Under the mantle of scientific advancement, the ideological work of science was imperceptible to turn-of-the-century scientists, just as the ideological work of requiring Polymerase Chain Reaction Sex Tests of women athletes is, apparently, to the I. O.C. (See chapter 1.) Nineteenth-century theories of intersexuality—the classification systems of Saint-Hilaire, Simpson, Klebs, Blackler, and Lawrence—fit into a much broader group of biological ideas about difference. Scientists and medical men insisted that the bodies of males and females, of whites and people of color, Jews and Gentiles, and middle — class and laboring men differed deeply. In an era that argued politically for individual rights on the basis ofhuman equality, scientists defined some bodies as better and more deserving of rights than others.
If this seems paradoxical, from another point of view it makes good sense. Political theories that declared that ‘‘all men are created equal’’ threatened to do more than provide justification for colonies to overthrow monarchies and establish independent republics. They threatened to undermine the logic behind fundamental social and economic institutions such as marriage, slavery, or the limiting of the right to vote to white men with property. Not surprisingly, then, the science of physical difference was often invoked to invalidate claims for social and political emancipation.32
In the nineteenth century, for example, women active in the movement to abolish slavery in the United States, soon began to insist on their right to speak in public,33 and by mid-century women in both the United States and England were demanding better educational opportunities and economic rights and the right to vote. Their actions met fierce resistance from scientific experts.34 Some doctors argued that permitting women to obtain college degrees would ruin their health, leading to sterility and ultimately the degeneration of the (white, middle-class) human race. Educated women angrily organized counterattacks and slowly gained the right to advanced education and the vote.35
Such social struggles had profound implications for the scientific categorization of intersexuality. More than ever, politics necessitated two and only two sexes. The issue had gone beyond particular legal rights such as the right to vote. What if, while thinking she was a man, a woman engaged in some activity women were thought to be incapable of doing? Suppose she did well at it? What would happen to the idea that women’s natural incapacities dictated social inequity? As the battles for social equality between the sexes heated up in the early twentieth century, physicians developed stricter and more exclusive definitions of hermaphroditism. The more social radicals blasted away at the separations between masculine and feminine spheres, the more physicians insisted on the absolute division between male and female.