ABOUT THIS BOOK
What is the relationship between intelligence and sex? In recent decades, studies of the controversial histories of both intelligence testing and of human sexuality in the United States have been increasingly common—and hotly debated. But rarely have the intersections of these histories been examined. In Gentlemen’s Disagreement, Peter Hegarty enters this historical debate by recalling the debate between Lewis Terman—the intellect who championed the testing of intelligence— and pioneering sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, and shows how intelligence and sexuality have interacted in American psychology.
Through a fluent discussion of intellectually gifted onanists, unhappily married men, queer geniuses, lonely frontiersmen, religious ascetics, and the two scholars themselves, Hegarty traces the origins of Terman’s complaints about Kinsey’s work to show how the intelligence testing movement was much more concerned with sexuality than we might remember. And, drawing on Foucault, Hegarty reconciles these legendary figures by showing how intelligence and sexuality in early American psychology and sexology were intertwined then and remain so to this day.
REVIEWS
“Peter Hegarty has crafted a fascinating history of the intersectionality of sexuality and intelligence in the social sciences. Hegarty masterfully weaves together queer theory, history, and psychology to examine how what many in the social science community have defined as normal is constructed and mutually constitutive. Gentlemen’s Disagreement sheds new light on Alfred Kinsey and Lewis Terman, but just as important, it offers insight into how these human science discourses of sexuality and intelligence developed and how they continue today to shape modern psychology’s understandings of (and assertions about) normality. ”
— Thomas A. Foster, editor of Documenting Intimate Matters: Primary Sources for a History of Sexuali
“Peter Hegarty’s highly original study of the relationship between sexuality and intelligence in the twentieth-century American human sciences focuses on their most celebrated students, Alfred Kinsey and Lewis Terman. By analyzing their personal biographies, training, disciplinary outlooks, and use of the conventions of contemporary science, Hegarty is able to construct a fascinating cautionary tale about unacknowledged subjectivity, misleading methodologies, and the politics of intelligence testing and human sexuality that will inform both practitioners and historians of the human sciences.”
— Robert A. Nye, editor of Sexuality
“Peter Hegarty is the first scholar to examine seriously and systematically the connections between the discourses of intelligence and of sexuality, both of which were being refashioned in important ways in the United States. Hegarty’s use of Lewis Terman and Alfred Kinsey to build his analysis is original and compelling.”
— John Carson, author of The Measure of Merit
"Hegarty’s work may inspire more careful considerations of the ways scientists think about sexuality and intelligence."
— Donna Drucker, Times Higher Education
"[An] intriguing and provocative study."
— Journal of Interdisciplinary History
“A fascinating account of different worldviews. . . Highly recommended to historians of sexuality.”
— Indiana Magazine of History
“A series of essays that draw freely from social theory, cognitive science, and archival research to explore the co-production of sexuality and intelligence as two of the most salient categories of human difference. Hegarty complicates received wisdom that sees Kinsey as the liberator of American sexual attitudes and Terman as the eugenicist intelligence tester. At the same time, Hegarty destabilizes longstanding assumptions within the field of sexology where the scientist’s heterosexuality is often equated with greater impartiality and objectivity.”
— Social Studies of Science
“Interdisciplinary in scope and methodologically dynamic, Hegarty’s genealogy of the Terman-Kinsey debate troubles dominant psychological models by placing critical psychology, feminist and queer theory, and poststructuralist historiography in conversation.”
