History of Psychology Copyright 2007 by the American Psychological Association

2007, Vol. 10, No. 2, 92–110 1093-4510/07/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/1093-4510.10.2.92

PASSIONATE MEN, EMOTIONAL WOMEN:

Psychology Constructs Gender Difference in the
Late 19th Century
Stephanie A. Shields
Pennsylvania State University

The author examines British and American scientific psychology’s portrayal of

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natural and ideal masculinity and femininity in the late 19th century to show how
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purported differences in emotion and reason were critical to explaining the evolu-
tionary foundation of existing social hierarchies. Strong emotion was identified with
heterosexual manliness and men’s purportedly better capacity to harness the power
of emotion in the service of reason. “Feminine” emotion was portrayed as a
comparatively ineffectual emotionality, a by-product of female reproductive phys-
iology and evolutionary need to be attractive to men. The author argues that
constructions of emotion by psychology served an important power maintenance
function. A concluding section addresses the relevance of this history to the politics
of emotion in everyday life, especially assertions of emotional legitimacy.

Keywords: emotion, gender, 19th century, American psychology, British

psychology, history of psychology, Herbert Spencer, evolutionary theory

In Western societies, beliefs about emotion have historically served an im-

portant role in characterizing gender difference. I have previously argued that this
long-standing legacy of beliefs about emotion as gender specific is significant
both in the individual’s gender practice and in the maintenance of the ideology of
gender difference (Shields, 2002). In this article, I focus on a significant moment
in the development of modern psychology in the late 19th century to show how
the ideology of psychological gender difference was critical to the imagined role
of psychology in explaining the evolutionary foundation of existing social hier-
archies.
I develop the idea that emotion is a powerful currency for setting gender
boundaries because emotion can be construed as both embodied and ineffable.
Embodied emotion, as in expressive behavior, has a material reality that lends it
to being the object of scientific study, which can thus be offered in evidence of
dispositional and behavioral group differences. The scientific approach to human

Stephanie A. Shields works at the intersection of the psychology of emotion, the psychology
of gender, and feminist psychology. Her research focuses on the politics of emotion in everyday life,
particularly evaluation of others’ emotional behavior and experience. She also studies the social
context of psychological research, primarily the history of the psychology of women and gender, and
women’s participation in American psychology. Her book Speaking From the Heart: Gender and
the Social Meaning of Emotion (Shields, 2002) received the Association for Women in Psychology’s
2003 Distinguished Publication Award.
I thank Leah Warner, Peter Hegarty, and Lewis Jillings for their comments on the manuscript.
I also thank Audrey Nariunaite for her research assistance.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Stephanie A. Shields, Depart-
ment of Psychology, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802. E-mail: sashields@
psu.edu

92
 SPECIAL ISSUE: PSYCHOLOGY CONSTRUCTS GENDER DIFFERENCE 93

emotion is founded on the belief that cognitive, physiological, and expressive

behaviors can serve as reliable indices of emotion processes and outcomes. In
19th-century British and, later, American scientific thinking, speculation regard-
ing the nature of emotion and emotion regulation was used to describe and thereby
define the difference between women and men and between races and social
classes. Ineffable emotion, as a quality of conscious experience or motivating
force, apparently eludes exact quantification. Thus, the nature of emotional
experience, as a distinctively human quality, can be claimed or contested as a
property of status and power. In the 19th century, emotion’s ineffability left it to
the expert to describe emotion’s embodied dimensions and content and to connect
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emotion to particular functions and effects.

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The paradox of embodiment and ineffability produces ambiguity that exposes

emotion to observers’ differing and even conflicting evaluation. Criteria for the
“right” kind and quantity of emotion, for example, are not inherent to the emotion
displayed, but reflect cultural conventions and norms that are situationally nego-
tiated and applied. In Western culture, those relatively more powerful and those
relatively powerless share a fundamental assumption about emotion, namely that
it has the potential to induce unreasoned and uncontrolled behavior. That said,
only the expert has the authority to say when and by whom unreasoned and
uncontrolled emotion happens. The polarity of reason and emotion and the threat
that emotion poses to emasculate reason are long-standing Western notions, even
though dichotomizing these qualities is itself not logically based (Midgley, 1995).
In this article, I am specifically concerned with gender divisions. I focus
on how women’s traits, especially emotion, were described as complementary
to men’s and how, through this maneuver, unequal distribution of social and
economic power and status hierarchies was justified and perpetuated. The idea
of complementarity—that is, the belief that the traits, strengths, and weak-
nesses of one group are compensated for or enhanced by the traits, strengths
and weaknesses of another—is an exceptionally powerful way to maintain
power inequities between groups, as it implies that any perception of inequity
is illusory and that the actual basis for discriminating between groups is based
on each group’s relative strengths and weaknesses. I focus on British scientific
writing relevant to gender because of the significance of two important threads
of inquiry that characterized British psychology from the mid- to late 19th
century, namely concern with mind– body relations and evolutionary theory.
The creation of gender hierarchy on the basis of hypothesized complementa-
rity of traits and abilities must also be read as part of a larger pattern of
then-dominant views on race and class that fostered practices that maintained
and legitimated systems of subordination.
I begin with an overview of the interpretation of complementarity as it relates
to gender in 19th-century scientific thinking. I then turn to the application of the
complementarity principle to gendered emotion, drawing examples from Herbert
Spencer’s (1820 –1903) paradigmatic views on gender and emotion. Spencer, the
man, was himself by no means conventional, yet as a scientist his self-assured
treatment of gender and emotion, as I show, exemplifies prevailing scientific
views on each subject. I conclude with a brief discussion of the relevance of this
history to contemporary politics of emotion in everyday life.
 94 SHIELDS

