Book Review

Canada and the United States

Historical interpretation without gender now seems woefully incomplete after more than a decade of empirical research and theoretical debate. This is apparent in the historiography of social science itself, where men's positions as academic insiders and women's as reform outsiders shaped both institutional practice and structures of knowledge, sometimes in surprising directions. This solid interdisciplinary collection reconsiders "the formative years" (1870s to 1920s) of social science in the United States. The standard story, emphasizing professionalization and American exceptionalism, assumed the social scientist to be male amid an evolutionary trope that moved from amateur to academic. This book offers alternative markers of development, such as "the opening of Harvard's psychological laboratory to women, the founding of Cornell's School of Home Economics, or the invention of sociological jurisprudence by Goldmark and Kelley" (p. 21). But editor Helene Silverberg has an even more ambitious goal. "The reorganization of gender relations," she argues, "was central to the transformation of American social science" (p. 4).

1

The contributors unevenly reveal how shifts in Victorian concepts of gender informed social knowledge and institutional locations, because they mostly discuss social science rather than changing gender constructions. Silverberg attributes the boundaries of political science to middle-class men who projected their Progressive-era fight against urban bosses onto definitions of the field. Anthropologist Kamala Visweswaran provides a nuanced consideration of popular women ethnographers, who smashed conventional womanhood but remained tied to "white settler ideology and imperialist projects" (p. 111). "The confrontation of Victorian feminism with evolutionism created the conditions necessary for the articulation of 'woman' as a universal category" but "worked to prohibit gender identification," she concludes (p. 110). Sociologist Desley Deacon's biographical portrait of Elsie Clews Parsons cogently explains an intellectual position in terms of a gender shift: 1910s feminism's rebellion against domesticity precipitated Parson's critique of conventional sexual arrangements within marriage.

. . .