— Signs
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
A Gentlemen’s Disagreement? - Peter Hegarty
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226024615.003.0001
[Alfred Kinsey, Lewis Terman, sex and intelligence, SBHM]
This chapter examines the history of the explicit disagreement between American sexologist Alfred Kinsey and psychologist Lewis Terman on the issue of the relation between sex and intelligence. It suggests that the conflict may have started with Terman’s review of Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (SBHM), which was published in January 1948. The chapter discusses the similarities between Kinsey and Terman in terms of their interest in eugenics and highlights the differences in biographical writing about them. (pages 1 - 24)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Why the Gifted Boy Didn’t Masturbate - Peter Hegarty
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226024615.003.0002
[masturbation, sexual precocity, Lewis Terman, Alfred Kinsey, SBHM, G. Stanley Hall, gifted children]
This chapter examines Lewis Terman’s response to Alfred Kinsey’s ideas about masturbation and sexual precocity, the first of his four distinctive criticisms of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (SBHM). It describes the exchange between Kinsey and Terman wherein the former identified psychologist G. Stanley Hall as an important resource of anti-masturbation influence in early twentieth-century American culture, and analyzes Hall’s influence on Terman and Terman’s view on the masturbation of gifted children. (pages 25 - 44)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Less Than Ideal Husbands - Peter Hegarty
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226024615.003.0003
[Lewis Terman, Alfred Kinsey, premarital intercourse, marital happiness, marital happiness]
This chapter examines Lewis Terman’s response to Alfred Kinsey’s claim that rates of premarital intercourse were stable across the generations and on the issue of the less-than-ideal husbands that gifted boys might grow up to be. It considers Kinsey’s review of Terman’s 1938 book Psychological Factors in Marital Happiness and analyzes the condition under which Terman’s book was written, the detail of its account of marital happiness, and the effects of its conclusions on the interpretations of Terman’s own marriage. (pages 45 - 66)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Queer Individuals - Peter Hegarty
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226024615.003.0004
[Lewis Terman, homosexual sex, Alfred Kinsey, SBHM, moral prudery, homosexual conduct, gifted, homosexuality]
This chapter examines Lewis Terman’s silence on Alfred Kinsey’s findings about the frequency with which adult men reported homosexual sex in his review of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (SBHM). It discusses Kinsey’s opinion that Terman’s review of his book was motivated by moral prudery and cites a biographical account which considered Terman’s review as one of the most moralistic responses to SBHM. The analysis indicates that Terman was not troubled by the evidence of widespread homosexual conduct in the population which Kinsey’s work had already begun to reveal and that his defense of the gifted had come to depend upon that projection of homosexuality onto the national population. (pages 67 - 90)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Gentlemen and Horse Traders - Peter Hegarty
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226024615.003.0005
[scientists’ character, scientific knowledge, intelligence, education, Alfred Kinsey, SBHM, cognitive dissonance, deviant desires, sexual practices]
This chapter examines the relationship between attributions about a scientist’s character and the trustworthiness of scientific knowledge resulting from that scientist’s efforts. It analyzes the issue of intelligence and education in Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (SBHM) and the influence of Raymond Pearl on Kinsey’s works. The chapter also considers the hypothesis that cognitive dissonance is relieved by the knowledge that one’s deviant desires are shared by others and suggests that Kinsey’s work helped to relieve people from a sense of individual gift about their sexual practices. (pages 91 - 112)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Ancient Ascetics and Modern Non-Americans - Peter Hegarty
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226024615.003.0006
[Lewis Terman, Alfred Kinsey, SBHM, secular men, religious men, sexual nature, psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud]
This chapter examines the last of the four of Lewis Terman’s criticisms of Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (SBHM), which centered on Kinsey’s views about the differences between secular and religious men. It explains that Kinsey’s account of sexual nature was in tension not only with Terman’s but also with psychoanalysis, and considers the differences between Kinsey’s and Sigmund Freud’s narratives about religion. (pages 113 - 130)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Frontier Living, by Figures Alone - Peter Hegarty
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226024615.003.0007
[statistical representation, Alfred Kinsey, SBHM, sampling theory, statisticians, national survey, national population]
This chapter examines the statistical representation in Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (SBHM), presents a history of statistics in the United States that ends with postwar sampling theory, and analyzes Kinsey’s interaction with the statisticians. It suggests that while Kinsey’s study prompted the imagination of new normative ideals for a national survey of sex, he also articulated resistance to the statisticians’ ideas concerning the use of a sample of the national population. (pages 131 - 150)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Normalization Now - Peter Hegarty
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226024615.003.0008
[sexuality, intelligence, queteletian normalization, reproductive strategies, Lewis Terman, sexual morality, Alfred Kinsey, sexology, sexual behavior]
This chapter focuses on the normalization of sexuality and intelligence. It explains Lewis Terman’s view on the sustained Queteletian normalization of children and sexuality, and discusses theories about reproductive strategies which show that high intelligence is a necessary prerequisite for the enactment of sexual morality. The chapter also considers the legacy of Alfred Kinsey’s sexology and highlights the fact that the surveying of sexual behavior remained a heterogeneous low science after Kinsey. (pages 151 - 160)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Notes
Works Cited
Index of Names
General Index