Complementarity of the Sexes

Elsewhere I have outlined the post-Enlightenment transition from the intel-
lectual class’s belief in the general inferiority of females in nearly all capacities
(intellectual, perceptual, and moral) to a notion that the mental and moral faculties
of each sex are complementary (Shields, 1975, 1982; see also Lloyd, 1984). The
idea of complementarity is that each sex has an innate and distinctive intellect and
character with its own strengths and limitations and that the weaknesses in each
sex are compensated for by corresponding strengths in the other. With the advent
of evolutionary theory in the mid-19th century, variation came to be seen as the
source of evolutionary progress, and the principle of complementarity came into
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its own as a useful explanatory device. Complementarity could account for how
it can be that evolutionary advancement occurs without upsetting the stability and
continuity of the species. In turn-of-the-century American and British psychology,
for example, the concept of complementarity was the basis for the hypothesis that
females were more likely to be nearer the average in physical and mental
attributes, whereas the distribution of males on these dimensions was wider.
Differences in variability were seen as an evolutionary adaptation that ultimately
could account for differences in social achievement and status of women and men.
Evidence of differences in variability was asserted even at the level of capacity for
complex or abstract thinking. G. Stanley Hall, for example, tested young chil-
dren’s familiarity with a variety of ideas and objects, reporting that “the easy and
widely diffused concepts are commonest among girls, the harder and more special
or exceptional ones are commonest among boys” (Hall, 1891, p. 143). (See
Shields, 1982, for an extended discussion of the variability hypothesis as applied
to gender differences.) The complementarity model was believed to be applicable
at the level of the individual, as in the operation of instinct (e.g., Sutherland,
1898), as well as at the broader social level, as in the private sphere/public sphere
dichotomization of woman/man, family/work, and consumption/production
(Erskine, 1995; E. Richards, 1997; Russett, 1989).1
It goes without saying that the lists of traits assigned to each sex were not
derived from systematic empirical research but drew heavily on what was already
believed to be true about women and men. That is, the attributes assigned to each
sex were essentially variations on popular images already evidenced in popular
culture. Although most scientists probably drew on their own experience of
“common knowledge,” the proximal source that justified doing so was likely to
have been popular science writing, which was itself fed by unexamined assump-
tions about women’s and men’s nature. (See G. Richards, 2002, regarding the
repeating circulation of “folk” knowledge to scientific psychology and back
again.) Beetham (1996), for example, showed how cultural tensions and contra-
dictions about women and beliefs about femininity were enacted in the pages of
periodicals from the early 18th century to Victorian domestic magazines and new
journalism.

1
The paradoxes of this dichotomization are explored in Homan’s (1998) study of Queen
Victoria as monarch and wife.
 SPECIAL ISSUE: PSYCHOLOGY CONSTRUCTS GENDER DIFFERENCE 95

The Formation of Psychology in Public Discourse

At midcentury, evolutionary theory and the mind– body question were two
themes much in evidence in public discourse concerning philosophy and physi-
ology. Separately, they would contribute in important ways to the character of the
new discipline of psychology. The growing influence of evolutionary thinking on
public and scientific discourse, however, did not converge with and inform
thinking about mind– body issues until the last quarter of the century (Smith,
2004). Each of these themes drew on truisms regarding female nature. Evolution-
ary theory is important for its emphasis on complementarity as an explanatory
principle; the mind– body question is relevant to the focus on emotion as late-
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century focus of theorizing in the newly established academic discipline of

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psychology.
There was no science of mind and human behavior at midcentury, and
psychology as a scientific practice was fed by popular discourse concerning
fundamental psychological questions of human agency, mind, and relation-
ships (see also White, 2002). Smith (2004) argued that psychology in Britain
became institutionalized as a science not because of its establishment as an
academic specialization, but through a preexisting scientific discourse of
nonacademic writers and readers. He argued that psychology “was shaped in
a public arena, not through the specialization or differentiation of academic
life” (p. 83). Periodicals for the broad, educated readership, Smith further
suggested, played a major role in this public discourse. That public arena was
part of a larger community in which scientific and philosophical themes of all
kinds were reviewed and debated. For example, Mind was established by
Alexander Bain (with George Croom Robertson) in 1876 as “the first English
journal devoted to Psychology and Philosophy” to make philosophy a more
academic field and to connect with the new physiological psychology of
Helmholtz and others.
The public and popular forum within which mind– body issues were
debated allowed popular culture notions of women’s nature and gender
difference (as well as race and class) to be imported seamlessly into the
formation of scientific ideas. Lorimer’s (1997) analysis of scientific represen-
tations of race illustrates this idea. Lorimer observed that from the 1830s
through the 1870s, racial discourse was not specialized and “scientific papers
presented at learned societies were indistinguishable from the books and
articles seeking to address an educated public” (p. 213). He argued that
scientific discourse drew on what we would identify today as racial stereo-
types with the goal of differentiating attributes that were matters of objective
knowledge from those that were simply projections of sentimentality onto
non-White races. By the end of the century, Lorimer concluded, the applica-
tion of “the ideology of scientific naturalism” (p. 228) to race and race
relations had circulated widely and, in treating humans as natural objects,
precluded conversation about the possibility of change in either and erased the
roles of human will and agency from explanations of both the oppression and
the liberation of colonized peoples. Positive images of aboriginal and colo-
nized peoples were therefore dismissed as the products of antiscientific
sentimentality. I am not suggesting that the impetus or values behind scientific
 96 SHIELDS

representations of race, class, and gender were equivalent, or that the social
consequences of each played out in the same or even analogous ways. The
point is that in this period, public discourse and lay beliefs about group
characteristics and differences were an important source for science and, in
turn, scientific legitimization of these constructs further naturalized and reified
them.

