Ethnological theories of race/sex in nineteenth-century black thought: Implications for the race/gender debate of the twenty-first century

The presumed opposition between man and woman is a very recent phenomenon in the historical scope of gender. This is especially true for black Americans who were thought to be “ungendered” throughout history. In the nineteenth century only the white race was gendered—blacks were believed to be too savage to share these distinctions. The theory of gender that white ethnologists applied to black Americans in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was also taken up by blacks, with implications for our current intersectional historiographies.