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Dr. Clarke Revisited: Science, True Womanhood, and Female Collegiate Education

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Sue Zschoche
Sue Zschoche*
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Kansas State University
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Extract

The most notorious controversy in the history of woman's education began modestly, virtually in private, on a December afternoon in 1872. The occasion was the regular monthly meeting of the New England Woman's Club, a group that numbered Julia Ward Howe and Lucy Stone among its members and that, like them, was inclined toward literate discourse, genteel reform, and the moderate wing of the woman's rights movement. The precipitatingincident was a guest lecture given by Edward Hammond Clarke, a prominent Boston physician. The ultimate result was debate so bitter that years later G. Stanley Hall referred to it as a “holy war.”

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Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 29 , Issue 4 , Winter 1989 , pp. 545 - 569
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Copyright © 1989 by the History of Education Society 

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References

1 For the account of this meeting, see “Sex in Education,” Woman's Journal, 21 Dec. 1872. Stone and Howe were editors of the weekly newspaper, and hence, the club meetings were granted automatic coverage. G. Stanley Hall made the “holy war” comment in his chapter on “Adolescent Girls and Their Education,” in Adolescence (New York, 1905), 2:569. Writing three decades after the publication of Sex in Education, Hall remained a fervent partisan of the Clarke position on woman's education.Google Scholar

2 The dating of the first “real” collegiate education for women is an arguable point, but quite clearly, the opening of Vassar in 1865 marked the beginning of the most significant period of expansion. For an account of the early years of woman's collegiate education see Barbara Miller Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America (New Haven, 1985), 43–61.Google Scholar

3 Woman's Journal, 21 Dec. 1872.Google Scholar

4 Clarke, Edward H., Sex in Education; or, a Fair Chance for the Girls (Boston, 1873; reprint, New York, 1972), 127.Google Scholar

5 Ibid., 19.Google Scholar

6 Four volumes devoted to refuting Clarke were published in 1874. The most widely quoted, then and now, was Ward Howe, Julia, ed., Sex and Education: A Reply to Dr. E. H. Clarke's “Sex in Education” (Boston, 1874; reprint, New York, 1972). See also Brackett, Anna C., ed., The Education of American Girls (New York, 1874); Bisbee Duffey, Eliza, No Sex in Education; or, an equal chance for both girls and boys (Syracuse, 1874); and Comfort, George F. and Manning Comfort, Anna, Woman's Education and Woman's Health; chiefly in reply to “Sex in Education” (Syracuse, 1874). Clarke published an additional volume in 1874 which presented supporting evidence from educators. See his The Building of a Brain (Boston, 1874).Google Scholar

7 Carey Thomas, M., “Present Tendencies in Women's College and University Educations,“ ACA Publications, 3d ser. (Feb. 1908), 20.Google Scholar

8 Frankfort, Roberta, Collegiate Women (New York, 1977), 87. Similarly, Solomon notes that “the excitement over Clarke's warnings subsided quite swiftly.” See her In the Company of Educated Women, 57. Rosalind Rosenberg is one of the few historians to ascribe long-term significance to the controversy (though she emphasizes a different aspect of the debate than I do in this paper). See her excellent account of the debate over Sex in Education in Beyond Separate Spheres (New Haven, 1982), 1–27. The statistics on female enrollment are drawn from Michele Newman, Louise, ed., Men's Ideas/Women's Realities (New York, 1985), 62.Google Scholar

9 Higginson in the Woman's Journal, 10 July 1875; Brown Blackwell, Antoinette, The Sexes throughout Nature (New York, 1875), 226.Google Scholar

10 Clarke, , Sex in Education 14.Google Scholar

11 Higginson, in Howe, , ed., Sex and Education 32–34.Google Scholar

12 Clarke, for example, attributed the aging process to “the friction of the machine.” See Harrison Shryock, Richard, The Development of Modern Medicine (Madison, 1979), particularly chapters 1–4.Google Scholar

13 Meigs, Charles D., Females and Their Diseases: A Series of Letters to His Class (Philadelphia, 1848), 36. An overview of nineteenth-century medical doctrine about women is provided in Charles Rosenberg and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female Animal: Medical and Biological Views of Women,” in Rosenberg, Charles E., No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought (Baltimore, 1976; paperback ed. 1978), 54–70. See also Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, “Puberty to Menopause: The Cycle of Femininity in Nineteenth-Century America,“ Feminist Studies 2 (1974). As I discuss more fully in this paper, however, I would make a distinction between medical doctrine in the first half of the century and the increasingly materialistic female physiology of the second half.Google Scholar

