Sex, science and history

C. Shannon

The history of sexual liberation is inextricably bound with the history of scientific rationalism. Throughout the twentieth century, the basic moral consensus on sexual liberation has proved capable of accommodating a wide variety of scientific methodologies, from the cultural anthropology of Margaret Mead to the biological taxonomy of Alfred Kinsey. Derek Freeman's The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research, and James H. Jones's Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life, critique their respective subjects'specific scientific practice only toreaffirm the general practice of sexual science and its underlying (a)moral consensus. This article examines the treatment of methodological issues in these books as a reflection of the historical profession's participation in the moral bankruptcy of the social sciences. Freeman's empirical deconstruction of Mead's Samoan research and Jones's empirical reconstruction of Kinsey's life both skirt substantive moral issues by affirming a hopelessly nineteenth-century ideal of scientific objectivity. Each book, in its own particular way, fetishizes fact at the expense of argument and obscures the nature of intellectual developments of interest to historians of every moral and methodological orientation.