Complementarity of the Sexes

According to American and British psychologists/biologists, the psycholog-
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ical traits of each sex were a direct consequence of biology (Shields, 1975, 1982).
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Sexual dimorphism was believed to be greater as one advanced up the racial

ladder, and sex differences in “lower” races, if noted, were described as less
distinctive than those of more “advanced” races (Gould, 1981; Laqueur, 1990).
The full physiological explanation for the mental and personality features that
distinguished the female from the male was restricted to discussions of women of
privileged classes. No strong distinction was made between gender and its
connection to class and race because class and race on their own seemed to
explain the position and deficiencies of both women and men. Laqueur (1990, p.
205) persuasively argued that over the course of the 19th century there came to be
compelling political needs for redefining males and females as biologically
distinct sexes to replace the earlier construal of female as deficient or lesser male.
In the postrevolutionary new order, the argument that man was rightfully the
central authority in public and private domains could only be convincingly made
if there were natural qualities that set him apart from the other sex. As it was, it
was woman’s nature—as deviation from the standard—that needed explanation.
Female reproductive physiology was at the heart of most explanations of the
development of women’s distinctive cognitive and emotional character (Vertinsky,
1988). The specifics of individual accounts varied, but they were invariably fraught
with logical inconsistencies and physiological inaccuracies. (See, e.g., Shields’s
[1975] summary of Geddes and Thomson’s [1890] metabolic theory of sex differ-
ences.) The account generally followed this line: The human female’s nervous system
was limited (or prevented from its full development) either because of earlier achieve-
ment of full maturity and/or because of the biological demands of development and
maturation of the female reproductive system. At maturity, women’s brain and
nervous system were limited in their capacity to support the higher mental processes,
specifically objective rationality and true creativity. The lower mental processes
(emotion and certain perceptual skills) thus appeared to be or were comparatively
stronger. Then, at menarche, the female’s mental future was sealed: Blood that might
have promoted further brain development was diverted to the uterus and sustaining
fertility. The result of this abbreviated course of development and the demands of
female reproductive physiology were limited intellectual capacity in comparison to
men and a triad of interlocking traits: sensitivity, perceptual acumen, and, more
important, emotionality. Henry Maudsley’s (1879, as cited in Beer, 2000) views on
mental disorder provide just one example of how these disparate and internally
inconsistent elements were woven into an explanation of the form that the female
psyche must inevitably take. In describing the greater susceptibility of the young
woman to certain mental disorders Maudsley argued that “the affective life is more
 SPECIAL ISSUE: PSYCHOLOGY CONSTRUCTS GENDER DIFFERENCE 97

developed in proportion to the intellect in the female than in the male sex, and the
influence of the reproductive organs upon mind more powerful” (p. 450) and that one
manifestation of this is that menstruation:

brings with it periodical disturbances of the mental tone which border closely on
disease in some cases, while the irregularities and suppressions to which it is liable
from a variety of mental and bodily causes may affect the mind seriously at any
time. (p. 450)

Women’s healthy bodies and normal emotional state are thus described as
disordered sites exemplifying the opposition of nature and orderly society
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(Pateman, 1989).
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Reason and emotion were believed to be expressed differently for each sex
because of underlying “natural” differences.2 Consistent with the complementa-
rity framework, the strengths of one sex with respect to reason and emotion
compensated for the weaknesses of the other, with both ostensibly forming a
perfect whole. Female/feminine reasoning capacities were described as intuitive,
practical, concerned with specifics, and thus well suited to domesticity and
nurturance. Male/masculine reason, in contrast, was more likely to be described
in terms of a capacity for objectivity and abstraction, thus better suiting men for
broader projects in which either creative thought or impartiality was needed.
Rationality and intelligence were thus attributes of both sexes, but separate
capacities did not mean equal capacities: The more valued cognitive capabilities
were a male prerogative. For example, women were considered essentially unfit
for scientific work, but observational science (astronomy and especially botany)
were regarded as physically and intellectually within their grasp (Meadows,
2004).3
Similarly, the masculine version of emotion stands in contrast to the feminine.
In its feminine form, emotion was portrayed as a somewhat unstable sensitivity of
feelings toward oneself and others. Masculine emotion, in contrast, was described
as a passionate force evident in the drive to achieve, to create, and to dominate.4
Male/masculine reason was believed to be powered by a distinctively masculine

2
In Laqueur’s (1990) analysis, the purported difference in passion is defined more specifically
in terms of sexual interest; he did not consider emotion more generally. The difference in my
interpretation and Laqueur’s is likely to stem from the span of time on which we focus. Laqueur
considered the late 18th through the 19th centuries and drew heavily on studies of comparative
anatomy. My analysis focuses on the mid- to late 19th century and the influence of evolutionary
theory on the formalization of psychological science.
3
Shteir (2004, p. 18) reported that in England in the early 19th century, botany was widely
promoted for, practiced by, and identified with women. Magazines directed to a female readership,
however, contained articles on botany with simpler introductory knowledge, whereas articles on
botany in magazines for a male or mixed audience gave more complex and advanced information.
Shteir further noted that by the 1830s, new views on female intellectual learning did not support
women’s delving into systematic science: “The higher the intellectual aspiration of a women’s
magazine, the less likely that it would be the location for actual [scientific] instruction” (p. 33).
4
Schnog (1997, p. 105) described how American women’s fiction writing in the latter part of
the 19th century began to draw on the language of “emotional power, spontaneity, and depth” that
had been the province of male writers, replacing sentimentality and the idealized image of female
cheerfulness and sweet nature. She argued that these writers were asserting a claim to a level of
personhood that had excluded the possibility that women had the capacity for such depth of feeling.
 98 SHIELDS

emotion. Although passion could overwhelm reasoned behavior, well-controlled

masculine passion is energy focused on “the battle of life.” Passion was not
simply equated with sexual drive, but as all strong feeling that powered creative
thinking, social action, and physical prowess. Manly emotion was distinguished
by its capacity to be put in the service of reason (Shields, 2002) and with a broader
political definition of heterosexual manhood that emphasized Christian values of
autonomy and self-regulation (Alderson, 1998). (See also Smith, 1992, on a more
generalized 19th-century concern with threats to self-control.) Identification of
men with appropriate emotion was evident in the political arena on both sides of
the Atlantic as early as the late 17th century (Ellison, 1999). Mid-19th century
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Christian businessmen in the United States viewed strongly felt, controlled

