Between race,gender,and objectivity: Alice Mossie Brues (1913–2007) and the transformation of physical anthropology

Abstract

This article examines the career of Alice Mossie Brues (1913–2007), a prominent yet ambivalent figure in twentieth-century physical anthropology, to explore how gender and race shaped scientific authority and knowledge production during a period of profound disciplinary transformation. Trained under Earnest A. Hooton at Harvard, Brues combined classical racial anthropology with emerging approaches from population genetics, evolutionary theory, and, from the 1960s onward, computer simulation. She became an early innovator in the statistical and computational analysis of human variation and played a key role in integrating physical anthropology into the framework of modern evolutionary synthesis. At the same time, Brues consistently defended the biological validity of race, understood as geographically patterned population differences in gene frequencies, even as contemporaries moved toward clinal models of human diversity or rejected the race concept altogether. Through a close analysis of her publications, professional activities, and rhetorical strategies, this article situates Brues within debates over race, scientific neutrality, and political engagement. It argues that her insistence on an objective, socially neutral science – coupled with an explicit rejection of racism – formed a central but tension-laden aspect of her scientific persona. The article further shows how Brues’s success as one of the few women to attain leadership roles in physical anthropology was facilitated by her familial background and her willingness and ability to align herself with a masculinized culture of quantification, rigor, and disciplinary authority, while downplaying gender discrimination. Brues’s career thus illuminates the entangled histories of race, gender, and objectivity in the sciences of human diversity.