Cynthia Eagle Russett Quotes

Cynthia Eagle Russett was an American historian, noted for her studies of 19th century American intellectual history, and women and gender.

Russett was born Cynthia Eagle in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on February 1, 1937. She studied history as an undergraduate at Trinity College in Washington, D.C., earning a bachelor's degree, and then did graduate work at Yale University, earning a Master's from Yale in 1959 and a Ph.D. from Yale in 1964. Her dissertation was awarded Yale's highest honor for American history dissertations, the George Washington Eggleston Prize.She joined the Yale faculty in 1967, and was eventually appointed the Larnard Professor of History.Russett's spouse is a fellow Yale faculty member, Bruce Russett, and the couple had four children together. Wikipedia  

✵ 1937 – 5. December 2013
Cynthia Eagle Russett: 2   quotes 0   likes

Cynthia Eagle Russett Quotes

“One scarcely knows whether to laugh or cry. The spectacle presented, in Cynthia Russett's splendid book, of nineteenth-century white male scientists and thinkers earnestly trying to prove women inferior to men--thereby providing, along with "savages" and "idiots," an evolutionary buffer between men and animals--is by turns appalling, amusing, and saddening. Surveying the work of real scientists as well as the products of more dubious minds, Russett has produced a learned yet immensely enjoyable chapter in the annals of human folly.
At the turn of the century science was successfully challenging the social authority of religion; scientists wielded a power no other group commanded. Unfortunately, as Russett demonstrates, in Victorian sexual science, empiricism tangled with prior belief, and scientists' delineation of the mental and physical differences between men and women was directed to show how and why women were inferior to men. These men were not necessarily misogynists. This was an unsettling time, when the social order was threatened by wars, fierce economic competition, racial and industrial conflict, and the failure of society to ameliorate poverty, vice, crime, illnesses. Just when men needed the psychic lift an adoring dependent woman could give, she was demanding the vote, higher education, and the opportunity to become a wage earner!”

Cynthia Eagle Russett. Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood. Harvard University Press, 2009. Abstract

Similar authors

Reinhold Niebuhr photo
Reinhold Niebuhr 65
American protestant theologian
Hannah Arendt photo
Hannah Arendt 85
Jewish-American political theorist
Romain Rolland photo
Romain Rolland 43
French author
Svetlana Alexievich photo
Svetlana Alexievich 8
Belarusian investigative journalist and non-fiction prose w…
Paul A. Samuelson photo
Paul A. Samuelson 47
American economist
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn photo
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 120
Russian writer
Noam Chomsky photo
Noam Chomsky 334
american linguist, philosopher and activist
Ludwig von Mises photo
Ludwig von Mises 62
austrian economist
Ilya Ehrenburg photo
Ilya Ehrenburg 1
Russian-Soviet writer and poet
Toni Morrison photo
Toni Morrison 184
American writer