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Sex, Science, and History
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 February 2012
Extract
The history of sexual liberation is inextricably bound with the history of scientific rationalism. Throughout the twentieth century, the basic moral consensus on sexual liberation has proved capable of accommodating a wide variety of scientific methodologies, from the cultural anthropology of Margaret Mead to the biological taxonomy of Alfred Kinsey. Two recent works, Derek Freeman's The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research, and James H. Jones's Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life, critique their respective subjects' specific scientific practice only to reaffirm the general practice of sexual science and its underlying (a)moral consensus. In this article, I will examine the treatment of methodological issues in these books as a reflection of the historical profession's participation in the moral bankruptcy of the social sciences. Freeman's empirical deconstruction of Mead's Samoan research and Jones's empirical reconstruction of Kinsey's life both skirt substantive moral issues by affirming a hopelessly nineteenth-century ideal of scientific objectivity. Each book, in its own particular way, fetishizes fact at the expense of argument and obscures the nature of intellectual developments of interest to historians of every moral and methodological orientation.
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- Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 2000
References
Notes
1. Freeman, Derek, The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research (Boulder, Colo., 1999), 208Google Scholar. All further citations to this work will appear parenthetically within the text, preceded by FH.
2. Jones, James H., Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life (New York, 1997), xiGoogle Scholar. All further citations to this work will appear parenthetically within the text, preceded by AK.
3. See Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality: Vol. 1 (New York, 1980)Google Scholar, translated from the French by Robert Hurley. Gay, Peter, The Education of the Senses (New York, 1984)Google Scholar.
4. The Time article was reprinted, along with a representative sampling of essays reflecting the generally permissive attitude toward sex in the 1950s, in Sex in America, ed. Grunwald, Henry Anatole (New York, 1964)Google Scholar.