Contemporary Authors

• Measuring Manhood: Race and the Science of Masculinity, 1830–1934 - 2015 University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN

• University of Kentucky - https://gws.as.uky.edu/users/mnst227

  College of Arts & Sciences
  GENDER AND WOMEN'S STUDIES
  MELISSA N. STEIN Share this page:

  Assistant Professor, Gender and Women's Studies
  African American and Africana Studies
  Gender & Women's Studies
  Health, Society and Populations
  melissa.stein@uky.edu
  206 Breckinridge Hall
  859-257-9205
  Education
  2008-PhD, History (Rutgers University) 1995-BA, History/English/Women's Studies (Franklin & Marshall College)

  Biography
  Melissa N. Stein is an assistant professor in the Gender and Women’s Studies Department at the University of Kentucky. Prior to coming to UK, she completed postdoctoral fellowships at the Rutgers University Center for Race & Ethnicity and in the Gender Studies Department at Indiana University. She received her BA from Franklin & Marshall College and her PhD in History from Rutgers University in 2008, specializing in African-American and women’s/gender history. While at Rutgers, Stein was also a graduate fellow at the Institute for Research on Women, an Excellence Fellow at the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research, and head research assistant at the Center for Race and Ethnicity. Her publications include essays on “Race as a Social Construction” and “Class” in Black Women in America (Oxford University Press, 2005), and on “Misogyny” in The Encyclopedia of Women in World History (Oxford University Press, 2007), and an article, “‘Nature is the author of such restrictions’: Science, Ethnological Medicine, and Jim Crow,” in The Culture of Jim Crow: Rethinking the Segregated South, 1880-1920, edited by Stephanie Cole and Natalie Ring (Texas A&M University Press, 2011).

  Stein’s first book, Measuring Manhood: Race and the Science of Masculinity, 1830-1934 (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), is a gendered analysis of scientific racism in nineteenth and early twentieth century America that interrogates biomedical constructions of citizenship, investigates the relationship between racial and sexual sciences, and examines scientists’ attempts to offer medical solutions to the nation’s “race problems.”

  She has also begun work on a second book project, tentatively titled (Dis)Membering MOVE: Race, Memory, and the Meaning of Disaster. This project critically examines the 1985 MOVE disaster, in which the Philadelphia police department, with authorization from the mayor, responded to a stand-off with a black liberation group the city was trying to evict from its communal house in West Philadelphia by dropping a firebomb on the roof, burning the house to the ground and killing eleven MOVE members, five of them children. In the process, they also burned down an entire block of the predominantly African-American neighborhood, leaving 61 houses destroyed and 250 people homeless. Though often called a “cult” by the media, the story of MOVE is not nearly as well known today as Ruby Ridge or Waco, and when it is recalled in the national media or consciousness at all, it is typically dis-remembered as a racial event--not unlike Hurricane Katrina more recently. This erasure extends to the academy as well; while the 30th anniversary of the MOVE disaster is approaching, there has been surprisingly little scholarship about it, despite recent interest in race and the police state. The project, then, interrogates the dissonance between national and local memory of MOVE, the ways in which the story was covered then and now, and how media coverage and the incident’s imprint in the popular imaginary conform to and disrupt common racial--and gendered--tropes.

  Her teaching and research interests include critical race studies, gender studies, feminist science studies, the body, racial thought, sexuality and queer history, U.S. cultural and intellectual history, African-American history, women's and gender history, and the history of science and medicine.

  Past Courses
  GWS 300--Gender, Race, and Science

  GWS 595--Sex, Science, and Society

  GWS 600--The Body in History and Culture

  GWS 200--Issues in Gender and Women's Studies in the Social Sciences

  GWS/HIS 506--History of Sexuality in the United States

  GWS 300--LGBTQ History in the United States

  GWS 595--Gendering Science

  GWS 300--Black Women in U.S. History

  GWS 599--Senior Capstone

Stein, Melissa N.: Measuring manhood: race and the science of masculinity, 1830-1934
F. Montoya
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 53.8 (Apr. 2016): p1225.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
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Stein, Melissa N. Measuring manhood: race and the science of masculinity, 1830-1934. Minnesota, 2015. 354p index afp ISBN 9780816673025 doth, $94.50; ISBN 9780816673032 pbk, $27.00

