Sexual Science, Including Manhood, Womanhood, and Their Mutual Interrelations

Sexual Science, Including Manhood, Womanhood, And Their Mutual Interrelations by Orson S. Fowler is a 19th-century polemical manual presented as a comprehensive phrenological account of manhood, womanhood, and their mutual relations. The work promotes Sexual Science as the supreme framework for improving individuals, marriages, and nations, grounding its claims in phrenology and locating Amativeness and related faculties in the brain as drivers of conjugal life. It outlines a six-volume prospectus on Life, health, self-culture, religion, and intellect, with sex as the central topic; the Preface emphasizes universal gender, sexual laws, and progeny endowment, while the Introduction defends the dignity and utility of Sexual Science and argues for studying love, marriage, and family from a scientific standpoint. Beginning Part I (Sexuality), it defines gender and its office, highlights reproduction and heredity, and asserts that mental faculties—not merely bodily physiology—determine gender expressions. Notions of Amativeness with anatomical notes, and a normative program of right pairing, marriage, and child-rearing underpin a didactic project that aims to guide private conduct and national destiny.