Cynthia Russett, Historian of Women, Dies at 76
By MARGALIT FOX
Published: December 18, 2013
Cynthia Eagle Russett, a historian whose best-known book explored attempts by Victorian thinkers to scientifically “prove” women’s inferiority, died on Dec. 5 in New Haven. She was 76.
The cause was multiple myeloma, according to Yale University, where she was the Larnard professor of history.
A historian of 19th- and 20th-century intellectual life, Professor Russett attracted wide attention with her book “Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood,” published by Harvard University Press in 1989. The book examined the effect that the era’s newfound scientific knowledge had on the larger society, particularly where questions of sexual parity were concerned.
At a time when first-wave feminism was starting to roil the status quo, male thinkers, Professor Russett showed, strove to uphold it by invoking science to argue for women’s innate inadequacy.
“On the one hand, notions of female inferiority — physical, mental and moral — dating as they did from antiquity, could hardly be considered novel,” she wrote. “On the other hand, by virtue of the specificity of detail and inclusiveness of theory at its command, science was able to provide a newly plausible account of this inferiority. Measuring limbs, pondering viscera, reckoning up skulls, the new mandarins of gender difference were able to spell out in chapter and verse the manifold distinctions of sex.”
Among the most conspicuous offenders, Professor Russett wrote, was Charles Darwin, whose theory of human evolution had revolutionized the understanding of mankind’s place in the cosmos — but who then used that theory to argue for womankind’s continued subordination therein.
“Darwin had surmised that male intelligence, sharpened in both the struggle for mates and the struggle for survival, descended in its enhanced form, as a kind of secondary sex characteristic, to male offspring alone,” she wrote. “A similar conception governed the