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2014-43033 CIP

Stein (gender and women's studies, Univ. of Kentucky) addresses the construction of race, gender, and sex in the 19th-century US. She addresses how scientists of the time used US race relations and political rhetoric to shape their ideas, and how their studies in turn shaped society's ideas. The text explores the views that racial differences were seen as biological, permanent, and social hierarchies that reflected a natural order. Chapter 1 addresses the rise of male-dominated ethnology, which focused on differences between black and white men. Chapter 2 analyzes scientists' definitions of manhood during the Civil War years and how the body impacted this approach. Chapter 3 argues that at the turn of the 20th century, scientists used sexuality and "sex perversion" categories of analysis to define vice among the lower classes and minorities. Chapter 4 addresses the scientific response to lynching and how scientists linked ideas of sex perversion to the black male rapist myth. Chapter 5 argues that the NAACP's response to lynching named racial scientists as being a large part of the problem that black men faced. For women's studies, ethnic studies, and 18th- and 19th-century history collections. Summing Up: ** Recommended. Graduate students/faculty.--F. Montoya, Colorado State University-Pueblo

Braun, Lundy ()
Source:
African American Review. Winter2016, Vol. 49 Issue 4, p391-393. 3p.

Melissa N. Stein. Measuring Manhood: Race and the Science of Masculinity,
1830-1934. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2015. 368 pp. $94.50 cloth/$27.00
paper.
Lundy Braun, Brown University
I
n a recent issue of the premier journal Science, an interdisciplinary team of
scholars called for the elimination of race from human genetics research.
A startling call by any account, only time will tell how geneticists respond. One
obvious challenge to removing race from this type of research is that race is already
deeply woven into the scientific enterprise— and it has been for centuries.
The processes by which this happened need to be better understood to reimagine
this research.
In this readable book, Measuring Manhood: Race and the Science of Masculinity,
1830-1934, Melissa Stein offers a meticulously researched history of biological essentialism.
Her explicitly intersectional approach, while challenging to write, is a timely
contribution to our understanding of how race and gender together informed the
emerging sciences of ethnology, biology, and medicine from the nineteenth to the
early twentieth century. While the discontinuities between nineteenth and twentiethcentury
medicine, biology, and ethnology and the current moment are numerous,
Measuring Manhood illuminates the many continuities, in both ideologies and the
material practices of science, between past and present that are easily dismissed as
a thing of the past.
Drawing on extensive archival material from the papers of key figures in nineteenth-
and twentieth-century ethnology and sexology, including those who contested
biological essentialism; scientific texts; thematic tracking of scientific publications;
and visual imagery, this fascinating book illuminates the racialization and gendering
of the body as it emerged as an object of scientific inquiry in the early nineteenth
century. “Never divorced from the questions of the day” (29), racial science shifted
with the times. Structured chronologically and featuring in-depth biographies of
well-known and lesser-known theorists, she examines in detail the work of prominent
scientists, the assumptions their work drew on, and the social policies to which their
science responded and which it authorized.
In a period when distinctions between the various scientific endeavors were
blurry and fluid, Stein takes care to show that these men were recognized as mainstream,
not fringe scientists. They were professors at prominent universities; they
were members of key national science organizations; they published prestigious
books and articles that were deeply influential in pressing societal debates, most
especially over slavery, lynching in the Jim Crow era, and eugenics. Many of the
most prominent scientists, such as Samuel Cartwright, Samuel Morton, Josiah Nott,
Frederick Hoffman, or Benjamin A. Gould (who continues to be cited uncritically
in the biomedical literature), will be familiar to historians of racial science. Members
of the American School of Sexology, such as Frank D. Lydston or R. W. Shufelt,
on the other hand, will be less familiar to readers. In different, overlapping, and
unpredictable ways, all contributed to a hardening of ideas of race and gender
African American Review 49.4 (Winter 2016): 391-393
© 2016 Johns Hopkins University Press and Saint Louis University 391
difference as rooted in nature, ideas which culminated at the turn of the century
in what has been referred to as scientific racism.
From the early colonial period in North America, Stein argues that difference
was an organizing principle of society, but one in deep tension with ostensible
investments in equality. From Thomas Jefferson to nineteenth-century ethnologists,
