#carla bittel

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In 1873, in the United States and across the Atlantic, Victorians began talking about a controversial new book: Sex in Education; or, A Fair Chance for the Girls. Written by the now-infamous Edward H. Clarke, a physician at Harvard University, the book cautioned middle-class families that their daughters were seriously at risk for illness, with catastrophic consequences. The author warned that young women had unique and fragile constitutions and that they could become physically depleted or sterile when taxed by the rigors of coeducational studies, especially during menstruation. As more and more young women sought higher education, Clarke's work set off a firestorm of debate, as women's rights activists rejected his alarming predictions.

Spearheading the fight against Clarke was Mary Putnam Jacobi, a physician from New York, who provided scientific ammunition to refute his claims. Her own study showed the opposite to be true: women were healthy when they were educated, mentally engaged, and physically active. Women were not perpetually ill during menstruation, nor were they hindered by their biology, she insisted. Social limitations, not biology, constrained women and threatened their health.

-Carla Bittel, Mary Putnam Jacobi & The Politics of Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America.

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In the early 1860s, dramatic change swept through New York and the nation at large. During this volatile time of intense urbanization and industrialization, and the coming of the Civil War, religion was an empowering source for many Americans, particularly young evangelical women. Faith and domesticity provided some women comfort, security, and a sense of value in their communities. But for other women, religion was confining and limiting, especially when they struggled with the notion of conversion.

For Mary Putnam, several factors converged to draw her away from religion and toward a life of science. As she reached adulthood, she experienced a series of family crises and personal tragedies that forced her to reexamine her principles. She also began to address theological problems that she could not resolve. Just when her mind was confounded by religious questions, she found answers through the study of science, as she began informal medical training in 1860; her ideas then solidified as she moved on to the New York College of Pharmacy and the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania.

By questioning her Christian faith, Putnam also challenged what it meant to be a woman in nineteenth-century America. She was not alone. Interested in social reform and feminist causes, other women began to challenge the traditional authority of the church and express disagreement with women's place in the social hierarchy. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, leader of the American women's movement at midcentury, most famously critiqued the failures of religion to promote an equal and just society. When confronting the vast change and social problems of the nineteenth century, many women reformers began to place greater faith in scientific intervention. Putnam went further than most, making medicine and science her core values, much like a religion.

-Carla Bittel, Mary Putnam Jacobi & The Politics of Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America.

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Jacobi's focus on nutrition to define menstruation as healthy was significant: she used it to oppose ovarian determinism, a theory that said female sex organs controlled women's bodies. For this reason, she did not oppose ovarian surgery when it was necessary. She believed removing the ovaries did not unsex a woman, nor did it threaten her overall health, since nutrition was far more significant. On this matter, she disagreed with Elizabeth Blackwell, who was wary of ovariotomy. Frustrated, again, with the elder doctor, Jacobi wrote, "When you shudder at 'mutilations', it seems to me you can never have handled a degenerated ovary or a suppurating fallopian tube." The loss of one's ovaries was not more severe than "the loss of a limb or an eye." She now famously declared, "There is no such special sanctity about the ovary!"

-Carla Bittel, Mary Putnam Jacobi & The Politics of Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America.

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In 1873, in the company of women's rights activists, Mary Putnam Jacobi contemplated the subordinate status of American women. Women held secondary positions because of a false, but popular, "public sentiment": reproduction superseded all other activities of the female sex. "It is so far from true," she continued, "that the bearing and rearing of children suffices to absorb the energies of the whole female sex, that a large surplus of feminine activity has always remained to be absorbed in other than these primitive directions." According to Jacobi, women had a surplus of unused energy that could be diverted from the "primitive" to the productive, and divided between the private world of home and family and the public world of higher education and professional work. Women needed to be contributing members of society, intellectually engaged, and devoted to the greater good. This was not a choice; the health of women depended on it.

