Biological Explanations for Exclusion

 As nationalism became more closely entwined with ethnicity, it fed into an increasing emphasis on biological explanations for difference. Arguments for the rights of man had relied on the assumption of sameness of human nature across cultures and classes. After the French Revolution, it became increasingly dif­ficult to simply reassert differences on the basis of tradition, cus­tom, or history. Differences had to have a more solid foundation if men were to maintain their superiority to women, whites to blacks, or Christians to Jews. In short, if rights were to be less than universal, equal, and natural, then reasons had to be given. As a consequence, the nineteenth century witnessed an explo­sion in biological explanations of difference.

Ironically, then, the very notion of human rights inadver­tently opened the door to more virulent forms of sexism, racism, and anti-Semitism. In effect, the sweeping claims about the natural equality of all mankind called forth equally global asser­tions about natural difference, producing a new kind of opponent to human rights, more powerful and sinister even than the tradi­tionalist ones. The new forms of racism, anti-Semitism, and sex­ism offered biological explanations for the naturalness of human difference.

In the new racism, Jews were not just the Christ-killers that medieval Christians accused them of being; their inherent racial inferiority threatened to stain the purity of whites through intermarriage. Blacks were no longer inferior because they were slaves; even as the abolition of slavery pro­gressed around the globe, racism became more, not less, poison­ous. Women were not simply less reasonable than men because they were less educated; their biology destined them to the pri­vate, domestic life and made them entirely unsuitable for poli­tics, business, or the professions. In these new biological doctrines, education or changes in environment could never change the inherent hierarchical structures in human nature.

Sexism

Sexism was the least politically organized, least intellectu­ally systematic, and least emotionally negative of the new bio­logical doctrines. After all, no nation could reproduce itself without mothers, so while it might be conceivable to argue that African-American slaves should be sent back to Africa or that Jews should be forbidden to reside in a particular locale, it was not possible to exclude women altogether. Therefore, they could be allowed positive qualities that might be important in the pri­vate sphere. Moreover, since women clearly differed from men biologically (though just how much still remains a subject of debate), few dismissed out of hand the biological arguments about the difference between the sexes, which had a much longer history than the biological arguments about race.

Yet the French Revolution had shown that even sexual difference, or at least its political relevance, could be questioned. With the emer­gence of explicit arguments for the political equality of women, the biological argument for women’s inferiority shifted. Females no longer occupied a lower rung on the same biological ladder as males, making them biologically similar to males, even if infe­rior. Females were now increasingly cast as altogether different biologically; they became the “opposite sex.”

The precise timing and even nature of this shift in thinking about women is not easy to pin down, but the period of the French Revolution seems to be critical. The French revolution­aries had called upon largely traditional arguments for women’s difference when they forbade women to meet in political  clubs in 1793. “In general, women are not capable of elevated thoughts and serious meditations,” proclaimed the government spokesman. In the following years, however, medical men in France worked hard to give these vague ideas a more biological basis. The leading French physiologist of the 1790s and early 1800s, Pierre Cabanis, argued that women had weaker muscular fibers and more delicate cerebral matter, thus making them unfit for public careers, but their consequent volatile sensibility suited them for the roles of wife, mother, and nurse. Such think­ing helped establish a new tradition in which women seemed preordained to fulfill themselves within the confines of domes­ticity or a separate female sphere.

In his influential tract The Subjection of Women (1869), the English philosopher John Stuart Mill questioned the very exis­tence of these biological differences. He insisted that we cannot know how men and women differ in nature because we only see them in their current social roles. “What is now called the nature of women,” he argued, “is an eminently artificial thing.” Mill linked the reform of women’s status to overall social and eco­nomic progress. The legal subordination of women, he asserted, “is wrong itself” and “ought to be replaced by a principle of per­fect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.”

No equivalent of anti-Semitic leagues or parties was needed, however, to keep the biological argument going strong. In the landmark legal case of Muller v. Oregon before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1908, Justice Louis Brandeis trotted out the same old horses when explaining why sex could be a legal basis for classi­fication. The “physical organization of woman,” her maternal functions, the rearing of children, and the maintenance of the home put women into a separate and different category. “Femi­nism” had come into common usage as a term in the 1890s, and resistance to its demands was fierce. Women only got the right to vote in Australia in 1902, in the United States in 1920, in Great Britain in 1928, and in France in 1944.