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H-NET BOOK REVIEW 
Published by H-Women (November, 1998) 
 
Helene Silverberg, ed.  _Gender and American Social Science:  The 
Formative Years_.  Princeton, N.J. and Chichester, England: 
Princeton University Press, 1998.  x + 334 pp.  Notes and index. 
$55.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-691-01749-2; $18.95 (paper), ISBN 
0-691-04820-7 
 
Reviewed for H-Women by Mary E. Chalmers <[log in to unmask]>, 
University of Central Arkansas 
 
 
                  Gendered Social Science 
 
_Gender and American Social Science:  The Formative Years_, edited 
by Helene Silverberg, is an ambitious, multi-disciplinary collection 
of essays that brings the study of the social sciences, social 
reform, and gender together to significantly reshape our 
understanding of the development of the social sciences and their 
place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  The 
collection is extremely well researched, and the endnotes alone 
(nearly 100 pages) are a gold mine of information on secondary and 
primary sources.  All the essays make use of archival materials 
(both personal and institutional), journals and other published 
materials from the time, and a wide range of secondary materials 
related to individual disciplines, social sciences as a whole, and 
theoretical works.  The introduction by Silverberg lays out the 
collection's multifaceted approach and its consequences.  She begins 
with a useful historical and historiographical context for 
understanding how and why the development of the social sciences and 
social reform efforts have been seen as largely unrelated fields of 
study.  Rather than charting the social sciences only from the 
perspective of their male practitioners in the universities, the 
authors, using gender analysis, examine together the social sciences 
and the reform movements located in universities, settlement houses, 
government bureaus, and private foundations, such as Russell Sage 
and Rockefeller.  The women discussed in these essays made use of 
science and its authority, often along with traditional gender 
ideologies, to claim work for themselves as newly 
university-educated women.  In doing so, they produced vital, 
innovative work in government social reform and academic research 
that often influenced the male social scientists.  It was only 
later, with the effects of the failure of Progressivism, the 
restriction of war work to men, and various post-war agendas that 
suppressed dissent that severely limited women's access and 
contribution to the social sciences. 
 
The collection is divided into three, somewhat overlapping sections 
which demonstrate the many ways gender helps to understand the 
social sciences.  The first section, "Gender as Discourse," examines 
how the breakdown and challenges to the Victorian gender system 
contributed to the development of economics, political economy, and 
anthropology.  Mary G. Dietz and James Farr in "'Politics Would 
Undoubtedly Unwoman Her':  Gender, Suffrage, and American Political 
Science" and Nancy Folbre in "The 'Sphere of Women' in 
Early-Twentieth-Century Economics" both show how these fields were 
male constructed in an era of increasing women's work and agitation 
for female suffrage.  Both fields claimed objectivity and usefulness 
(while opposing women's work and suffrage) in part by embracing 
traditional Victorian doctrines of separate spheres where women's 
contribution to the home was moral and private and men needed a 
"family wage."  In economics, however, this backfired as the study 
of women's and children's work was left open to women in government 
bureaus, social reform movements, private foundations, and 
university departments outside of political economy.  Their 
findings, based on science and its methods, advocated for reform and 
provided a critique of and eventually helped to undermine core 
assumptions of neo-classical economic theory. 
 
Dietz and Farr show how the political scientists' efforts to use a 
gendered language to create a science of state, to claim a role as 
educators of young (male) citizens, and oppose women's suffrage 
failed because of the incoherence of the male/female imagery.  Dietz 
and Farr effectively demonstrate the contradictions inherent in the 
gendered language, but their list of "incredulous questioning" takes 
the political scientists' arguments out of context.  For instance, 
to claim that it is "merely tautological" to construct the state as 
"manly" and then say politics would "unwoman" women may demonstrate 
a lack of logic, but it also dismisses somewhat the gendered world 
the political scientists were trying to maintain (pp. 74-77). 
 
Kamala Visweswaran's "'Wild West' Anthropology and the Disciplining 
of Gender"  examines how women were able to use the notion of the 
west as "no place for women" and their gendered claim to civilizing 
(in this case the Native Americans) to popularize their writing (and 
the field of anthropology more generally) and to establish 
themselves as professionals.  Yet the anthropologists' acceptance of 
white Americans' race hierarchies, which was fairly typical of 
European and American women going into the field/empire, [1] kept 
these women, according to Visweswaran, from seeing gender as a 
universal category of analysis that encouraged identification across 
class and race boundaries.  Nevertheless, their efforts to 
understand sexual differences helped to create the notion of 
cultural relativism, which would in the long run destabilize these 
same hierarchies.  In trying to show the complexities involved, 
Visweswaran's own argument becomes somewhat convoluted and difficult 
to follow. 
 
Secondly, gender is shown to be "constitutive of social science"  by 
shaping "the production, organization, and uses of social knowledge 
(p.  24)."  Several essays point out the collaboration in the 1860s 
of men and women in the American Social Science Association (ASSA) 
to develop social science in the name of social reform.  As men in 
the universities in the late 1880s and early 1890s distanced 
themselves from reform under the threat of being fired for 
advocating radical ideas, the work of social reformers became 
increasingly invisible to the history of the now "objective" social 
sciences.  Kathryn Kish Sklar's reprinted 1991 essay, "Hull House 
Maps and Papers: Social Science as Women's Work in the 1890s,"  [2] 
helps to redress that invisibility by showing how women outside the 
universities were able to continue to create new work in the social 
sciences using concern for women's sphere combined with innovative 
social science methods. 
 