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emotion as a manly prerogative (Corrigan, 2002). Women’s emotion, feminine

emotion, was portrayed as lacking the power and energy ascribed to masculine
passion, identified with an inferior and ineffectual emotionality. Women’s emo-
tion was more likely to be described as sentimentality, which was itself rendered
as a degraded, pale version of normal emotional impulse that, in any event,
women were not well equipped to regulate.
The noted physiologist W. B. Carpenter (1894) provided an elegant summary
of the complementarity of the sexes in its ideal form. Note how he highlighted
both the reason– emotion axis and the public– domestic axis:

There is nowhere, perhaps, a more beautiful instance of complementary adjust-

ment between the Male and Female character, than that which consists in the
predominance of the Intellect and Will, which is required to make a man successful
in the “battle of life,” and of the lively Sensibility, the quick Sympathy, the
unselfish Kindliness, which give to woman the power of making the happiness of
the home, and of promoting the purest pleasures of social existence. (p. 417)

The definition of women’s ideal emotion evolved contemporaneously with the

identification of women as the center of the household. This domestic image of
woman featured emotional temperance and equanimity as its defining themes.
Emotionally, the successful household manager was portrayed as expressing calm
mother-love and unruffled housewifeliness. Emotional temperance was not an
automatic by-product of domestication, but a goal to strive for in and of itself, as
is clear in books written for and about the proper education of young women
(Armstrong, 1987). Of course, the reality of late 19th-century women’s lives bore
little resemblance to the sheltered and comfortable ideal portrayed in scientific
publications and popular tracts (Draznin, 2001).
The identification of the domestic sphere as one in which woman is the
emotion expert (by virtue of natural qualities of attention to detail and emotional
influences on judgment) undergirds a domestic structure of benevolent paternal-
ism. As the putative “emotion experts,” the burden was on women to define
healthy emotional home life. Nevertheless, women’s tendency for “mere emo-
tionality” calls into question the soundness of their judgment. The legitimacy of
women’s authority on emotional matters in the home was undermined by beliefs
regarding the inherent weakness of feminine emotional nature. The intervention of
someone with greater skills in self-regulation would be needed in matters of any
importance.
 SPECIAL ISSUE: PSYCHOLOGY CONSTRUCTS GENDER DIFFERENCE 99

Emotion in Gender, Gender in Emotion

In this section, I consider one example of how the use of “complementarity”
to preserve existing status and power relations was manifested in the emerging
science of psychology. Psychological sex differences were of interest primarily in
connection with the growing influence of evolutionary theory in explaining, and
in some cases justifying, existing social relations (e.g., G. Richards, 1997). But it
was one on which many prominent psychologists weighed in. It is important to
point out that the emotional and intellectual attributes of women were not
themselves of much consequence to men of science. Rather, discussion of the
feminine character was of interest to the extent that it made possible the identi-
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fication of those qualities that distinguished the highest human form of evolution.
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Gender comparisons were added as an example, a truism rather than a hypothesis

to be tested or a point that deserved argument.
At the same time another topic, human emotion, was one of the premier issues
in scientific psychology by the late 19th century. Dixon (2001, 2003) demon-
strated how the 19th-century concept of “emotions” in psychology was developed
in opposition to, and ultimately replaced, prevailing religious constructs of pas-
sions and affections of the soul. This move to emotion, he argued, was motivated
by hostility to traditional religious beliefs. If Dixon was correct, we may interpret
the rise of the psychology of emotion in the early years of scientific psychology
as an indicator of psychologists’ assertion that psychology is a science of the
natural world, that is, one in which the object of investigation is separable from
the investigator and knowledge can be pursued objectively with a bright line
separating the role of the psychologist–investigator from that of the research
participant (see Morawski, 1992). Embodied emotion thus assists the move of
psychological inquiry from the realm of moral philosophy to natural science. A
key point to keep in mind is that the formation of psychology, with its treatment
of emotion as an aspect of mind that is utterly natural, occurred at a time of
significant social transitions (Mendus & Rendall, 1989). Thus, psychology pro-
vided scientific justification that the political and social hierarchies of family,
society, and empire reflected the true nature of human relations.
The study of emotion in psychology initially concerned the nature of con-
sciousness, bodily experience, and brain function. Later in the century, evolution-
ary theory’s concern with continuities and discontinuities with other animals
began to have a discernible influence. Many who were involved in the disciplinary
formation of scientific psychology in the United States, Britain, and Germany
were concerned with emotion. Charles Darwin, William James, and Wilhelm
Wundt are, of course, identified with the theories of emotion that burgeoned in the
last quarter of the century (Gardiner, Metcalf, & Beebe-Center, 1937).
The way in which gender and emotion were treated within the same text
depends on whether emotion or gender (more accurately, women’s divergence
from the masculine standard) was the focus (Shields, 2002). Tracts on emotion
rarely mentioned gender differences or women specifically. Illustrations of prob-
lematic emotion or sentimentality (in contrast to genuine emotion) would some-
times describe a woman’s reaction or “feminine” emotion. Nor was race consid-
ered unless it was in the course of illustrating a point regarding mature or
advanced emotion in contrast to immature or primitive emotion. Description and
 100 SHIELDS

explanation of human emotion meant the White European male. When the topic
was gender difference, however, emotion, in the form of female emotionality, was
a predominant theme.

