Sex and personality: Studies in masculinity and femininity.

Abstract

At this point it may be well to give a few words of warning in regard to possible misuses of the M-F test.SEX AND PERSONALITY be as accurate as possible, both forms of the test should be administered and the average taken of the two scores. Types of investigation in which the test should be helpful include, among others, the relationship of masculinity and femininity of temperament to body build, metabolic and other physiological factors, excess or deficiency of gonadal and other hormone stimulation, and homosexual behavior, and to such environmental influences as parent-child attachments, number and sex of siblings, sex of teachers, type of education, marital compatibility, and choice of friends or of occupations. It will be especially interesting to compare M-F differences in different cultures, and in the same culture at intervals of one or more generations. In short, the measurement of M-F differences will make it possible greatly to expand our knowledge of the causes which produce them.Our primary task has been to throw light on the meaning of the M-F score. For this reason we have presented only a relatively brief summary of the extensive experimental work which was necessary to bring the test to its present form, and have devoted the bulk of our volume to the relationships found to obtain between M-F score and other variables, including physique, personality traits as rated and measured, achievement, age, education, intelligence, occupational classification, interests, domestic milieu, delinquency, and homosexuality. It is hoped that the reader will thus be sufficiently impressed by the multiplicity of factors which go to determine an individual's score and by the complexity of interaction among them. In the interest of concreteness and in order to illustrate some of the major questions that arise in score interpretation, three chapters have been devoted to case studies. We believe that many of these will be of surpassing interest to the general reader as well as to the professional student of personality and temperament CHAPTER II ORIGIN OF THE M-F TEST The idea of developing a test of masculinity and femininity first occurred to the senior author in 1922 in connection with an investigation of intellectually superior children. One division of that investigation had for its purpose comparison of gifted and unselected children with respect to their interest in, practice of, and knowledge about plays, games, and amusements. Each of 90 such activities was rated three times by each subject; first for acquaintance with it, secondly for interest in it, and thirdly for frequency"with which it was practiced. There followed a list of 45 questions about experience or accomplishment in a wide variety of activities hardly to be classed as plays or games, such as " Have you ever cooked a meal ?" " Havfe you ever taken part in a play?" etc. Finally, there were 123 information questions designed to test the subject's actual knowledge about the plays, games, and other activities. (Examples: "A singing game is follow-the-l...

From genius inverts to gendered intelligence: Lewis Terman and the power of the norm.

“…First, feminists criticized the test's arbitrary items, its assumption that masculinity and femininity are logical opposites, its failure to predict gendered behaviors, and its conflation of MF with hetero/homosexual identity among men (see, for example, Constantinople, 1973;Lewin, 1984aLewin, , 1984b. Consistent with Butler's (1990Butler's ( , 1993 claims that categories of normative gender coalesce through the repeated abjection of queerness, historians of sexuality have more recently emphasized how "masculinity" and "femininity" result from Terman and Miles' (1936) efforts to detect and normalize people with "abnormal" genders in this work (Hegarty, 2003;Terry, 1999).…”

“…Most recently, welfare reform has involved the promotion of marriage among women on welfare, guided by a correlation-causation error that such marriages decrease state dependency, while marriage rights are simultaneously "defended" by being denied to same-sex couples (Cahill, 2005). Even in the current moment when gay and lesbian identities are "affirmed" rather than pathologized by psychology (see, e.g., Coyle & Kitzinger, 2001;Omoto & Kurzman, 2006), it remains "open season" on effeminate boys in ways that Terman and Miles (1936) had a hand in initiating (Sedgwick, 1993;see also American Psychiatric Associ-ation, 1980;Burke, 1996;Minter, 1999). IQ is still evoked to explain social inequalities from which elites profit both within, and between, nations (see Jaccoby & Glauberman, 1995;Lynn & Vanhanen, 2002)-and to conflate social reputation with innate talent in interpreting the biographies of "great men" to support Darwinian arguments about intelligence.…”

“…Men interned in San Quentin scored as feminine on the MF test, but 56 army prisoners in Alcatraz, serving sentences for sodomy, scored on average +66.2, almost identical to the mean for male college students. Terman and Miles (1936) determined that only the former group were "true" inverts; the latter were more likely to be bisexual -much as the Ancient Greeks had been (Terman & Miles, 1936, p. 256;see Hegarty, 2003;Terry, 1999 for discussion).…”

“…X is partially excused, and Terman and Miles (1936) project further warranted, by a description of X as working toward self-rehabilitation:…”

“…Intervening in the lives of people such as X requires that inversion be a learned unnatural mutable condition. In spite of the claims of almost all of the men that were inter-viewed as "case histories," Terman and Miles (1936) repeatedly describe sexual inversion as both acquired and changeable. By 1936 Terman has moved far from the 19th century theories associating sexual inversion with genius, or the gifted child with a tendency to wilt into sexual deviance under the pressures of modernity.…”