26 Theorizing Gender Historical Roots of Contemporary Theory 27 deduced a need for educational as well as economic reform.A and moralists and made it a question ofobservation and comparison thread of sex egalitarianism ran through the Utopian socialist of the behaviour of different species.More,biologists became movement of the early nineteenth century.It became part of the interested in why sex existed at all,and gradually developed mainstream socialist tradition through the writings of August an account of the evolutionary advantages given by sexual Bebel and Friedrich Engels.In Engels this current met the reproduction.Though one spin-off from Darwinism has been the speculative history of kinship being constructed by theorists like naked ape'claim that men's supremacy over women is an Morgan (Ancient Society)and Bachofen (Mother Right).Engels's evolutionary law,in the long term the effect has been unsettling famous Origin of the Family,Private Property and the State rested on for patriarchy.Merely by offering explanations of sexual behaviour, ethnography that was soon superseded and as historiography was evolutionary biology entrenched the idea that these patterns were obsolete when it was written (see chapter 7 below).But it remained in need of explanation,that they were somehow problematic. important because it crystallized once and for all the idea of The scientific impact on the field of argument deepened with relationships between men and women as a social system with the advent of doctors interested in sexuality and gender and the a definite historical trajectory.The argument dramatized the creation of a semi-medical speciality which later came to be called differences between gender relations in the remote past,in known 'sexology'.Medical and medico-legal case histories provided the history and in the hoped-for future.Engels tied the trajectory of first base for an exploration of the forms of human sexuality as a gender to the dynamics of class,but the basic idea did not depend natural phenomenon.The first monument of this work was on this link. Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis (first edition 1886,numerous What Engels still took for granted,as did all the reformers of expanded editions later),which catalogued with horrified fascin- that generation,was the naturalness of the categories of women' ation the many forms of 'degeneracy from transvestism and and 'men',and indeed the conventional attributes of women and homoeroticism to eating shit and liking to be whipped.The men.Radical doctrines of equal rights could easily coexist with anthropology of sexual variation was developed much more lovingly highly conventional views about 'true womanhood',about the by Havelock Ellis,whose Sexual Inversion,the first volume of Studies proper work of women and men and about their heterosexual in the Psychology of Sex to be published,appeared in 1897.But the destiny.Women's suffrage campaigners at the turn of the century central figure in this movement of thought was undoubtedly routinely argued that the public realm needed the moral uplift, Sigmund Freud. domestic virtues and nurturance that were the natural attributes Particularly in 'Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality',Freud's of women.Along this track it was easy for upper-class feminism arguments wrecked the notion of natural fixed characters for the to merge into charity or moral surveillance of the poor,in the two sexes.His emphasis on 'bisexuality'in human emotions,and kindergarten movement and campaigns for infant health and his insistence on the importance of conflict within emotional life, mothercraft centres,eugenics,domestic science teaching and the made it difficult to see any pattern of sexual character as completely like. settled.More,in his analyses of the 'Oedipus complex'he showed how patterns of emotion in adulthood could be grasped as resolutions of the conflicts of development,and how different Science and Radicalism childhood situations could twist and reconfigure every aspect of emotional life. These assumptions of naturalness were nevertheless challenged Freud's importance in the history of ideas was not so much in from several directions.One was evolutionary biology.Charles popularizing the theme of sex,which a good many others Darwin's Descent of Man in 1874 offered a detailed account of were also doing.It was in providing a method of research- sexual selection'as a mechanism of evolution alongside the'natural 'psychoanalysis'itself-which generated masses of new information selection'emphasized in the Origin of Species.In his unemphatic about emotional life and human development,and led to a focus style Darwin took the issue of sex out of the hands of theologians on the life history as the unit of analysis rather than the species