14 Meigs, , Females and Their Diseases 36. In regard to the conservation of energy and male sexuality, see, for example, Tristram Engelhardt, H. Jr., “The Disease of Masturbation,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 48 (1974): 234–48. For a fascinating though speculative account of what he terms the “spermatic economy,” see Barker-Benfield's, G. J. The Horrors of the Half-Known Life (New York, 1976), particularly 135–226. Regina Morantz-Sanchez generally discusses gender differences in medical theory and practice in chapter 8 of Sympathy and Science (New York, 1985). One notable gender difference was that, for males, energy depletion was thought to be subject to conscious control.Google Scholar

15 See, for example, Meigs's explanation of female qualities in his fourth letter, Females and Their Diseases, 37–52.Google Scholar

16 Gail Hamilton's remark is typical: “Mere natural maternity is a fact of no moral significance whatever.” See her Woman's Wrongs: A Counter-irritant (Boston, 1868; reprint, New York, 1972), 199.Google Scholar

17 The literature on nineteenth-century feminism is abundant. Two works that offer a particularly thorough explication of the relationship between feminist ideology and cultural attitudes toward women are Cott, Nancy, The Bonds of Womanhood: Woman's Sphere in New England, 1780–1860 (New Haven, 1977); and Kish Sklar, Kathryn, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven, 1973). For a brief discussion of the romantic conception of femininity in antebellum America, see Curti, Merle, Human Nature in American Thought (Madison, 1980), 165–71. The distinction between female and feminine mentioned above primarily addressed the differences among women: the so-called cult of true womanhood was, in short, an ideology of class as well as gender. The distinction between female and feminine made it possible for middle-class women to draw a sharp line between themselves and those women who did not meet the rigorous qualifications for true womanhood. For a lucid description of the class implications, see Sklar's Catharine Beecher, particularly chapter 11.Google Scholar

18 Clarke's application of materialistic physiology was haphazardly documented. He quoted, however, a number of the pioneers of the physiology of the nervous system: Weir Mitchell, S., Hammond, William A., Bain, Alexander, and with particular admiration, Henry Maudsley. See Curti, Human Nature, 187–93, for a brief account of the research into mind/body relationships. A more technical piece on the scientific aspects of this issue is Walther Riese and E. C. Hoff, “A History of the Doctrine of Cerebral Localization,” Journal of the History of Medicine and the Allied Sciences 5 (1950): 50–71 and 6 (1951):439–70. In The Building of a Brain, Clarke clarified his position to some degree, taking particular care to assert that he was not a strict “materialist.” Brain and mind were not identical, he wrote, but then added that the mind could only be known through the brain and was, in fact, developed through it (23). Moreover, gender differences in brain (and hence mind) were undeniable: “the organs whose normal growth and evolution lead up to the brain are not the same in men and women: consequently their brains, though alike in microscopic structure, have infused into them different… qualities” (20).Google Scholar

19 Clarke, , Sex in Education 41–42, 118–61.Google Scholar

20 Ibid., 136–37,62.Google Scholar

21 Ibid., 61–117. Of the five remaining patients, one had received a “technical education,” one had attended a female seminary, and one had been provided a superb private tutoring, such “that few young men… receive.” Two patients, an actress and a bookkeeper, had no formal higher education whatsoever.Google Scholar

22 Ibid., 114. The emphasis is mine.Google Scholar

23 Ibid., 14.Google Scholar

24 Ibid., 92–93.Google Scholar

25 Duffey, , No Sex in Education 117.Google Scholar

26 For a sympathetic assessment of Youmans written by a contemporary, see Fiske's, John brief biography in A Century of Science (Boston, 1899), 64–99. Robert Bannister discusses Youmans's relationship with Spencer in Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought (Philadelphia, 1979), 68–76. A typical Youmans comment on woman's rights can be found in “Progress and the Home,” Popular Science Monthly 23 (July 1883):413–16.Google Scholar

