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How Louisa May Alcott Voted for the First Time in 1880

On March 29, 1880, Louisa May Alcott voted with 19 other women for the first time at the Concord Town Meeting.

The only thing they could vote for, though, was school committee. The year before, the Massachusetts Legislature had bowed to pressure from suffragists and agreed to let the commonwealth’s women have that limited franchise. It would take another 40 years for the 19th Amendment to pass recognizing women’s right to vote — or at least white women’s right to vote.

When Louisa May Alcott voted, though, she wasn’t the first woman in the commonwealth to cast a ballot. In a couple of small towns, women could already vote for school committee. Ashfield and Monroe let women serve on local school boards starting in 1868. Boston did the same in 1874.

Those votes for school committee would have to satisfy women for decades. The struggle for full access to the polls would continue until 1920. And even the small concession of letting women vote for school committee was too much for some. As activist Harriet Hanson Robinson, wrote, “it was thought to be a rash and dreadful act for a woman to appear at the polls, or near the ballot box, in company with the MEN.”

Louisa May Alcott voted for the first time in 1880.

Women’s Suffrage

When Louisa May Alcott voted in 1880, the women’s suffrage movement had officially been in full swing for 32 years, ever since the first convention in Seneca Falls, N.Y.

Since then, it had gained steam, as a national Women’s Rights Convention took place in 1850 in Worcester, Mass., and the American Equal Rights Association met for the first time in Boston in 1866.

Louisa May Alcott and her entire family supported women’s suffrage along with a host of other reforms, including school reform, dietary reform and abolition of slavery.

In 1853, Louisa’s mother, Abby Alcott, drafted a petition demanding equal political rights for women in Massachusetts. In the 1870s she declared, “I am seventy-three, but I mean to go to the polls before I die, even if my daughters have to carry me.”

She never got the chance.

Though Louisa May Alcott voted, her mother, Abby Alcott, never got the chance.

How Louisa May Alcott Voted

Louisa May Alcott showed she was her mother’s daughter when she signed letters, “Yours for reforms of all kinds.”

She supported the women’s suffrage movements by writing articles for The Woman’s Journal, the leading suffrage paper.

When Massachusetts let women vote for school committee, Louisa May Alcott went door-to-door to urge women to register. She also held meetings at her house.

The Wayside, where the Alcott family lived from 1845 to 1848. They sold it to Nathaniel Hawthorne.

When the great day arrived, she wrote, a group of 20 women, ‘mostly with husbands, fathers or brother’ appeared, ‘all in good spirits and not in the least daunted by the awful deed about to be done.’

After two hours of Town Meeting, the school committee vote came up. Bronson Alcott, Louisa May’s father, suggested the women vote first. The women stood up and walked to the front of the hall.

The local newspaper reported, ‘many a feminine heart [palpitated] with excitement . . . in preparation for the trying ordeal of passing in front of . . . nearly 200 great horned men & boys to deposit their maiden vote.’

Some of the men thought it funny, she wrote. But when Louisa May Alcott voted with the other women, “No bolt fell on our audacious heads, no earthquake shook the town, but a pleasing surprise created a general outbreak of laughter and applause,” she wrote.

A Good Committee

Then came a surprise. The moderator announced the voting closed before the men could vote for school committee. The men, noted Louisa, seemed perturbed.

She thought it fair because the women couldn’t vote on any other issue.

One man consoled himself by saying it didn’t matter because the women voted the same way their husbands, fathers and brothers would have.

A defiant Louisa May Alcott concluded, “We elected a good school committee.”

She hoped more women would vote, but in 1883, only seven did.

Forty years later, on August 26, 1920, the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution took effect.

This story was updated in 2022.

Images: The Wayside by By Daderot at English Wikipedia – Photograph taken by me, July 4, 2005., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=221716.

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Six Amazing Indian Women From New England

Indian women faced double discrimination since the first European colonists arrived in the Americas. Many fought back against the prejudice that destroyed their traditional way of life.

Some Indian women like Lucy Nicolar exploited stereotypes to put across a message of equality for all. Other Indian women like Gladys Tantaquidgeon used modern education to preserve traditional customs and arts.

