The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould

MEASURING BODIES 147

friend who could sympathize with and aid them. This is the "woman stage"

of character (1887, p. 159).

In what must be the most absurd statement in the annals of biolog-
ical determinism, G. Stanley Hall—again, I remind you, not a
crackpot, but America's premier psychologist—invoked the higher
suicide rates of women as a sign of their primitive evolutionary
status (1904, vol. 2, p. 194):

This is one expression of a profound psychic difference between the
sexes. Woman's body and soul is phyletically older and more primitive,
while man is more modern, variable, and less conservative. Women are
always inclined to preserve old customs and ways of thinking. Women pre-
fer passive methods; to give themselves up to the power of elemental
forces, as gravity, when they throw themselves from heights or take poi-
son, in which methods of suicide they surpass man. Havelock Ellis thinks
drowning is becoming more frequent, and that therein women are becom-
ing more womanly.

As a justification for imperialism, recapitulation offered too

much promise to remain sequestered in academic pronounce-

ments. I have already cited Carl Vogt's low opinion of African

blacks, based on his comparison of their brains with those of white

children. B. Kidd extended the argument to justify colonial expan-

sion into tropical Africa (1898, p. 51). We are, he wrote, "dealing

with peoples who represent the same stage in the history of the

development of the race that the child does in the history of the

development of the individual. The tropics will not, therefore, be

developed by the natives themselves."

In the course of a debate about our right to annex the Philip-

pines, Rev. Josiah Strong, a leading American imperialist, piously

declared that "our policy should be determined not by national

ambition, nor by commercial considerations, but by our duty to the

world in general and to the Filipinos in particular" (1900, p. 287).

His opponents, citing Henry Clay's contention that the Lord would

not create a people incapable of self-government, argued against

tiie need for our benevolent tutelage. But Clay had spoken in the

bad old days before evolutionary theory and recapitulation:

Clay's conception was formed... before modern science had shown

that races develop in the course of centuries as individuals do in years, and

at an undeveloped race, which is incapable of self-government, is no