Welcome back to Bitchy History, where we cheerfully dismantle the greatest hits of misogyny—and this week, we’re putting science itself on the stand.
In Part I, we met the philosophers and theologians who invented “woman” as a cosmic afterthought. Now, in Part II, we enter the age of lab coats, skull calipers, and nervous diagnoses—the glorious 19th and 20th centuries, when “objective” men in frock coats declared that female ambition caused infertility, reading led to madness, and housework was the cornerstone of democracy.
This is the era when patriarchy swapped its rosary for a microscope.
We’re talking phrenology, hysteria, Freud, “the rest cure,” eugenics, hormones, pink kitchens, and the 1950s domestic goddess industrial complex—all the ways “science” kept proving that women belonged exactly where men wanted them.
Because if the binary were natural, it wouldn’t need this much paperwork.
Additional Reading:
How To Debunk Sexist Pseudoscience
The “Scientific” Antifeminists of Victorian England
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (2000)
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (1990)
Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (1988)
