In contemporary usage, the categories of “race” and “sex” share a common, curious feature. On the one hand, these appear as neutral categories:“natural” ways of organizing the human race. Thus, theoretically, everyone belongs to some race or another; everyone has a “sex.” But, on the other hand, when examined more closely, the neutrality of the social organizing function of these categories dissipates. White men and women do not seem to belong to a “race” in quite the same ways as black men and women do. Similarly, men as a group are not defined by their status as men in quite the same ways as women as a group are. For both black people and women, their racial and sexual status appears to provide a richer, more elaborate content to their social identities than do the categories of “white” and “male” provide to white people and women. Generalizations about black people qua black and women qua women abound; many fewer such generalizations about white people qua white and men qua men can be found in our social lexicon.

In this chapter I want to focus on the evolution of the social categories of race and of sex from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century in western Europe and North America.