For Jacobi, women's work was a matter of health, but it was also a tool of liberation, an equalizing force that could grant women financial independence and social autonomy. Work could prove women's economic and intellectual worth while granting personal freedom. Women had always worked, she said, "but they demand now, and simply, some opportunity for a free choice in the kind of work, which, apart from the care of children, they may perform." She respected all forms of work, but professional careers held a special advantage because they provided a lifetime of economic autonomy, not temporary compensation. The professions allowed women to have "separate resources" from men, meaning fathers and spouses. In marriage, they could create what she called an "equitable monetary division between husband and wife." Professional work was not indulgent; rather, it was "only the natural result of the double pressure of an economic and of a psychological necessity."

-Carla Bittel, Mary Putnam Jacobi & The Politics of Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America.

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The Boylston Prize is cited as one of Jacobi's major achievements, for it was public recognition of her competence, and illustrated her ability to carry out a complex study, apply laboratory techniques, articulate her findings, and convince an audience of men to reconsider concepts of female physiology. Despite the impact and notoriety of her study, Harvard Medical School remained closed to women. A few years later, Jacobi took more direct action, writing to Morrill Wyman and zoologist Alexander Agassiz and calling for coeducation in support of Marion Hovey's offer. Then, in 1882, she joined Emily Blackwell and Marie Zakrzewska in raising another endowment, this time of $50,000, and offering it to Harvard on the condition that it accept women by 1891. Although financial difficulties forced college officials to consider the proposal, outraged faculty stepped in, and with threats of resignation, halted the women's efforts. Women did not enter Harvard Medical School until 1945.

-Carla Bittel, Mary Putnam Jacobi & The Politics of Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America.

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Despite [S. Weir] Mitchell's praise for Jacobi, he did not approve of women doctors. Mitchell publicized his disapproval in a fictional series titled "Characteristics," which featured a physician who discouraged a young woman from pursuing medicine on the basis that the profession made women masculine and stripped them of all their feminine qualities. Jacobi wrote to Mitchell in protest and chastised him for attributing hysteria to healthy women studying medicine. She asked: "Do you not almost inevitably get into the habit of extending to the whole sex the estimate which you justly form of the multitudes of them which absorb your professional attention?" She then defended women physicians and lamented their limited opportunities for work. For Jacobi, challenging Mitchell was a matter of correcting "bad science,' claiming credit for her work, and contesting his position on the "woman question."

Jacobi's long-term frustrations with Mitchell informed her treatment of his most famous patient, Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Gilman's story The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) has become a feminist allegory and a treatise against the problems of nineteenth-century medical practice. Gilman's novella reflected her own experience under Mitchell's care and described the road to insanity traveled by a woman undergoing the rest cure. Confined to her room and deprived of stimulation, including talking, reading, and writing, the narrator is drawn deeper into mental illness by her seclusion and what she considers the sinister patterns of the yellow wallpaper that surround her. While Mitchell's name has become synonymous with the rest cure, Gilman's name has become associated with protest against it. Her indictment of medical men like Mitchell stands in opposition to her reverence of women physicians. Whether as fictional characters or real practitioners, women doctors were heroic feminist figures in Gilman's writing and personal life. In many ways, Jacobi was a more than logical choice to take over as Gilman's physician.

In 1901, Jacobi offered to treat Gilman for her "brain trouble," years after she fled the care of S. Weir Mitchell and almost a decade after the publication of The Yellow Wallpaper: In December of that year, Gilman noted in her diary, "Call on Dr. Jacobi & state my case. She is to undertake it—her own proposition." Jacobi was eager to help Gilman because this was no ordinary case; her treatment had symbolic power, considering her very public critique of Mitchell and the rest cure. They were also "interested in the same things, both medically and politically, sharing deep concerns about the mental health of American women and the social restrictions that caused and exacerbated them." They both operated professionally from feminist standpoints, and believed in the power of work to liberate women from economic dependency on men. Influenced by socialism, they shared an organic view of society, seeing it as a collective project where all members, including women, contributed to the broader good through their work and education. The two women were also interested in the science and social implications of evolution on American civilization, particularly the vitality of (white) women for the future of the race.

