I thought a certain extract was fascinating and food for thought for this class, so I copied it below!
To put it into context, the piece had been talking about classifying the human race into 'inferior' and 'superior' groups based on biological concepts. Women (entirely, as a sex) were inferior.. Below is some of the explanation/ theory. (Essentially, it claims that men are more evolved versions of women - I put the super-relevant quotes in bold)
Taken from: "Stephen J. Gould, "Measuring Bodies," The Mismeasure of Man, 113-145 (1981) New York: WW Norton & Company"
"In 1890 American anthropologist D. G. Brinton claimed:
"The adult who retains the more numerous fetal, infantile or simian traits, is unquestionably inferior to him whose development has progressed beyond them. ...Measured by these criteria, the European or white race stands at the head of the list, the African or negro at its foot. ...All parts of the body have been minutely scanned, measured and weighed, in order to erect a science of the comparative anatomy of the races."
....Didn't everyone know that savages and women are emotionally like children? Despised groups had been compared with children before, but the theory of recapitulation (the repetition of an evolutionary or other process during development or growth) gave this old chestnut the respectability of main-line scientific theory ."They're like children" was no longer just a metaphor of bigotry; it now embodied a theoretical claim that inferior people were literally mired in an ancestral stage of superior groups.
G. Stanley Hall, then America's leading psychologist, stated the general argument in 1904: "Most savages in most respects are children, or, because of sexual maturity, more properly, adolescents of adult size'. (1904. voI. 2, p. 649). A. F. Chamberlain, his chief disciple, opted for the paternalistic mode: "Without primitive peoples, the world at large would be much what in small it is without the blessing of children."
Herbert Spencer, the apostle of social Darwinism, offered a pithy summary ( 1895. pp. 88-90):
"The intellectual traits of the uncivilized ...are traits recurring in the children of the civilized."
Since recapitulation became a focus for the general theory of biological determinism, many male scientists extended the argument to women.
E. D. Cope claimed that the "metaphysical characteristics.. of women were very similar in essential nature to those which men exhibit at an early stage of development. ...The gentler sex is characterized by a greater impressibility; ...warmth of emotion, submission to its influence rather than that of logic; timidity and irregularity of action in the outer world. All these qualities belong to the male sex, as a general rule, at some period of life, though different individuals lose them at very various periods. ... Probably most men can recollect some early period of their lives when the emotional nature predominated a time when emotion at the sight of suffering was more easily stirred than in maturer years. ...Perhaps all men can recall a period of youth when they were hero-worshipers when they felt the need of a stronger arm, and loved to look up to the powerful friend who could sympathize with and aid them. This is the "woman stage.. of character" (1887, p. 159).
In what must be the most absurd statement in the annals of biological determinism, G. Stanley Hall-again, I remind you, not a crackpot, but America's premier psychologist-invoked the higher suicide rates of women as a sign of their primitive evolutionary status (1904, voI. 2, p. 194):
"This is one expression of a profound psychic difference between the sexes. Woman.s body and soul is phyletically older and more primitive, while man is more modern, variable, and less conservative. Women are always inclined to preserve old customs and ways of thinking. Women prefer passive methods; to give themselves up to the power of elemental forces, as gravity, when they throw themselves from heights or take poison, in which methods of suicide they surpass man. Drowning is becoming more frequent, and that therein women are becoming more womanly. "
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