Silverberg, in her own essay, "'A Government of Men':  Gender, the 
City, and the New Science of Politics,"  demonstrates how 
middle-class, white men, after jettisoning the science of the state 
of earlier the political scientists, constructed political science 
so as to curb the power of the party machines, to devalue the 
political activism of women, and to "catapult their discipline to 
the center of American political life" (p.  156).  By promoting the 
civil service, the political scientists were not just embracing 
"better government;" they were also positioning themselves as the 
appropriate government administrators, while appearing to be gender 
and class-neutral.  They could now dismiss both party bosses with 
their immigrant and working-class bases and women's activism, 
without having to attack either head-on.  This permitted them to 
claim objectivity, scientific status, and greater usefulness to 
American political life. 
 
Nancy Berlage's essay, "The Establishment of an Applied Social 
Science: Home Economists, Science, and Reform at Cornell University, 
1870-1930,"  clearly articulates how gender ideologies about women 
and the domestic sphere were combined with academic science projects 
and methods to create a new applied knowledge of home economics in a 
university setting. Because of changing pressures, the home 
economists reformulated their discipline several times in order to 
carve out and claim independence, scientific standing, and the 
ability to reform society. 
 
The collection's final section shows how gender was harnessed in the 
social sciences as a means of "cultural critique," helping to 
reshape gender boundaries and discourses.  The last of these 
essays--Guy Alchon's "The 'Self-Applauding Sincerity' of 
Overreaching Theory, Biography as Ethical Practice, and the Case of 
Mary van Kleeck"--seems a strange essay to conclude this collection. 
While Alchon uses extensive archival materials to write an 
informative biography on van Kleeck, he cautions against using 
gender analysis (as too theoretical and abstract) and proclaims in 
opposition to it the value of biography.  This claim seems 
particularly discordant given that two excellent biographies using 
gender analysis precede his essay:  Dorothy Ross, "Gendered Social 
Knowledge: Domestic Discourse, Jane Addams, and the Possibilities of 
Social Science,"  and Desley Deacon, "Bringing Social Science Back 
Home:  Theory and Practice in the Life and Work of Elsie Clews 
Parsons."  Ross, author of _Origins of American Social Sciences_, 
one of the seminal works in the study of the history of the American 
social sciences that does not address gender, [3] examines the role 
of Jane Addams not just as a social reformer but as a sociologist, 
whose work influenced university sociology, even though it has gone 
largely unacknowledged.  Addams' work, unlike what the universities 
adopted, was relational, socially situated, grounded in personal 
experience, and female gendered.  Her work embraced multiple vantage 
points, leading William James to claim Addams "simply _inhabits 
reality_ (p. 251)."  Deacon's biography shows how Parsons developed 
in her life and her studies to become increasingly critical of the 
Victorian domestic sphere for not training women to get along in the 
modern world. Not content with criticism, Parsons, in theory and 
practice, also tried to bring about an "Unconventional Society"  and 
a new family for new times (pp. 283-84). 
 
Alchon, by contrast, argues that an analysis of van Kleeck's life 
driven by gender would lose "much that is ironic, surprising, and 
otherwise inaccessible to the press of such an abstraction (p. 
297)."  He rejects gender analysis, in part, because he claims that 
the life of van Kleeck disproves the gender division of the social 
sciences between "soft" female reformers and "hardening," 
"disciplining" male academics (p.  311).  Yet the authors of this 
collection argue that such division was not descriptive of the 
reality of the day, but was a perception created when the university 
social scientists claimed objectivity.  Alchon seems to be working, 
at least partially, from the position that continues to posit the 
validity of the objective social sciences and the necessity of 
keeping them separate--even immune--from the political and 
theoretical analysis of gender.  While his caution to avoid extreme 
imbalance and his rejection of teleological history is of course 
valid, he uses this claim to dismiss gender analysis as "solipsistic 
and ahistorical (p. 312)." 
 
Yet, despite Alchon's claim that gender analysis leads to 
"self-applauding sincerity," the essays in this collection clearly 
demonstrate the vitality and insight that gender analysis, combined 
with careful research in political, economic, family, personal, 
social, and educational contexts, can bring to topics so frequently 
understood as unrelated to gender.  The essays, while all useful 
within their own disciplines, together reveal a kaleidoscopic 
view--shedding light in multifaceted ways on the social sciences in 
academia and in reform movements. Even though several topics, 
including the settlement houses, the ASSA, various social scientists 
and reformers, are discussed in multiple essays, there is little 
direct repetition.  Rather, the notion of multiple vantage points 
and "inhabiting reality" that Ross uses could easily serve as an 
explanation for how this collection looks at the formative years of 
the social sciences. 
 
This work should become a crucial text for researchers, scholars, 
and graduate students studying either the social sciences or gender, 
for it demonstrates how gender analysis (and social reform) are 
integral to understanding the development of social knowledge and 
provides an excellent model for how to do gender analysis. 
 
NOTES: 
 
[1].  See, for instance, Margaret Strobel, "Gender, Race, and Empire 
in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Africa and Asia," in _Becoming 
Visible:  Women in European History_, 3rd Edition, eds.  Renate 
Bridenthal, Susan Mosher Stuard, and Merry E. Wiesner (New York: 
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998). 
 
[2].  _The Social Survey in Historical Perspective, 1880-1940_, eds. 
Martin Bulmer, Kathryn Kish Sklar, and Kevin Bales (Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press, 1991). 
 
[3.].  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).  See 
Silverberg's introduction. 
 
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