Jacobi prescribed to Gilman a graduated therapeutic regimen of mental and physical training. She began with electric therapy, applying electricity to the solar plexus, a large nerve center in the abdominal cavity. To promote digestion, assimilation, and nutrition, she had Gilman drink a mixture of phosphoglycerates in wine. To "set that inert brain to work," Jacobi assigned her mental and tactile exercises that gradually increased in their complexity to "reestablish the capacity for action." Gilman started off by working with kindergarten blocks, "just building things," to regenerate her cerebral activity. She quickly moved to reading more complex books and scientific texts such as E. B. Wilson's The Cell, a text on cell theory, evolution, and inheritance. Gilman followed Jacobi's advice and returned to writing her book Human Work (1904), a book that reflected her organic vision of society. Soon after, Gilman began a program of physical exercise, joining a woman's basketball team and playing at Barnard College in New York. True to form, Jacobi's treatment of Gilman rested on a regimen of increased mental and physical stimulation.

-Carla Bittel, Mary Putnam Jacobi & The Politics of Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America.

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Jacobi's defense of vivisection in 1900 was one of her final public battles on behalf of both medical science and medical women. After that, she devoted most of her energy to her private battle with a brain tumor, a condition that finally took her life six years later. She stepped back from her clinical work and political activities and reduced her public appearances. She spent her final years living between her new residence, the home of her daughter at 19 East 47th Street, and the Jacobi cabin at Lake George. Abraham took little part in her health care. Instead, in March 1903, she began to receive treatment from Dr. Helen Baldwin, a New York Infirmary physician. She also enjoyed the arrival of her grandchildren, although her illness barred her from providing any medical assistance with their births. She stayed in touch with her favorite causes, attending the Minneapolis meeting of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and the Alumnae Breakfast at the Twelfth Street School in 1902, where she spoke in public, possibly for the last time.

-Carla Bittel, Mary Putnam Jacobi & The Politics of Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America.

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Mary Putnam's dissatisfaction with the college [Female Medical College of Pennsylvania] and her troubled departure ultimately worked to her advantage, for it convinced her of the necessity of a European education. Putnam appreciated the guidance of her leading mentor at the school, Emeline Horton Cleveland. She admired Cleveland, calling her a woman of "real ability" who had received a real education in Paris. Cleveland's influence on Putnam was significant, planting the seed for her to expand her education in France. But her short stay in Philadelphia clarified her intellectual expectations and exposed her to the disadvantages of female institutions. Despite all of the efforts by the faculty to reform the Female Medical College, Putnam believed that the regular institutions for men had higher standards, and that only integration - not separatism - could provide women with a true scientific way of life. The Philadelphia experience, and her thesis, provided her with an opportunity to differentiate herself from other women students, and even some of her male instructors. It also introduced her to a new method for measuring the quality of American medical education, as European medicine became her yardstick.

-Carla Bittel, Mary Putnam Jacobi & The Politics of Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America.

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For many years, Mary Putnam Jacobi was "theoretically opposed" to woman suffrage. She had stood quietly against it for several years, not publicly denouncing it, but not endorsing it either. Women's education and work in the professions were bigger priorities because they could provide the true means for gender equality, she believed. With the woman suffrage movement split and struggling in the 1870s and early 1880s and the failure of Reconstruction to secure black male suffrage and citizenship, Jacobi did not see the vote as a pressing need for women. Her scientific faith determined her priorities, so that early on, conducting medical experiments was more important than casting votes. But by the last stage of her career, science and suffrage had become related, if not inseparable, causes.

In 1885, she publicly vowed her support for women's political enfranchisement. In a short article in The Woman's Journal, the suffrage newspaper of Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell, she announced, “Please count me henceforth among those who believe in woman suffrage.” In the years that followed, Jacobi became deeply involved in the resurgent suffrage movement, so that by 1894 she was the leading voice for the New York City campaign. Explaining her commitment to the cause, she told Agatha Schurz, daughter of Carl Schurz, “My great reason for desiring Equal Suffrage, is as a formal recognition of the equality of the sexes, — and because such recognition as a matter of theory is essential to securing equality as a matter of fact.” Late in her life, she came to see suffrage as the most important right of citizenship and, consequently, that it represented the actualization of gender equality.

