![]() ![]() He required students in his marriage course to have private conferences in which he took their sexual histories. Kinsey now shifted his research focus as well, transferring his obsessive concern with variation among gall wasps to the varieties of human sexual experience. Jones observes, Kinsey was using the marriage course to “transform his private struggle against Victorian morality into a public crusade” and to “protest issues that had bedeviled him for decades.” 3(p335) The Indiana students responded enthusiastically, and his course enrollments grew to 400 by 1940. He also attempted to replace conventional ideas of normal sexual behavior with a new biological definition: “nearly all the so-called sexual perversions fall within the range of biological normality.” 3(p333) As his recent biographer James H. High points of the course were Kinsey’s illustrated lectures on the biology of sexual stimulation, the mechanics of intercourse, and the techniques of contraception, as were his spirited denunciations of repressive laws and social attitudes. Perhaps because of this disappointment, Kinsey made an unusual career move in 1938: he agreed to lead a team-taught course on marriage and the family instituted in response to a student petition. Although both were well received by specialists, Kinsey was deeply disappointed that he was not offered a professorship at a more prestigious university. 2 In 1936, he published The Gall Wasp Genus Cynips: A Study of the Origin of Species in 1930 and The Origin of Higher Categories in Cynips. Kinsey advanced up the academic ranks, becoming full professor in 1929. Alfred and Clara had 4 children, 3 of whom survived into adulthood. In 1924, he married Clara Bracken McMillen, then an outstanding chemistry student at Indiana University. After identifying several new species, Kinsey received his doctor of science degree in 1919 and joined the faculty of Indiana University the following year. With Wheeler as his mentor, Kinsey jettisoned most of his religious ideas-although not all of his repressive upbringing-and embarked on a massive and meticulous Darwinian case study of the evolutionary taxonomy of the gall wasp. 1Īlfred became a student of applied biology at Harvard, where he came under the influence of William Morton Wheeler, an eminent field biologist, staunch Darwinian, and confidant of the irreverent H. Father and son never reconciled when Alfred graduated with high honors in 1916, his father refused to attend commencement. After 2 lackluster years, Alfred rebelled and left for Bowdoin College in Maine, where he enrolled as a biology student. His father, a zealously religious and intimidating man, and a teacher at Stevens Institute of Technology, insisted that his son put aside his early interest in biology and instead enroll in Stevens to study engineering. He was born in Hoboken, NJ, on June 23, 1894, the son of Alfred Seguine Kinsey and Sarah Ann Charles. And, drawing on Foucault, Hegarty reconciles these legendary figures by showing how intelligence and sexuality in early American psychology and sexology were intertwined then and remain so to this day.ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL Americans of the 20th century, Alfred Charles Kinsey conducted landmark studies of male and female sexual behavior that helped usher in the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s. In Gentlemen’s Disagreement, Peter Hegarty enters this historical debate by recalling the debate between Lewis Terman-the intellect who championed the testing of intelligence- and pioneering sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, and shows how intelligence and sexuality have interacted in American psychology.Through a fluent discussion of intellectually gifted onanists, unhappily married men, queer geniuses, lonely frontiersmen, religious ascetics, and the two scholars themselves, Hegarty traces the origins of Terman’s complaints about Kinsey’s work to show how the intelligence testing movement was much more concerned with sexuality than we might remember. ![]() But rarely have the intersections of these histories been examined. What is the relationship between intelligence and sex? In recent decades, studies of the controversial histories of both intelligence testing and of human sexuality in the United States have been increasingly common-and hotly debated. Published by the University of Chicago Press, the book explores the relationship between intelligence and sex through an analysis of the work of, and debates between, sex researcher Alfred Kinsey and intelligence tester Lewis Terman. Psychologist and historian of psychology Peter Hegarty‘s book Gentlemen’s Disagreement: Alfred Kinsey, Lewis Terman, and the Sexual Politics of Smart Men, is now in print. ![]()
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