence should have given them pause—nineteenth-century race scientists were so immersed in the gendered thinking and racial fears of their day, and so committed to finding medical solutions for social problems, that they failed to see their part in creating one of the nation’s most significant tragedies.

Stein contends that gendered thinking undergirded each stage of racial scientific thought. In the antebellum period, patriarchal society and the continued influence of theological thought among early ethnologists meant that men were the focus of these studies. Ethnologists discussed the biblical story of Ham, debated the origins of “mankind” (monogenesis versus polygenesis), and assessed the quantity of facial hair, the nature of skin color, and the size of skulls of white and black men, with the only real consensus being the reality of two races. Even David Walker, who thoroughly repudiated polygenesis and argued for the cultural construction of race, thought in exclusively male terms. When the debate over slavery heated up in the 1850s, scientists both shaped and were shaped by the debate; polygenesis (temporarily) won the day and explained why Africans, a different species, not only could, but should, be held in slavery.

In the next stage of Stein’s periodization—the Civil War era—the study of men and secondary male characteristics continued to dominate ethnological investigations, but the presence of immigrants among the thousands of male soldiers’ bodies forced scientists to examine the category of “man” more closely. During the war, three different groups conducted anthropomorphic studies of recruits, sending out physicians armed with both calipers and the assumed knowledge that whites constituted the norm. Not surprisingly, the racial hierarchies their measurements revealed testified to the justification for delaying citizenship: African American men lacked facial hair, a key indicator of manliness, and manhood—scientists and politicians agreed—was necessary for citizenship. In the blunt language of ethnologist John Van Evrie, “equal beards” were necessary for “equal voting” (132).

In this same time period, the rise of evolutionary theory shifted the focus from men to reproduction, leading ethnologists to think more about sex. While they began to look more often to...