Jacobi initially opposed woman suffrage as a matter of strategy and priorities but also because she opposed universal suffrage, in general. She believed it granted the vote to the uneducated and, in her eyes, the undeserving. Showing both her scientific sensibility and class position, Jacobi held that voters should be intellectually agile and properly trained to comprehend complex questions and analyze data. She explained her position: “Persons habituated to technical pursuits are ... always inclined to distrust the action of masses in relation to subjects about which they must be inadequately informed.” For years Jacobi questioned the ability of the male "masses" to vote with integrity; she also questioned whether women were intellectually prepared and ready for the vote. Frustrated with the spotty educational opportunities for women early in her career, she at first was reluctant to support woman suffrage. But by the mid-1880s, she believed that women had evolved and were ready and capable of enfranchisement. They were no longer a political liability but an asset in the promotion of social justice and the struggle to end corruption. Jacobi now echoed fellow women advocates who celebrated women's "progress" as a justification for female enfranchisement.

Philosophically, Jacobi also changed her mind because she had come to see woman suffrage as compatible with her positivist views on women's health and the social organism. She believed that "the real basis of democracy, republicanism and justice is the physiological equality or equivalence of human beings." Society could be a healthy body when all of its elements contributed to the larger whole, and this meant the full inclusion of women in political activity. When women were denied the vote and full political participation, they were prohibited from being complete living organisms, and the social organism failed to function to its most healthful capacity. She believed this denial explained a "large share of . .. the physical ill health of women, not to speak of [their] moral unhappiness." Again, Jacobi used her identity as a woman physician to blame female illnesses, as well as social ills, on women's second-class status.

-Carla Bittel, Mary Putnam Jacobi & The Politics of Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America.

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Putnam, attuned to the fact that fears about women physicians differed when one crossed national borders, also took advantage of her national identity as an American woman. She remarked, "An Englishman would say that it was indelicate to admit women to study medicine, a Frenchman, that it was dangerous." In France, critics were most concerned with how the medical woman posed an internal threat, challenging French notions of women's roles in society and the family. Putnam seemed aware of this cultural concern in her decision to go to Paris, and she decided to use her outsider status as an asset rather than a liability.

Putnam also realized that a female physician "was never heard of" because the French believed it was unnatural, indelicate, and, as Putnam insinuated, dangerously provocative to have women in the close company of men. Knowing that it was difficult to be "delicate" at the dissecting table, she recognized that foreign women had a better chance of dispelling the myth that women doctors posed a threat to French society. She explained, "I knew well enough that I was not "dangerous,' and that Frenchmen would instantly perceive that I was not, and when once that first difficulty was overcome, that I could be much more at ease here." The French "disbelief" in women was so deeply "rooted," observed Putnam, that "their whole social system is constructed so entirely on the principle of keeping young men and women as far apart as flame and gunpowder." But as an American woman, with "greater coldness of temperament and reliability of character," she did not threaten to spark inappropriate relations. Maintaining a strong deportment, and "not flirting with the [other] students," worked in her favor. To the French, American women like Putnam seemed less feminine and lacking passion, and, therefore, less of a temptation to men. Ironically, American women in medicine became acceptable in France for the same reason female professionals became unacceptable in the United States: they appeared less womanly.