scientists increasingly grounded their theories of difference in biology. Indeed,
difference was codified in United States census categories by 1790. However, race
as a natural unit of scientific analysis was not yet a given in the early nineteenth
century; it was “being made” in the laboratory of the United States. The first three
chapters of Measuring Manhood offer fresh insight into the centrality of gender to
racial science. In this period, ‘gender difference offered scientists a convenient
reference point and foundation through which to frame their ideas about race as a
nascent category of difference similarly ordained by nature itself” (5). In turn, racial
theories shaped the emerging field of sexology at the end of the nineteenth century.
But racial scientists and sexologists were not monolithic in their theorizing.
Scientists of a variety of stripes brought their own world-views and distinctive
training to bear on their science and its interpretation— and their questions and
theories changed profoundly over time. For example, in the antebellum period, the
study of difference by ethnologists (most of whom had medical degrees) centered
on questions of racial origins. This point is nicely illustrated in several graphs in the
first two chapters, where Stein tracks the specific concerns of racial science thematically.
Racial origins, which accounted for twenty-five percent of publications,
followed by disease and physical difference, were by far the most common themes
of racial texts in this period. This is consistent with the prominence of debates over
polygenism and monogenism. After the Civil War, the focus of ethnologists’ work
shifted to mortality, disease, and gender as captured in the related notions of fitness
for citizenship and the “future of the race.”
With the shift toward more explicitly gendered preoccupations, by the end of
the nineteenth century some racial theorists turned to sexology, a field defined by
obsession with what they referred to as sexual deviance and perversion. In Stein’s
novel account of the self-fashioning of racial scientists, sexologists, and physicians
more broadly as “experts” with intensely social concerns, we witness the twisted,
yet normal thinking that characterized their science. For example, Stein shows in
exquisite detail in chapter four just how deeply intertwined were racial science,
sexology, and antiblack violence as ideas of inferiority and danger coalesced in
lynching. Scientific discourses on race,” she writes, “played a key role in constructing
the popular image of black men as a sexual menace and grounding it in the physical
body; in turn the negative assessment of black men was often used outside the
scientific establishment to justify lynching” (218).
Throughout the book, Stein features the work of major African American
thinkers, such as David Walker, Frederick Douglass, physician C. V. Roman, antilynching
campaigner Ida B. Wells, and influential head of the NAACP Walter
White, all of whom responded vigorously to the violence of essentialism and
articulated new visions of humanity. Stein demonstrates definitively that African
American intellectuals and scientists (and some white scientists) have a long history
of contestation of biological essentialism; indeed, contestation, though severely
constrained by the historical moment, was integral, not peripheral, to the history of
racial science. How constraints work— and the dilemma of relying on science to
combat biological essentialism—is vividly portrayed in chapter five, where Stein
traces the antilynching campaign of Walter White and his attempt to enlist the
statistical expertise of Raymond Pearl in the campaign. Although expressing skepticism
about the evidence supporting racial science, Pearl remained aloof and
ultimately refused to lend his support to White’s critique.
392 AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW
To analyze race, sex, and gender together in one volume is admittedly
ambitious. The narrative is, however, logically structured and tightly argued.
Demonstrating an impressive mastery of the secondary literature, Stein continually
marks what is new for the reader. By analyzing the gendered dimension of racial
science, this deeply researched book is a unique contribution to the history of race,
gender, and science. It will be of interest to Africana studies scholars, historians,
and also a range of interdisciplinary scholars interested in the history of racial
inequality as it intersects with health.
To the perennial question why should we care about long-forgotten science
conducted centuries ago, Stein responds that “scientists are always a product of
their own cultural context— even when they intend their work to challenge, subvert,
or revolutionize the status quo— and in the United States, race continues to have
considerable ideological power as a framework for categorizing and dividing human
beings” (283). Measuring Manhood offers fresh insight into the power of science to
shape popular discourse, culture, and politics, and provides an important and
instructive framework for reflecting on contemporary research on human diversity
and race.

