The Social Sciences Had a Very... Questionable Past

I’m always so thrown off anew at the lengths misogynists are ready to go to further prove to themselves that their misogyny is rooted in reason – however twisted – and thus justified. I was attending a lecture about science theory and history and this is one of those lectures with the most flabbergasting revelations about science.1

In today’s lecture I learned that when putting together a female skeleton, they would pick and choose parts of a woman they would find appealing which means small head (less intelligence), long neck (a beauty standard), and wide pelvis (increased fertility). It goes without saying that this is wrong, that there is no correlation between a small head and intelligence, nor a wide pelvis and increased fertility.

Further scientific research showed that relative to their body, women had a bigger head. It also showed that children had a relatively big head relative to their body size. So misogynists interpreted this as though women were stuck in this infantile state and that’s why their heads were so big relative to their body size compared to men, which meant that their cognitive abilities were stuck in that infantile state as well.

The effort it took to reach that conclusion instead of saying that they either had more brain power (also wrong, but the next best stupid idea) or that there was most likely no correlation between skull size and intelligence. Otherwise elephants would be leagues and bounds more capable than humans, but they’re not.

All of this laid the seeds for eugenics and for the longest time, neither the academic establishment nor the public/state wanted to talk about it. It wasn’t until 1966 that social sciences were taught at my university. Even then, the social sciences didn’t receive their own faculty until much later. They were very explicit about it: the social sciences, especially political science, were “staatsgefährdend” – a danger to the state – and thus not allowed to be taught as to not give students the wrong ideas that make them value critical thinking and criticize the establishment that preaches the above.

And to close this off, here is what Paul Lazarsfeld, an exiled Austrian scientist who never returned after the Nazi brain drain, had to say about this:

The Catholic Church is suspicious of them (i.e. empirical social sciences) for a variety of reasons: Substantive findings might come in conflict with certain dogmatic positions [like women’s supposed inherent inferiority]; quantitative methods do not seem congenial to a spiritual outlook of life. […] It is doubtful whether the ruling bureaucracy in the S.P. [socialist party] has a very genuine understanding of what empirical social research could do for their cause; but even if they had they would not put up a major fight for it because they do not want to rock the boat.

  1. Last week, I was gagged to find out that the last exhibition of black people in Europe was in 1958 during the opening of Brussels' Atomium landmark where they showed off a tribe of 100 black people from “Belgian Congo.” And this wasn’t even uncommon. People were frothing at the sight of a black 8-year-old girl and greedily trying to touch her. ↩︎