78: Cynthia Eagle Russett's Sexual Science

In Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood, Cynthia Eagle Russett explores scientific constructions of gender difference from 1880-1920 as part of a larger scientific shift from a belief in the malleability of nature to a belief in biological determinism; she argues that this shift tracked the transition to a new, modern worldview.

Russett pulls from a variety of Victorian sciences to examine the social construction of sexual difference: phrenology, anatomy, physiology, craniology, evolutionary biology, psychology, etc.  Generally, these sciences were used to disprove the equality of mankind, so that women were inferior to men, non-European races were inferior to European ones, and, because the categories were immutable, environmental intervention was no longer a viable reform policy.  Different theories had different impacts on the construction of "woman" as a social category.  Many of these complicated Victorian notions of Progress.  Darwin argued that the transmission of culture from mother to child was a physical process, so education of the mother had a direct impact on the intelligence of the child; Patrick Geddes and L Arthur Thompson argued for a static and essentialist view of sexual difference based on metabolism that could not be affected by environmental factors, so education of women was futile; recapitulation theory created a ladder of human development and placed women, children, and people of color as a buffer between humans and apes; Spencer argued that the most fundamental (biological and social) division of labor was that between the sexes, and that societies with higher differentiation (like the Victorians) were the most advanced, and so on.  In each, Russett locates the moment where women are constructed as inferior to men because of some immutable biological difference.

Throughout, Russett argues that these theories gained currency because they assuaged white, middle-class anxieties about cultural change and fears about no longer being dominant.  Her book thus contributes both to an understanding of cultural reactions to modernism AND to the larger feminist enterprise of exposing false constructions of gender by mapping out ideological constructs within science.

72: Jane Hunter's Gospel of Gentility

In The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the-Century China, Jane Hunter argues that women missionaries in turn-of-the-century China were able to use missionary work to greatly expand women's sphere even as they supported submissive roles for women and lived relatively circumscribed lives at the mission.  Hunter accesses this paradoxical construction of American womanhood in China primarily via the letters and private papers of some 40 female missionaries from different denominations who worked in China from 1900 to 1922, when some 60% of Protestant missionaries in China were women.  She also includes information from interviews and the archives of two mission boards.  Because their status as outsiders in Chinese culture throws the missionaries' gender norms in high relief, the book highlights the feminization of Protestantism and the ways in which American womanhood intersected with work, religion, and cross-cultural exchanges.

69: Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering

In This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, Drew Gilpin Faust uses a wide variety of primary materials to understand the cultural implications of the Civil War.  Working from correspondence between soldiers and their families and friends; poetry and writings by Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Ambrose Bierce, and others; and the voices of the legions of relief workers, coffin manufacturers, government bureaucrats, and other support staff, Faust shows new processes of dying and killing, along with new ways of making sense of these processes, helped shift the nation from a relatively unstructured agrarian federation to a modern, centralized, bureaucratic, industrial state.

The Civil War produced some 620,000 dead, which made death not just one of many features of the war but the defining element of it.  The sheer mass of bodies, generated by the combination of old styles of warfare with new, technologically-enhanced ways of killing, created huge logistical issues.  Soldiers died in new and gruesome ways, which made identification difficult; but even if they didn't, there was still the problem of mitigating bodily decay while trying to identify thousands of bodies and return them to their families.  These new problems generated new social and technological systems: refrigerated coffins, new embalming practices, streamlined accounting methods, and new bureaucratic systems to oversee the sheer volume of bodies needing to be processed.  Dealing with death thus helped businesses and the nation develop more modern systems for mass production and distribution.