• Academia
  https://www.academia.edu/29738725/Book_Review_Melissa_Stein_Measuring_Manhood_Race_and_the_Science_of_Masculinity_Social_History_of_Medicine
  Word count: 1061

  Social History of Medicine Advance Access published May 3, 2016
  Social History of Medicine
  Vol. 0, No. 0 pp. 1–2

  Book Review
  Melissa N. Stein,
  Measuring Manhood: Race and the Science of Masculinity,1830–1934
  , London; Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Pp.354. $94.50. ISBN 978 0 8166 7303 2.
  In this exciting, new monograph, Melissa Stein adds to the growing number of scholarsfocused on the legacy of race in American science, and its importance to the history ofAmerican politics and culture.
  1
  Drawing principally on print sources, Stein contends thatsince its inception American racial science received legitimacy through the reception ofcontemporary scientists and physicians. Moreover, as the nineteenth century progressed,notions of race became increasingly linked to, and defined by, ideas of gender and sexu-ality, and these theories had profound social and political impacts on homosexuals andpeople of colour.The book is organised chronologically and divided into five chapters. The first chapterutilises print sources by black and white authors before the American Civil War to arguethat gender-difference and sex only played a minor role in the debate over whether blackand white people derived from the same point of origin, Adam and Eve. Stein explainsthat antebellum ethnologists maintained a male-centric approach and were preoccupied‘with less sex-specific characteristics like skulls, brains, bones, skin and hair as they con-structed a hierarchy among men’ (p. 29). However, in light of movements advocating forblack and female suffrage during and after the Civil War, the scientific image of thesetwo groups became ever more entangled. Stein depicts the mid-to-late nineteenth cen-tury as largely transitional from the focus on male bodies in antebellum ethnology to thesex-oriented racial science of the turn of the twentieth century.Chapter 3 focuses on the nascent field of sexology in the late nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries, and it is one of the book’s strongest chapters. Here, Stein analysesthe emerging rhetorical linkages between concepts of homosexuality and race, both ofwhich seemingly threatened white manhood. Like race, sexologists understood many ho-mosexuals to have acquired the condition hereditarily, and more often than not, it wasAfrican Americans who were depicted as inherently perverted. In this chapter, the linksbetween the sciences of race and sex become clearer, with both being seen as challengesto the future of the white race and the American republic.In the last two chapters, Stein explores the response of American scientists, citizens,and African American activists to these supposed challenges to white male sovereigntythrough the debate over lynching that enrapt American culture before the Second WorldWar. Chapter 4 specifically examines the reaction of white scientists to lynching, andthese scientists argued that black people convicted of rape should be castrated, as op-posed to lynched. While progressive compared to lynching, castration still reinforced theimage of the black male as sexually perverse and uncontrollable. Furthermore, Stein
  1
  Mike Yudell,
  Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in theTwentieth Century
  (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 2014); Terence D. Keel, ‘Religion, Polygenism,and the Early Science of Human Origins’,
  History of the Human Sciences
  , 2013, 26, 3–32; Ann Fabian,
  The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’sUnburied Dead
  (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,2010); and Gregory Michael Dorr,
  Segregation’sScience: Eugenics and Society in Virginia
  (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008).
  ©
  The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Social History of Medicine.
  Social History of Medicine
  Vol. 0, No. 0 pp. 1–2

  Social History of Medicine Advance Access published May 3, 2016
  b y g u e s t on N o v e m b e r 8 ,2 0 1 6 h t t p : / / s h m . oxf or d j o ur n a l s . or g / D o wnl o a d e d f r om

  argues that castration ‘challenge[s] historians, particularly historians of science and medi-cine, to think of “progressive” as an entirely relative term’, because these authors under-stood themselves as reformist by providing a eugenically sound alternative to extra-legalviolence (p. 236). The final chapter considers the response of the African American com-munity to this debate through a close analysis of NAACP leader Walter White’s anti-lynching works. White and his academic allies had considerable success in using scienceto undercut many of the least defensible arguments of eugenicists and physical anthro-pologists. However, Stein argues that the employment of science validated the notionthat a science of race was possible, with White facing ‘the challenge of dismantling themaster’s house using the master’s tools’ (p. 270).
  Measuring Manhood
  is a much-needed update to works by authors such as GeorgeFredrickson, John Haller and William Stanton, and is essential reading for scholars of ra-cial science, gender and the American medical profession’s role in developing and distrib-uting social ideologies.
  2
  The chapters on the early twentieth century represent the book’sstrongest contributions as they most effectively wed together the co-evolution of race,science and gender. While the first chapter effectively argues for the need to considerethnology as a part of the fabric of legitimate mid-nineteenth-century science, it wouldhave been stronger if Stein had devoted more space to how ethnology influenced otherscientific and medical disciplines as she does in later chapters. For example, since anatom-ical writers influenced racial scientists as Stein contends, it would have been useful if shehad explored the corollary—how anatomists discussed race. Likewise, her statistical anal-ysis of racial science texts from the National Library of Medicine’s
  Index Catalogue
  onlyuncovers a broad image of racial science’s evolution (as Stein admits), and loses sight ofthe diversity of topics within these texts.In spite of these minor issues, Stein has created a masterful work on the way racial the-ory, gender and science came together in the long nineteenth century. Moreover, sheshows how a variety of actors among the American public helped shape this debate, andthe profound influence these theories had on significant questions facing the fate ofAfrican Americans in the United States, such as the right to vote, military service andlynching.
  doi:10.1093/shm/hkw042
  Christopher Willoughby
  Tulane University cwilloug@tulane.edu
  2
  George M. Fredrickson,
  The Black Image in the WhiteMind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914
  (Middletown, CT: WesleyanUniversity Press, 1971); John S. Haller, Jr.,
  Outcastsfrom Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority,1859–1900
  (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971);William Stanton,
  The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes toward Race in American 1815–1859
  (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960).