27 Spencer, Herbert, “The Psychology of the Sexes,“ Popular Science Monthly 4 (Nov. 1873): 31–37. See also Spencer, Herbert, “The Nature of Society,” in Parsons, Talcott et al., Theories of Society: Foundations of Modern Sociological Theory (New York, 1961), 139–43. For a brief overview of Spencer's place in modern sociology, see Parsons, , “The General Interpretation of Action,” also in Theories of Society, 85–97, particularly 89–91. For an overview of the popularity of Spencerian social thought during the 1870s, see both Hofstadter, Richard, Social Darwinism in American Thought, rev. ed. (Boston, 1955), 31–50; and Bannister's Social Darwinism, particularly 14–56.Google Scholar

28 Youmans, , “Progress and the Home,“ 416. During the 1870s and 1880s, Popular Science Monthly published scores of articles attacking the woman's rights movement. These articles drew upon an incredibly diverse body of data—both real and imagined—from a number of fields, including botany, zoology, anthropology, and physiology. Most began with Spencer's assumption that the biological mechanisms of lower forms of life were directly applicable to human life. For a sampling of this eclectic broadside against woman's rights, see the following, all published in the PSM. Van De Warker, Ely, “The Genesis of Woman,“ 5 (July 1874): 269–77; Maudsley, Henry, “Sex in Mind and Education,” 5 (June 1874): 198–215; De Warker, Van, “The Relations of Women to the Professions and Skilled Labor,” 6 (Feb. 1875): 454–70; Brooks, W. K., “The Condition of Women from a Zoological Point of View,” 15 (June 1879): 145–55, and (July 1879):347–56; Huges Bennett, A., “Hygiene in the Higher Education of Women,” 16 (Feb. 1880): 519–30; Hardaker, M. A., “Science and the Woman Question,” 20 (Mar. 1882): 577–84; DeLauney, G., “Equality and Inequality in Sex,” 20 (Dec. 1881): 184–92; Clouston, T. S., “Female Education from a Medical Point of View,” 24 (Dec. 1883): 214–28, and (Jan. 1884):319–34. Louise Newman's Men's Ideas/Women's Realities is a useful edited collection of articles drawn from PSM in the late nineteenth century. For a discussion that summarizes many of the major scientific themes used against woman's rights, see Law Trecker, Janice, “Sex, Science, and Education,” American Quarterly 26 (Oct. 1974):352–66. See also Conway, Jill, “Stereotypes of Femininity in a Theory of Sexual Evolution,” in Vicinus, Martha, ed., Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age (Bloomington, 1972), 140–52.Google Scholar

29 See, for example, the review of Social Statics; or the Conditions Essential to Human Happiness specified, and the First of them developed, by Herbert Spencer, in Atlantic Monthly 16 (Sep. 1865): 382. Robert bannister makes the compelling argument that Spencer is better understood as a “natural-law” theorist who attempted to restate “the principles of Enlightenment liberalism in the face of developments in science and society that seemed to threaten them” (Social Darwinism, 35).Google Scholar

30 In his discussion of the controversy surrounding woman's higher education, Peter Gay argues that Clarke and his supporters were expressing the male fear of female advancement, a position I would not dispute. See The Education of the Senses, volume 1 of The Bourgeois Experience (New York, 1984), 213–20. Nonetheless, , the method by which they did so seems of the greatest significance, particularly inasmuch as biological “law,” as framed by Clarke and others, asserted male authority in an impersonal and allegedly objective manner. Evelyn Fox Keller has written with great sensitivity of the manner in which the concept of “laws” of nature “introduces into the study of nature a metaphor indelibly marked by its political origins.” See her Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven, 1985), 131 and passim.Google Scholar

31 The reformers had long used the health issue to their own advantage. For a half century, they had argued that poor female health stemmed from the indolence of a leisured life and an abysmal ignorance of physiology. Education provided amelioration by furnishing women with purpose for their lives, with knowledge of their own bodies, and with an idealistic appreciation of their womanly duties. Of the antebellum female educators, none was more vocal on the issue of female health than Catharine Beecher. See, for example, her Letters to the People on Health and Happiness (New York, 1855). Beecher's philosophical approach to female invalidism is discussed at length in Sklar's biography, particularly pp. 204–16. For an overview of the significance of antebellum health reform, see Markell Morantz, Regina, “Making Women Modern: Middle Class Women and Health Reform in Nineteenth-Century America,“ Journal of Social History 10 (June 1977): 490–507.Google Scholar

