Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood

"Able, patient and often witty . . . provides a critically useful case study of a period when the level of distortion reached dramatic new heights." (New York Times Book Review)

One scarcely knows whether to laugh or cry. The spectacle presented, in Cynthia Russett's splendid book, of nineteenth-century white male scientists and thinkers earnestly trying to prove women inferior to men—thereby providing, along with "savages" and "idiots," an evolutionary buffer between men and animals—is by ...