Sex and Society: Studies in the Social Psychology of Sex

William Isaac Thomas was among the first American scholars to subject the age-old question of sex difference to rigorous empirical inquiry. Published in 1907, this collection of studies pioneered a social-scientific approach to understanding how biological and psychological disparities between men and women shape the structures of communal life. Thomas examines comparative data on physical strength, vital capacity, and nervous energy, then traces how these organic facts ripple outward into the division of labor, courtship rituals, marriage customs, and the allocation of power between the sexes. The argument is unflinching in its materialist logic: the forms that society takes, from the household to the factory to the political sphere, cannot be fully understood apart from the bodily realities of those who inhabit it. Yet the book also reveals the limits of its era, assumptions that would be thoroughly interrogated by subsequent generations of scholars. As a window into the origins of American sociology and the anxieties of modernity about gender, this volume remains essential reading for anyone interested in where social science came from and how it grappled with the most fundamental questions of human difference.