Unresolved Conflicts about Sex: Julian Huxley and the Progress of Sexology in Britain, 1916-1930

This paper recovers a significant body of Julian Huxley’s early writings concerning the biology of sex determination, sex development and sexual behavior. Following the success of his studies relating to avian courtship, Huxley envisaged a more integrated approach to the study of animal behavior which would synthesize the perspectives of both field observations and experimental zoology. In this endeavor he considered sex-related questions the most pressing, although, in practice, he failed to assimilate his own ornithological observations of avian courtship with the new biology of sex determination that was developing at a rapid pace in Germany and North America. Huxley learned the latest theories of sex determination directly from Richard Goldschmidt and Thomas Hunt Morgan, largely siding with Goldschmidt’s controversial (and ill-fated) ‘theory of balance’ which catered for a high degree of sexual variation in morphology and behavior. Especially during his period as Fellow of New College and Senior Demonstrator in the Department of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at Oxford (1919-1925), the biology of sex constituted one of Huxley’s leading interests and played a major role in establishing him as one of the twentieth-century’s most famous public intellectuals and popularizers of science and eugenics. It was largely because of Huxley that, after decades of resisting Continental sexology, the medico-scientific study of sex became both respectable and popular in Britain, although the subject remained inextricably entangled with Huxley’s eugenic vision of human progress.