Sexual Science

“ 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 an