Herbert Spencer on Emotion and Gender

I use Herbert Spencer’s (e.g., 1897, 1902) extensive writings on each of these
subjects to show how popular concepts of gender difference were imported into
scientific discussion at critical moments to establish a scientific basis for the
legitimacy of sexist ideologies. Spencer, a noted philosopher and social theorist,
is most widely known today as the originator of the “survival of the fittest”
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doctrine. Spencer’s Lamarckian views have made him less significant as a

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scientific forebear of evolutionary theory as it is understood today, but his writing

and his ideas were enormously influential at the time, both among scientists and
in popularizing evolutionary theory (Paxton, 1991; Hawkins, 1997). His interest
in the social implications of evolutionary theory was founded, one biographer has
contended, in his search for “a scientific basis for a doctrine of inevitable progress
which would justify his belief in an extreme of laissez-faire economics and social
theory” (p. 383, cited in Paxton, 1991). It is noteworthy that early in his career,
Spencer endorsed feminist causes, but by the late 1850s he had shifted his position
to be deeply antifeminist, to the point that he edited his earlier writings to conform
to his new position. Paxton (1991, p. 7), for example, observed that by the 1880s
Spencer had:

obliterated or distorted the record of his early position on feminism by erasing

most of the chapter on “The Rights of Women” [in Social Statics] and rewriting
many other passages about women in his Social Statics and in the first editions of
the earlier volumes of his Synthetic Philosophy.

Intending to apply his theory of social evolution, his system of synthetic

philosophy, to major fields of study in a series of 10 books, Spencer completed his
monumental task over 36 years. The number of pages he devoted to the questions
of emotion and sex differences in his vast writings and the breadth of his influence
in the spread and longevity of social Darwinism make him an especially useful
example. As important is Spencer’s place in setting an agenda for how gender
should be incorporated into discussions of the social aspects of human evolution.5
Spencer’s version of sex differences agreed with the prevailing view that
women, because they reached maturity earlier than men, were disadvantaged
relative to men. Spencer, as Shuttleworth (2004, p. 200) described him in another
context, “speaks with his usual dogmatic authority” on matters of gender. In
enumerating female characteristics, he explicitly identified the specific limitations
of female intellect as “falling-short in those two faculties, intellectual and emo-
tional, which are the latest products of human evolution” (Spencer, 1902, p. 341).
Much of his discussion of sex differences centered on the comparative emotional

5
Spencerian views on race, ontogeny, and gender were further popularized by the influential
sexologist Havelock Ellis (see, e.g., Shields, 1975; Turner, 2002). Ellis was particularly influential
in promoting the idea that men were more variable than women in psychological traits, including
intelligence (Shields, 1982).
 SPECIAL ISSUE: PSYCHOLOGY CONSTRUCTS GENDER DIFFERENCE 101

and intellectual weakness of women and the consequences of comparative female

deficiency for social relationships and society more generally.
Spencer’s account of emotion—like other evolution-based accounts of the
time—was, in contrast, ostensibly sex neutral (Shields, 2005). He did not compare
men and women in his analysis of emotion; still, he noticeably placed masculine
competition at the center of emotion theory. Male emotional attributes were
asserted to have evolved in response to men’s competition with other men:

Those tribes survived in which the men were not only powerful and courageous,
but aggressive, unscrupulous, intensely egoistic. Necessarily, then, the men of the
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conquering races which gave origin to the civilized races, were men in whom the
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brutal characteristics were dominant; and necessarily the women of such races,
having to deal with brutal men, prospered in proportion as they possessed, or
acquired, fit adjustments of nature. (Spencer, 1902, p. 342)

In Spencer’s (1902) view, passion, even brute passion, when under the control
of reason, makes advances in civilization and thought possible. The female role in
promoting evolution was to adapt to the force of male passion. Thus, female
emotional attributes evolved insofar as they could serve to promote safe and
peaceful relations with men, and this adaptation had both an evolutionary impulse
and one arising out of the proximate need for the female to yield to male
dominance. It is interesting, too, that Spencer emphasized that these powerful
emotional impulses of courage, aggression, and egotism gave origin to “the
civilized races.” One could ask how males of the less-civilized races conducted
themselves.
Spencer’s (1902) account placed masculine competition at the center of
emotion theory. Male emotional attributes were described as evolving because of
men’s competition with other men for resources and the power to control them.
When passion takes the form of commitment, it is the quality that enables men
(and not women) to transcend the world of pedestrian ideas and experience.6
In 19th-century thinking, female emotion is ineffectual because feminine
rationality is not competent to use emotion’s services. The embodiedness of
emotion reveals the source of this deficiency. Spencer (1902) asserted that
women’s emotional deficiency is evident in “the most abstract of the emotions, the
sentiment of justice—the sentiment which regulates conduct irrespective of per-
sonal attachments and the likes or dislikes felt for individuals” (pp. 341–342).
Spencer believed that because women were doomed by a limited intellect, lower
level emotion skills were more developed in them, such as the ability to disguise
one’s feelings or “to distinguish quickly the passing feelings of those around” (p.
342). These were the result of a power differential—literally. A difference in
physical power encouraged the weaker woman to hone perceptual skills as a
survival strategy: “The weaker sex has naturally acquired certain mental traits by