32 Howe, , Sex and Education 23–24.Google Scholar

33 For example, Anna Brackett suggested that Clarke begin by studying diet, environmental sanitation and ventilation, women's clothing, social life, and, should all else fail, the “imperfect acclimatization of the Anglo-Saxon race to the North American continent.” Brackett, Education of American Girls, 387–88.Google Scholar

34 See, for example, the rebuttals by “C”, Ward Howe, Julia, and by Caroline Dail, all in Howe, Sex and Education, pages 110, 29–30, and 91–93, respectively. Howe's comment was typical: “Much of his remarking upon sex is justly offensive, and his statements concerning those single women of culture whom he terms agenes would scarcely be endured in any household in which these single saints bear the burthens of all the others, and lead lives divinely wedded to duty.”Google Scholar

35 “The Education of American Girls,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine 49 (July 1874): 287. The Harper's reviewer had missed one significant attempt to impugn Clarke's science directly. In one of the books under review, Mary Putnam Jacobi provided a devastating analysis of Clarke's physiological model, beginning with the droll comment that Clarke had provided women with the “nervous system of a crustacean.” See her “Mental Action and Physical Health,” in Brackett, The Education of American Girls, 255–306. In 1876, Jacobi empirically studied the question in her Boylston Prize–winning essay, The Question of Rest for Women during Menstruation (New York, 1886). The work enhanced Jacobi's already considerable reputation, but seems to have had virtually no impact upon the debate.Google Scholar

36 Brackett, , Education of American Girls 382–83, 379.Google Scholar

37 For example, Luke Owen Pike argued that “the attempt to carry a philosophical doctrine into execution is by no means unlike the attempt to impose a creed.” See his “Woman and Political Power,” Popular Science Monthly 1 (May 1872): 89.Google Scholar

38 Howe, Sex and Education, 6.Google Scholar

39 In his True Love and Perfect Union (New York, 1980), William Leach writes of the growing “positivist” inclinations among reformers in the years immediately following the Civil War. Certainly, some of the women I am writing of here—Julia Ward Howe and Caroline Dall, for example—would be numbered among mat group. While I have found a notable use of scientific language, I have found little indication that the usage represented much more than the adoption of metaphors currently in vogue. Certainly in their reaction to Clarke, what was most prominent was their romantic ideal of womanhood.Google Scholar

40 Blackwell, , The Sexes throughout Nature 229–31.Google Scholar

41 Ibid.; 228, 235. Blackwell accepted materialistic physiology, arguing that the mental characteristics of men and women were utterly different because “they act through fundamentally differentiated nervous systems” (128). As mentioned above, however, she was also convinced that science would eventually establish the quantitative equivalency of male and female qualities. Her overt fusion of romantic with rationalist principles, as well as the feminist critique of science implicit in her work, make her a particularly provocative intellectual figure. Elizabeth Cazden's Antoinette Brown Blackwell: A Biography (Old Westbury, N.Y., 1983) furnishes an informative account of her life, but a full examination of her thought remains to be done.Google Scholar

42 For background on the ACA, see Marion Talbot and Lois Kimball Mathews Rosenberry, The History of the American Association of University Women, 1881–1931 (Boston, 1931). Talbot and Rosenberry devote an entire chapter to the ACA's efforts to combat the physiological argument (see 116–30). The ACA became the AAUW in 1921.Google Scholar

43 Clouston, , “Female Education from a Medical Point of View,“ 333–34.Google Scholar

44 Talbot and Rosenberry, History of the AAUW, 118–19, 124. One suspects that Marion Talbot's mother, Emily, may have been influential in convincing Wright to publish the ACA data. Both were active in the American Social Science Association. See Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres, 19–20.Google Scholar

45 Howes, Annie, Health Statistics of Women College Graduates: Report of a Special Committee of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae (Boston, 1885), 10–17, 77.Google Scholar