Putnam balanced a strong professional air with the demeanor of a respectable lady, negotiating a place for her own style of femininity within a masculine medical culture. She rejected feminine norms in her adopted nation and constructed a different identity as an American. Emphasizing character over appearance, modesty over fashion, French observers saw Putnam as more "gentille" than beautiful, which was to her advantage, since "much prettiness would be in the way of attending, or, in fact, receiving permission to attend the hospitals." Describing herself as a "boy-girl" to her family, she knew that she was combining qualities of both genders, and upsetting traditional roles both at home and abroad. She tried to calm her parents, who worried about their daughter acting "more like a son." She told them not to worry about her with such "feminine perversity," that she would find a way to remain respectable yet resilient in her attempts to access the education she so desired. French physicians may have had doubts about Putnam, but ultimately, she gained admission to Parisian clinics and laboratories, and eventually, the École de Médecine. Putnam was accepted because she did not pose a serious risk to the French social order, or so it seemed.

-Carla Bittel, Mary Putnam Jacobi & The Politics of Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America.

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At the end of their sessions in Albany, New York suffragists hoped they had gained support from several legislators at the convention. Although the women claimed to be nonpartisan, they anticipated support from Republicans, in particular. But the suffrage amendment failed in a vote of ninety-seven to fifty-eight, and party politics worked against them. As Jacobi put it in a letter to Carl Schurz, who opposed woman suffrage: “The desire of the Republicans to retain the prestige of the Convention, ... to keep their grip on the State, introduces calculations inimical to the women's claim.” Many senators obviously agreed with Francis M. Scott of New York, who proclaimed to the chamber: “I vote, not because I am intelligent, not because I am moral, but solely and simply because I am a man.” Many New York politicians believed that when it came to the vote, sex superseded all other considerations.

The failure of the suffrage amendment at the convention did not dissuade activists from continuing their campaign. Returning to the city that fall, Jacobi decided to further disseminate her arguments and expand her convention speech into a treatise, "Common Sense" Applied to Woman Suffrage (1894), the most important text produced by the campaign, ultimately with lasting significance. Intended for a middle-class audience, G. P. Putnam's Sons published the book and sold it widely in its "Questions of the Day" series. The title "Common Sense" came from Thomas Paine's revolutionary pamphlet, and it connected the cause to the founding fathers, a common tactic utilized by men and women alike in nineteenth-century political discourse. Jacobi's book pointed to the important role played by American women in the development of the nation, including the Revolution. The title "Common Sense" reflected the book's main purpose: to explain what seemed obvious to Jacobi, that suffrage was the logical outcome of women's legal, intellectual, and industrial emancipation in the nineteenth century. Jacobi's "Common Sense" was also a reversal of Paine, who maintained that the distinction of king and subject was unnatural but that "male and female [were] distinctions of nature." She, on the other hand, asserted that commonalities between the sexes were natural and most distinctions were manufactured barriers that could be overcome through the education of women and changes to the social order.

-Carla Bittel, Mary Putnam Jacobi & The Politics of Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America.

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If the arrival of children nourished the Jacobi marriage, other factors weakened their bond, including their different temperaments. Extremely bold and eager to speak her mind, Mary was independent and determined to live life on her own terms. Although her husband was joyful around the children, Mary thought he was "unsocial" with adults and did not easily mix with new people; he was most comfortable in the company of old friends, preferring fellow physicians and activists, most importantly, Carl Schurz. A former Union army general who became a leading Republican as well as a journalist, orator, reformer, and the first German-born U.S. senator, Schurz shared Jacobi's political sensibility and memories of European radicalism. The two men were often described as “inseparable.” Over time, Abraham found intellectual inspiration more often in his male companions than in his wife. While she cared deeply for her children, she was not a model of nineteenth-century maternalism and did not relish their daily care. Abraham, by contrast, was more affectionate with the children, playing, cuddling, and singing them lullabies. Mary acknowledged their different parental relationships, predicting Ernst would adore his father and see her more as the disciplinarian and custodian.