6
The self-servingness of this image should be noted. The image of science in much of the 19th
century was of the individual (presumptively male) conducting scientific work on his own. By end
of century, the emphasis in laboratory science was increasingly on groups working together in
laboratories, but the scientific and popular image of advancement as the result of lonely efforts of
individual scientists persisted (Meadows, 2004, p. 183).
 102 SHIELDS

its dealings with the stronger” (p. 342). Spencer is quite specific in describing the
acquisition of this skill:
In barbarous times a woman who could from a movement, tone of voice, or
expression of face, instantly detect in her savage husband the passion that was
rising, would be likely to escape dangers run into by a woman less skilled in
interpreting the natural language of feeling. Hence, from the perpetual exercise of
this power, and the survival of those having most of it, we may infer its estab-
lishment as a feminine faculty. (p. 343)

There is little to show for this skill, however: “Ordinarily, this feminine
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faculty, showing itself in an aptitude for guessing the state of mind through the
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external signs, ends simply in intuitions formed without assignable reasons”

(Spencer, p. 343). Two conclusions can be drawn from Spencer’s (1902) descrip-
tion. First, it is clear that female emotion seems to serve the purpose of compen-
sating for weakness and is not applicable to achieving other ends. Second, women
really do not understand what they are doing anyway. Here, the construction of
emotion as embodied and ineffable serves both as a vehicle for making the
argument and as the data on which the argument is deemed proven.
In his extensive treatment of emotion, Spencer (1897) did not explicitly
concern himself with women or gender difference. He did, however, distinguish
between the emotional capacities of “civilized” and “uncivilized” human races,
attributing racial differences in intellect and personality to adaptation to environ-
mental conditions. The very few instances in which gender slips into Spencer’s
text on emotion reveal again his belief in the ineffectuality of women’s emotion
even in the domestic sphere. In The Study of Sociology, for example, Spencer
(1902) dedicated an entire chapter to discussion of emotions that exert an effect
on sociological beliefs. He described how sentiments (to be differentiated from
sentimentality) such as “loyalty” and “awe of power” can impair and impede clear
rational thought. Spencer focused his discussion on the political and military
levels of social organization. Despite his primary focus on macro-level effects of
emotion, his illustrative example is drawn from home life and the debilitating
effects of emotion as a feminine condition. He likened the way in which awe of
power blinds reason in society to the effects of maternal instinct that evokes a
mother’s idealization of her children, making her unable to recognize their actual
flaws (p. 144). As in his writing on gender, Spencer equated female emotion with
ineffectual emotion. His point was not that offspring are powerful, but rather that
maternal emotion (like awe of power) is simultaneously natural (making moth-
ering possible) and the enemy of true rationality. It is not mothering itself that
explains women’s emotional ineffectiveness, but their brains and their bodies.
Spencer was not unique in his portrayal of women’s psyche as defined and limited
by their bodily selves. As Hurley (1996) observed, a long-standing belief evident
in Victorian society identified women “as entities defined by and entrapped within
their bodies,” in contrast to men, who are “governed by rationality and capable of
transcending the fact of. . .embodiment” (p. 119). This view of gender difference,
of course, is one applied to “advanced” races, as brute force, rather than reason,
was the embodied method of control used by more primitive men.
The notion of complementarity worked well for Spencer (and others) in
explaining and justifying male–female relations, but was less usefully applied to
 SPECIAL ISSUE: PSYCHOLOGY CONSTRUCTS GENDER DIFFERENCE 103

race. The problem of race was explaining shared humanness without yielding
rigid status differences or suggesting that they could, in any way, be flexible. A
different strategy was needed to explain gender relations that came with the
necessity of intimacy and mutual dependence required by sexual selection. One
explanatory dilemma that Spencer faced was how to account for women’s
evolutionary progress—after all, the demands of relationships in “barbarous”
societies were different from those at the human evolutionary apex. If women
were restricted by their arrested mental development, how could they be fit mates
for civilized men? Spencer (1902) addressed the problem with reference again to
the distinctive emotional qualities of each sex. Here is the problem as he saw it:
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“It is to be anticipated that the higher culture of women, carried on within such
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limits as shall not unduly tax the physique. . .will in other ways reduce the contrast
[between women and men],” and this “will entail a less-early arrest of individual
evolution, and a diminution of those mental differences between men and women,
which the early arrest produces” (p. 346). Spencer assured the reader that the
distinctive female character will be retained, however, because of the emotional
qualities that mark her: love of the helpless (especially manifested in mothering)
and “a less-developed sentiment of abstract justice” (p. 346). So, even as women
may intellectually grow, their particular emotional traits will remain compara-
tively less tractable and less useful for constructive social purposes.7

The Science of Emotion in the Service of Existing Power Relations

Given that differences in gender were largely understood to be fundamentally
expressed in emotion and emotion-related traits, why was so much made of
emotion in discussions of the sexes and so little made of the sexes in discussions
of emotion? The experts in 19th-century streams of science and philosophy that
gave rise to psychological science were male and of the more comfortable classes.
They were invested in maintaining power and privilege by virtue of that position.
Nonexperts’ everyday familiarity with emotion makes them experts of a sort, too.
But real experts understand the importance, complexity, and power of emotion
and interpret it for the expert-in-everyday-life. It is left to the scientific experts to
take the measure of emotion and to demonstrate the place of this animal/primitive
quality in the larger order.
Budding psychological science was concerned with generating explanations
of the generalized adult human mind, which, by definition, was White, privileged,
and male, unless otherwise specified. Emotion theories explained a nominally
desexed human capacity that was identified with the natural, typical, and ideal
masculine. Furthermore, ideal masculinity was northern European masculinity.

