The question you must answer in this essay is: What, specifically, were the scientific reasons these individuals gave during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries to support their arguments about women’s inferiority and men’s superiority?
In your essay, you must conduct research into the scientific/medical/biological arguments and justifications that prominent seventeenth, eighteenth, and/or nineteenth century thinkers laid out when dividing and judging the sexes. Your goal is to explore and explain this research in essay form, giving your reader a clear sense of the historical thinking around this issue from a scientific perspective. You may explore an entire school of thought or focus in detail on the work of one individual. (Regardless, your essay must cite from at least 3 scholarly sources, either primary or secondary.)
After providing this overview, your essay should then evaluate the arguments put forth by the historical thought you’ve uncovered: from our modern perspective, what about their arguments did your individual(s) get wrong? Why do you think they got it wrong? Were their arguments totally absurd, or did they have some basis in scientific reality? What biases did the individual(s) display in their argumentation? What might have been their motivation for arguing what they did? You need not answer all of the preceding questions, but keep them in mind when evaluating your individuals. You very well might need to conduct some research into modern science in order to construct your evaluation of the antiquated science (such research would count towards your goal of 3 scholarly sources).
