Miriam Tildesley and the Anthropological Politics of Standardizing Racial Measurements

Abstract This article examines to what extent nationalist and sexist sentiment and international politics shaped attempts to universalize measurement practices in physical anthropology. On the one hand, racial scientists were interested in creating an international community with a universalized methodology and developing a global taxonomy of human races. On the other hand, they chauvinistically guarded their localized practices from outside influences. By following the standardization efforts of British biometrician Miriam Tildesley, a female racial scientist adamant on unifying a research field largely dominated by men from different countries, this article argues that intersecting forces of nationalism, internationalism, and sexism shaped anthropological practices in the early twentieth century.