From the 1930s through the 1930s, the Committee for Research in Problems of Sex turned its support to studies of sexual behavior in animals and humans. Frank Ambrose Beach emerged as a young scientist in the 1930s and, by the mid — 1940s, had articulated a detailed theory of animal sexuality. As an under­graduate Beach […]

Jost’s default model of sexual development influenced far more than the study of genitalia and sex-related anatomy. By the late 1950s, scientists had im­ported the idea into the study of behavior. They theorized that testosterone primed the male brain, readying it for sex-related activities such as mounting, intercourse, and territorial defense. The female brain developed […]

Harry Truman ended World War II by dropping two atomic bombs. As the cold war grew, American kids learned how to protect themselves from the A — bomb: duck and cover. Some parents built bomb shelters and debated the ethics of turning away or even shooting their less visionary neighbors when the time came. Gender […]

Using Hormones to Sex the Brain By THE 1940s, HORMONE BIOLOGISTS, BIOCHEMISTS, AND REPRODUC­tive endocrinologists had identified, crystallized, named, and classified a host of new hormones. They had also outlined the roles of hormones—both go­nadal and pituitary—in the control of the reproductive cycle, leaving re­searchers poised to look more seriously at the possibility that hormones […]

We can see from this story of hormone discovery that the interchanges be­tween social and scientific gender are complex and usually indirect. Scientists struggled with nomenclature, classification, and measurement for a variety of reasons. In scientific culture, accuracy and precision have high moral status, and as good scientists, using the highest standards oftheir trade, endocrinolo­gists […]

If choosing how to standardize hormonal measurements was crucial in consol­idating their identities as sexual substances, so too was choosing what to call them. It was no random act of scientific purity to name male hormones ‘‘an­drogens,’’ female hormones ‘‘estrogens,’’ the hormone isolated first from urine collected in a police barracks (but later identified as […]

Traditionally, scientists address such crises, which often plague new and rap­idly expanding fields, by agreeing to standardize. If only everyone used the same method of measurement, if only everyone quantified their products in the same manner, and if only all could agree on what to call these proliferating substances that had somehow escaped the boundaries […]

In 1920, the male hormone turned boys into men, and the female hormone made women out of the girls. Feminists had won a major political victory in gaining the right to vote, and America had rid her shores of many foreign radicals. But out of this apparent calm, a new unrest soon broke loose. While […]

—Ш Getting Ready for the Deluge Carl Moore’s and Dorothy Price’s work did not end confusion about the biological nature of masculinity and femininity, nor about the hor­mones themselves. During the decade preceding World War I, scientific in­sights accumulated slowly, but in the postwar era a new phase of research on hormones—later called the ‘‘endocrinological […]

By 1915 three book-length treatises on reproduction, hormones, and the sexes had been published. The Physiology of Reproduction, by Francis H. A. Mar­shall, which appeared in 1910, summarized more than a decade of work and became the founding text of the new field of reproductive biology. Marshall, a university lecturer in agricultural physiology, studied the […]