46 Dewey, John, “Health and Sex in Higher Education,“ Popular Science Monthly 28 (Mar. 1886): 606–14.Google Scholar

47 A useful overview of medical opinion after Clarke is provided in Vern Bullough and Martha Voght, “Women, Menstruation, and Nineteenth-Century Medicine,” in Women and Health in America, ed. Leavitt, Judith W. (Madison, 1984), 28–37. G. Stanley Hall surveyed much of this medical literature in his discussion of adolescence in females in chapter 17 of Adolescence. Displaying his considerable talent for nimbly avoiding contradictory evidence, he concluded that periodicity was “perhaps the deepest law of the cosmos,” 639.Google Scholar

48 Lester Frank Ward is the best-known figure in the attack upon rigid reductionism. For a discussion of his career in particular and “reform” Darwinism in general, see Hofstadter, , Social Darwinism 67–84. It should be noted, however, that the reform-minded American Social Science Association had been struggling since the 1870s to blend idealism with positivism. In a sense, Ward furnished an evolutionary model that did precisely that. For a discussion of the ASSA, see Haskell, Thomas, The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority (Urbana, Ill., 1977), particularly 139–43.Google Scholar

49 Howes, , Health Statistics 7–8. The particular assertion that nervous disorders were the inevitable price of civilization appears to have been borrowed from George Beard's conception of neurasthenia. For Beard, nervous exhaustion was not a moral failing, but rather the somatic consequence of an advanced civilization and hence the mark of a more highly evolved human being. In contrast, “primitive” peoples were virtually immune to nervous disorders, thus indicating their lower place on the scale of evolution. See Charles Rosenberg, “George M. Beard and American Nervousness,” in No Other Gods, 98–108. For middle-class educated women, Beard's theory provided a crucial, if paradoxical, defense. If lower-class women were physically healthier, they were therefore less evolved.Google Scholar

50 Howes, , Health Statistics 5, 8, 18.Google Scholar

51 Dewey, , “Health and Sex in Higher Education,“ 610.Google Scholar

52 Roberts Smith, Mary, “Shall the College Curriculum Be Modified for Women?“ Publications of the ACA, 3d ser., 1 (Dec. 1898): 1–15. Smith's comments were the subject of an ACA symposium, published in the same issue of the ACA's journal. See the comments by Leach, Abby, Richards, Ellen, Talbot, Marion, James Smith, Emily, Morris Cone, Kate, Latimer, Caroline, and Carey Thomas, M., 16–46. Without exception, Smith's respondents were opposed to female “vocationalism” at the undergraduate level. Their reasons varied, but the unifying theme was that placing gender considerations at the heart of the curriculum unnecessarily restricted woman's educational experience. Smith certainly did not preclude woman's participation in the public sphere; she only demanded that such vocations be consistent with femininity. Her proposal was very much in line with the rejection of the classic liberal arts curriculum and a new emphasis on preparing the student for “real life.” Starr Jordan, David, the president of Stanford, called this trend “constructive individualism.” For Jordan as for Smith, however, considerations of “femininity” were prior to those of “individualism” in woman's education. See Jordan's “The Higher Education of Women,” Popular Science Monthly 62 (Dec. 1902):97–107.Google Scholar

53 The dilemma for the women's colleges was that the traditional curriculum may have avoided the question of gender, but by 1900 it was neither identical nor equal to a male education that also stressed vocationalism. Rosalind Rosenberg discusses the resistance of the women's colleges to the new curricula in “The Academic Prism: The New View of American Women,” in Ruth Berkin, Carol and Beth Norton, Mary, eds., Women of America (Boston, 1979), 319–38.Google Scholar

54 Cheney, May, “Will Nature Eliminate the College Woman?“ Publications of the ACA, 3d ser. (Jan. 1905): 1–9. David Starr Jordan sounded a similar theme in “The Higher Education of Women.”Google Scholar

55 Roberts Smith, Mary, “Shall the College Curriculum Be Modified?” 15. The preceding is not intended to suggest that another course of action was available to the alumnae—or even that a different course would have been preferable. Given the currency granted to this particular version of “scientific thought“ at the end of the century, it. is difficult to imagine a plausibly acceptable alternative. The intellectually radical. alternative was, of course, to challenge directly the cultural and scientific faith in male and female differences. In Beyond Separate Spheres, Rosalind Rosenberg examined the woman social scientists in the early twentieth century who did exactly that. The fate of their work was similar to that met by Jacobi's empirical study of Clarke: it was for the most part ignored.Google Scholar

56 Thomas, , “Present Tendencies,“ 55.Google Scholar