7
Spencer did acknowledge the powerful intellect of some women, most particularly George
Eliot (Mary Anne Evans), a close friend. Friendship did not bloom to romance, however, at least on
his part. Spencer believed that Eliot could be his intellectual equal, but ultimately rejected her as a
mate because she did not have beauty—a feature that he felt essential to successful human pair
bonding and a trait essential to the pair’s offspring’s quest for a mate (Paxton, 1991). Hrdy (2000,
p. 144) quoted a letter that Spencer wrote to Eliot in 1904 that (perhaps ruefully) sums up his earlier
rejection of her: “Physical beauty is a sine qua non with me; as was once unhappily proved where
the intellectual traits and the emotional traits were of the highest.” By this time Eliot was already
in her years-long relationship with George Henry Lewes. Spencer remained a life-long bachelor.
 104 SHIELDS

The rules are most apparent when they are broken or are about to be. The racial
and social class limits of ideal masculinity were rendered explicit only when there
was pressure at the boundaries, as during periods of colonialist expansion (Bhatia,
2002). By analogy, one would expect that impulses toward greater social and
political equality of women would have similarly been met with explicit recog-
nition of limits between masculine and feminine spheres. For example, G. Stanley
Hall (1906, p. 590) believed that coeducation during adolescence would impair
“normalizing [of] the lunar month,” jeopardizing whether there would even be
future generations.
Evolutionary theory was appropriated to explain, and thereby legitimize,
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existing gender arrangements and their intersection with race and class catego-
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ries.8 The identification of emotion with manliness centered on men’s purportedly

better capacity to harness the power of emotion in the service of reason, and so
drive evolution and civilization forward. “Feminine” emotion, in contrast, was
portrayed as a comparatively inferior and ineffectual emotionality, a by-product of
female reproductive physiology and evolutionary need to be attractive to men.
The late 19th century witnessed the first self-consciously scientific attempts to
explain gender differences at a time when, on both sides of the Atlantic, women’s
rights were increasingly becoming a public issue. Gender as difference is a
consistent theme in today’s mass culture. In both periods, science borrows popular
beliefs about gender to develop an explanation of the psychology of gender
difference, especially emphasizing differences between them, and then uses that
explanation to confirm the validity of the popular beliefs. Women exist by virtue
of their difference from men, but psychological categories are generically male.
Difference always implies a reference to a standard, and maleness is the unmarked
category that serves as the standard in gender comparisons (Bacchi, 1990).
The contrast between images of emotion and emotionality at these two points
in time shows how they rest uneasily on a changing, often paradoxical set of
beliefs about gendered emotion that shift from one historical period to the next
(Shields, 2002). No matter in what way these beliefs about gendered emotion
change, a constant core remains. The core is the identification of “emotionality”—
ineffectual, misdirected, or trivial emotion—as distinctively “feminine.”
Evolutionary theory and social Darwinism evoked much debate and analysis
among female intellectuals from its first incursion into public discourse
(Deutscher, 2004; Hawkins, 1997; E. Richards, 1997). Within the new discipline
of psychology, however, the response was more focused on arguing that nurture
(learning and environment) should be seriously considered in explaining gender
differences. It is noteworthy that a number of the first generation of American
female psychologists recognized the sexism of the complementarity model and

8
Alexander Sutherland’s (1898) treatment of parental instinct in humans offers a good
example. After making much of the human infant’s comparatively extended period of helplessness
as an indicator of humans’ extraordinary capacity for intellectual development, he observed that
although the “savage of Negrito, Bushman, or Adaman type” has a brain, “much above that of the
highest apes, [it] is by no means the wondrous organ it is subsequently to become” in advanced races
(Vol. 1, p. 97). “Accordingly,” he observed, “babes of these races are not nearly so tender or so
delicate to nurture as those of civilised man” and they “come unhurt through an ordeal that would
be certain death to the infant of a civilised race” (p. 97). Despite these differences in intellect and
hardiness, maternal instinct, Sutherland asserted, is fully developed across all races.
 SPECIAL ISSUE: PSYCHOLOGY CONSTRUCTS GENDER DIFFERENCE 105

openly challenged it, on logical and empirical grounds (e.g., Calkins, 1896;
Tanner, 1896; Thompson, 1903). Their challenge was particularly strong against
the variability hypothesis (Shields, 1982). The same level of challenge was not
raised in Britain, for two possible reasons. Women were even scarcer in British
psychology of the 1890s and beyond, a period when American women were
entering psychology in noticeable numbers. Creese (1998) suggested that this is
because British psychology was in “a period of doldrums” (p. 356) as leadership
in experimental psychology had passed to Germany and the United States,
although others have disputed the notion of a late 19th-century decline. It is as
likely that the absence of challenge may be traced to the more general exclusion
of women from doctoral study at Cambridge and Oxford Universities.9 The
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American situation was also something of a coincidence in that women were first
admitted to graduate schools in the 1880s, a period when the new science of
psychology was rapidly establishing itself as a legitimate discipline. A new
discipline needs disciples, and the population of women who could now seek
postgraduate degrees and careers in education and science were welcomed into
the field of psychology, if not with equal opportunity and enthusiasm as male
students, then at least more openly than they were in other scientific disciplines.
Psychology was avidly promoted as promising to yield significant contributions to
the practical welfare of humankind (e.g., Ladd, 1894). G. Stanley Hall (1894)
advocated the “new psychology” as “the very heart and marrow of the higher as
well as of the lower pedagogy” and, more important:
Its study is now indispensable, not only for all who would aid in making
education. . .but for all who wish to approach politics, social or religious questions,
or even science, from a higher standpoint, or deal with them in the large way they
now demand. (p. 300)

In any event, female psychologists, a fair proportion of whom identified

explicitly as feminists, argued against the essentialist explanation for women’s
traits, abilities, and social position and urged serious consideration of social and
contextual constraints as explanatory. In early 20th-century U.S. psychology,
questioning the idea of a distinctly maternal instinct was as close as psychologists
came to challenging the assumptions regarding women’s emotional “nature”
(Shields, 1984). After the complementarity model had long ceased to be a major
influence in experimental psychology’s construal of gender difference, implicit
beliefs about connections between gender and emotionality persisted. As in the
19th century, even today popular culture notions of gender and emotion creep
uncritically into the scientific psychology of emotion.

