The Science of Sex
Female students exercising with bowling pins, Western High School, Washington D.C., c. 1899 (Library of Congress)
The argument against women’s participation in democratic government was in many ways a medical argument.
Doctors and scientists in the nineteenth century relied on theories of female inferiority that dated back to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle. Such assumptions about the nature of gender were never formally tested, yet they gained the power of scientific fact in an age when science was superseding religious authority. Medical experts testified that the burden of voting would drive women to hysteria.
It took rigorous work by female and male researchers to challenge this consensus. Finding that many stereotypically female traits were learned, not inherited, they promoted dress reform, exercise, and education to overcome the stunting effects of a society that infantilized women. However, their critiques of medical misogyny did not extend to medical racism; many of the same doctors who debunked myths about women affirmed racist and eugenic ideas.
Anti-suffrage Society postcard, "A Woman's Mind Magnified," 1906 (The Suffrage Postcard Project)
Title page of Edward H. Clarke, Sex in Education, 1874 (Internet Archive)
Mary Putnam Jacobi (Wikimedia Commons)
Debunking gender myths
The anti-suffrage postcard on the right jokingly conveyed a widespread medical and scientific view that women’s frivolous nature was incompatible with political responsibility.
Boston physician Edward H. Clarke’s popular text, Sex in Education, argued that women were medically unsuited for academic study, which caused “nervous collapse and sterility.” As evidence, he presented case studies of seven patients.
Mary Putnam Jacobi, who completed her MD in 1864, was among the first to conduct scientific research on these common beliefs about gender difference. Her physiological data showed that physical and mental capacity were not affected by the menstrual cycle, as Clarke had claimed. In her 1894 book, ‘Common Sense’ Applied to Woman Suffrage, she asserted that giving women rights and education would allow them to become men’s intellectual equals.