The two doctors disagreed on the gendered roles of parenthood, particularly how to manage the responsibilities of the household. Though Abraham felt personally attached to the children, he believed that overseeing their care ultimately stood with Mary. Although they employed a nurse and other household servants, Abraham expected that his wife would make the professional and personal sacrifices needed to raise a family. Their conflict over parental roles brewed for years, but it came to a head in the spring of 1883, following a birthday celebration for Carl Schurz. Both had been invited to the party, but Abraham believed that "some one had to stay at home with the children," and it should have been Mary, considering he was "the oldest friend of C.S." When she went to Schurz's on her own, Abraham refused to go. Following the incident, he confronted her over dinner about her behavior, prompting her to walk away from the table and leave the house, most likely to stay with Victoria White, a colleague and collaborator. Abraham was angered by her disappearance and her mysterious whereabouts, although he suspected that she was in the city, "as on former occasions." Clearly, this was not the first time that Mary fled in anger from the expectations of marriage and motherhood.

The couple had great difficulty working out a peaceful coexistence, or, as Abraham described it, "a quiet and rational modus vivendi." Mary insisted on living and working by her own decisions, and her husband grew more irritated with her actions. Believing in the similarities between men and women, or fathers and mothers, she saw no need to make serious concessions to her husband. Although progressive in his thinking, Abraham thought she was ungrateful for not acknowledging his support for her professional status. In a letter to Mary during her absence, he wrote, "If you had less temper, and more patience, and a less exaggerated conviction of what is due to you, you might have recognized the fact that I have done a great deal for you." But what Abraham saw as a "quiet and rational" existence, Mary saw as confinement.

-Carla Bittel, Mary Putnam Jacobi & The Politics of Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America.

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Although Paris had a strong hold on Mary Putnam Jacobi, New York had much to offer, for Manhattan was becoming the nucleus of American intellectual life. It was the center of American literary culture as well as the publishing capital, due in part to George Putnam's contributions in the previous decades. New York was the locale of a growing academic community, led by the expansion of the city's universities. And it was a medical mecca due to its growing hospitals, medical societies, and public health movements after the Civil War. New York City was also becoming a prominent urban center of American women's rights activism, a movement that started in Seneca Falls in 1848. After belonging to such vibrant intellectual circles in Paris, Jacobi sought out like-minded intellectuals and professionals in New York, and did not need to look far.

Shortly after her arrival, Jacobi became involved in the New York Positivist Society, a loose-knit group of the city's intelligentsia dedicated to the ideas of August Comte. At biweekly meetings, middle- and upper-class writers, artists, and professionals met in parlors or lecture rooms to philosophize about the problems that plagued modern industrial society and to construct programs of social reform. These American disciples of Comte focused on two key positivist principles. First, they believed that all knowledge should be based on observable phenomena derived from empirical, scientific investigation. As David G. Croly, head of the New York Positivist Society, put it, "Our faith is ... based upon demonstrated truths, not upon authority or tradition, or mere subjective conceptions, but upon objective realities which can be seen and known of all men." Rejecting the atheist label, positivists insisted, "Our Supreme Being is Humanity, which we affirm is the only God man ever could or ever can know. " Second, they viewed society as an organism that mirrored both the family structure and the human body with its interrelated and interdependent parts. In the positivist view, all members and sectors of society, like all parts of an organism, should work in concert for the broader good. The philosophy translated neatly into middle-class visions of social reform in the post-Civil War era, for positivists believed professionals could eradicate social problems, and a new moral order would emerge where citizens worshipped humanity and directed their spirituality toward social improvement.

-Carla Bittel, Mary Putnam Jacobi & The Politics of Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America.

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By the 1890s, Jacobi's medical career had grown tremendously since her first years of practice in New York. She was now an established figure in the medical community, as seen in her membership and leadership positions in several societies. Although she resigned from teaching at the Woman's Medical College in 1889, she continued her clinical work at the New York Infirmary until 1897 and was a visiting physician at St. Mark's Hospital until 1902. Neurological studies dominated her medical research, as did her ongoing study of sex differences. She also continued to conduct and promote laboratory work, making the support and defense of vivisection a top priority in her political agenda.