The Politics of Emotion

To conclude, I would like to consider the relevance of the 19th-century
scientific perspective to present-day concerns with the practical and political
dimensions of emotion, especially what is at stake in the give-and-take of

9
If British psychology was no longer dominant, it was nonetheless active and influential. For
example, the British Psychological Society was founded in 1901, psychological laboratories con-
tinued to be established, and the Torres Strait Expedition took place (Herle & Rouse, 1998).
 106 SHIELDS

assertion of emotional legitimacy. Historical explorations of early psychological

expounding on emotion can help us extend current social psychological views on
emotion to a broader view of how beliefs about emotion function in creating,
maintaining, and sometimes challenging status relationships, such as those of
gender and intergroup relations. Indeed, recent research has shown that in-groups
attribute more “advanced” emotions to their own members than to out-group
members (Leyens et al., 2000, 2001).
The paradoxical construal of emotion as simultaneously embodied and inef-
fable is central to understanding how the politics of emotion operate in everyday
life. Two points should be made explicit. First, constructions of emotion out-of-
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control are used to disempower people. In this article, I focused on the way in
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which the portrayal of women’s emotion was paradoxically described as weak

emotionality and as dangerously unregulated. Although ostensibly valuing wom-
en’s emotional sensitivity as valuable in maintenance of the home, useful for child
rearing, and promoting positive relations with men, the very same attributes were
portrayed as a central defect in female character. The combined effects of mere
emotionality and comparative lack of intellectual competence (and concomitant
diminished power of will) were believed inevitably to handicap women, both in
terms of exercising “mastery” of the home and in achieving in the public sphere
outside it. Second, this construal of women’s emotional and intellectual capaci-
ties—at every point viewed as deficit in comparison to men’s—provides a warrant
for psychology to deal with social disorder. Psychology’s business as a science
was to explain when and why the natural could pose a threat to the (civilized)
social and to validate restriction of encroachment of the natural onto the social.
Omission of gender from theorizing emotion “tames” emotion, a potentially
disruptive but inarguably human attribute. Invoking emotion in theorizing gender
difference “tames” emotion, too, and through its identification with masculinity,
reveals its importance in the service of reason.
The links between gender and concepts of emotionality are most prominent
when emotion is construed as out of control. The 19th-century scientists’ portrayal
of ideal feminine emotion focused on the supposed refined sensibilities of women
of the comfortable classes and built on a notion of greater gender dimorphism in
more advanced races compared with those more “primitive.” The portrayal of
women’s emotional and intellectual limitations resembled to a remarkable degree
the childish and childlike character attributed to aboriginal peoples. “Problem
emotion” was portrayed somewhat differently for women than men in popular
media and scientific literature. For women, the problem was emotion itself as well
as limited capacity for self-regulation. Men’s “out-of-control” emotion was con-
ceived as a failure to exercise existing capacities of intellect and will. Thus,
emotion per se was not the problem, but the consequences of emotional acting out.
The politics of emotion are centrally concerned with claims to selfhood.
Social Darwinists interpreted extant social organization—whether animal or hu-
man—as the most advanced chapter in the evolutionary story. As the last chapter,
it was accorded right, even if not seen as equally benefiting all. That said,
privilege was accompanied by obligation. Class privilege that was perceived to be
the natural outcome of genetic superiority came with the obligation to be benev-
olent to those below, although the perceived obligation was limited (e.g., Weiner,
1994).
 SPECIAL ISSUE: PSYCHOLOGY CONSTRUCTS GENDER DIFFERENCE 107

Reddy (2001) pointed out that if we posit a politics of emotion, we must be

able to explain in what way the individual submits and why it matters. Emotions
associated with paternalism, such as love and sympathy, can be effective means
for convincing others to oblige, and may even be more effective than coercion.
According to Jackman (1994), the dominant group’s success is a reflection of the
extent to which it can persuade, rather than force, subordinates to accept positions
of low power or status. Through the use of coercive emotions, the dominant group
can exert social control by maintaining close, seemingly positive relations with
subordinates (Jackman, 1994).
The use of emotion ideation to justify and enforce group status is not an
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invention of the 19th century. In fact, many examples, whether relevant to gender
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or class, can be traced throughout Western history. Freedman (1998), for example,
described the status of anger in Europe in the late Middle Ages. Anger was a
prerogative of class. Writers from the 13th through 16th centuries portrayed
peasant anger as unthinkable for individuals and, when expressed by the group, as
nothing more than uncontained and destructive irrationality. Peasant uprisings
were viewed not as responses to perceived injustice or aiming to effect social
change, but as an unchecked overflow of crude natural emotionality. Freedman
observed that “cold, calculated anger, either for revenge or in defense of honor,
was considered generally impossible for peasants” because their anger was simply
“an instinct opposed to thought, the most dramatic expression of baseness more
commonly evidenced by [their] mere boorishness” (p. 179). As in the 19th
century, where defining a group’s emotion as suspect or not legitimate obviated
challenges to the “right” social order, identifying peasant uprising as irrational
behavior provided the ruling class with justification for quashing peasant unrest.
Maintaining a rational front against irrational and possibly dangerous animal-like
impulses could be nothing less. The double standard of entitlement reduces the
anger of those with lower status to mere emotionality and preserves the self-
serving belief that anger serves the social good when exercised by the right
people. Interrogating the political meanings of emotion as those meanings inter-
sect with dimensions of social identity thus reveals how the regulation of sub-
jective experience is accomplished through authorizing who is and who is not
permitted to “speak from the heart.”

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Received April 11, 2006
Accepted August 6, 2006 y