"No physiological doctrine has ever been established without vivisection," Jacobi wrote definitively to the editor of The Century in 1890. Her belief in the value of live-subject experiments had not waned as the debate over vivisection intensified in the profession and the nation at large. Equating vivisection with medical expertise, Jacobi continued to defend the practice as "good medicine" and a necessary act of scientific investigation. She privileged the social organism over the animal organism, humans over animals, and stood by animal vivisection as fundamental for human survival. The practice of vivisection could both demonstrate the similarities between men and women as they worked side by side in the laboratory and reinforce the distance between humans and animals. If both sexes could manipulate and control animal life, women could show they had little biologically in common with the animal kingdom. To connect science with the advancement of women, Jacobi tried to undo constructions of vivisection as a brutal masculine activity.

Many animal welfare activists rejected the notion that live-subject experimentation would help women, or medicine for that matter, believing that vivisection represented unnecessary acts of human cruelty against the natural world. Politicized and mobilized, these activists provided a strong challenge to Jacobi and those who saw "progress" through the microscope and on the dissecting table. From different angles, antivivisectionists defined animal experimentation as unnecessary and used their gender identity to claim moral authority on the issue. Women, especially, claimed to know right from wrong, humane from inhumane. Projecting feminine ideals and moral superiority, they placed themselves in opposition to many men of medicine, who they claimed were willing to be brutal for the sake of scientific knowledge. From this perspective, Jacobi and other female experimenters were unwelcome anomalies who defied nature through acts of cruelty that violated Victorian notions of morality and womanhood.

-Carla Bittel, Mary Putnam Jacobi & The Politics of Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America.

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Jan - Jun 2023 Reading List:

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Dear Ijeawele, or, A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017.

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. We Should All Be Feminists. New York: Vintage Books, 2014.

Bartky, Sandra Lee. Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Bittel, Carla. Mary Putnam Jacobi & The Politics of Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Bolen, Jean Shinoda. Goddesses in Everywoman: A New Psychology of Women. Perennial Library, n.d.

Brownmiller, Susan. Femininity. New York: Open Road Media, 2013.

Chesler, Phyllis. Women and Madness. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2018.

Christ, Carol P., and Judith Plaskow. Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979.

Daly, Mary. The Church and the Second Sex. New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1975.

Davis, Elizabeth Gould. The First Sex. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1971.

Doyle, Sady. Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers. Brooklyn: Melville House Publishing, 2019.

Dworkin, Andrea. Intercourse. New York: Basic Books, 2007.

Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Deirdre English. For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1978.

Firestone, Shulamith. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1970.

Gowrinathan, Nimmi. Radicalizing Her: Why Women Choose Violence. Boston: Beacon Press, 2021.

Hawthorne, Susan. In Defence of Separatism. Mission Beach: Spinifex Press, 2019.

Jeffreys, Sheila. Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution. Spinifex Press, 1990.

Jeffreys, Sheila. The Spinster and Her Enemies. Chicago: Spinifex Press, 1997.

Johnson, Sonia. Going Out of Our Minds: The Metaphysics of Liberation. Freedom: Crossing Press, 1987.

Johnson, Sonia. Wildfire Igniting the She/volution. Albuquerque: Wildfire Books, 1989.

Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Patriarchy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Love Your Enemy? The Debate between Heterosexual Feminism and Political Lesbianism. London: Onlywomen Press, Ltd., 1981.

Miles, Rosalind. Who Cooked the Last Supper?: The Women's History of the World. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001.

Reed, Evelyn. Woman’s Evolution: From Matriarchal Clan to Patriarchal Family. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1975.

Sjöö, Monica, and Barbara Mor. The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering The Religion of the Earth. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2013.

Smith, Joan. Home Grown: How Domestic Violence Turns Men Into Terrorists. London: Riverrun, 2019.

Solanas, Valerie. SCUM Manifesto: With an Introduction by Vivian Gornick. London: Olympia Press, 1971.

Spender, Dale. Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them. London: Ark Paperbacks, 1983.

Srinivasan, Amia. The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.

Stone, Merlin. When God Was a Woman. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.

Ussher, Jane. Women’s Madness: Misogyny or Mental Illness? Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.

West, Lindy. The Witches are Coming. New York: Hachette Books, 2019.