Here, then, are six amazing Indian women from New England. If you know of others, please mention them in the comments section.

Lucy Nicolar

Lucy Nicolar, a talented musician, took the stage name Princess Watahwosa, and spent her life mixing entertainment with political activism.

Publicity photo of Lucy Nicolar as Princess Watahwaso

She was born June 22, 1882, on the Penobscot reservation, which stretched along the Penobscot River in Maine from Indian Island to East Millinocket. As a child she traveled with her family to Kennebunkport. There they sold baskets and performed in Indian dress for tourists.

Lucy came to the attention of a Harvard administrator who hired her as his assistant, took her into his household and gave her musical and educational opportunities. Eventually she became a recording artist with Victor Records, performing adaptations of Indian songs such as By the Waters of Minnetonka and By the Weeping Waters.

Lucy Nicolar eventually returned to the Penobscot Indian Island Reservation with her husband Bruce Poolaw, a Kiowa entertainer from Oklahoma. They opened a gift shop while Lucy and her sister campaigned to improve life on the reservation. The two Indian women raised the educational standards for Penobscot children by gaining access to the public schools. They also persuaded the state to build a bridge to the island.

Lucy and Florence also demanded the right to vote for their people. When the state extended suffrage to the Penobscots in 1955, Lucy Nicolar cast the first ballot.

Betsey Guppy Chamberlain

Betsey Guppy Chamberlain promoted the then-radical idea that Indians – and Indian women — are people.

The Lowell Offering

A half-Algonquian mill girl, she published some of the first criticisms of the treatment of Native Americans in short stories from 1841 to 1848.

Born sometime around 1797, perhaps in Wolfeboro or Brookfield, N.H., she was part European. She married Josiah Chamberlain, a farmer, in 1820 and they had three children. Her husband died in 1823. Betsey sold their farm and went to work in the Lowell textile mills to support herself and her children.

The mill girls wrote for magazines published in town called the Lowell Offering and the New England Offering. Betsey Guppy Chamberlain wrote for both.

Harriet Hanson Robinson, a Lowell Offering contributor, wrote that Betsey Guppy Chamberlain probably came to the mills from a Shaker community.

She had inherited Indian blood, and was proud of it. She had long, straight black hair, and walked very erect, with great freedom of movement. One of her sons was afterwards connected with the New York Tribune.

Betsey Guppy Chamberlain wrote 37 stories and poems for the magazines. In them, she embraced themes of Indian gods and spirituality while satirizing Christian hypocrisy. Robinson called her the most original, prolific and noted of all the Offering writers.

In a story called A New Society she wrote of her dream where new rules of living are adopted. Among those rules:

Resolved, That every father of a family who neglects to give his daughters the same advantages for an education which he gives his sons, shall be expelled from this society, and be considered a heathen.

Weetamoo

Weetamoo, a Pocasset Wampanoag Indian, was married to Wamsutta, the eldest son of Massasoit. Massasoit had negotiated a treaty of friendship with the Pilgrims of Plimoth Plantation, and the English and Indians coexisted peacefully for 55 years.

Wamsutta succeeded his father as the tribe’s sachem. When war broke out between the English and the Narragansetts, Wamsutta and the Wampanoags joined the English against their rival tribe. After Wamsutta died, the Plymouth Colony grabbed more and more Indian land, subjected the Wampanoags to a humiliating peace treaty and hanged three of their men.

Weetamoo became sachem after Wamsutta died because the Wampanoags allowed women to become sachems in the absence of an adequate male heir.

Weetamo allied with her brother-in-law, Metacomet, also known as King Philip, to drive out the European settlers. They attacked the English in June 1675.

After months of bloody fighting in King Philip’s War, the English defeated the Wampanoags in August 1676. While trying to escape from them, Weetamoo drowned in the Taunton River. The English fighters mutilated her corpse, cut off her head and displayed it on a pole.

Molly Spotted Elk

Molly Spotted Elk was the stage name for Mary Alice Nelson, a Penobscot Indian acclaimed for her dancing in Paris.

Mary Alice Nelson

She acted out the stereotype of the sexy savage to meet the racist expectations of white people. At the same time she strove for recognition as an entertainer, as a writer and as an anthropologist.

Molly was born on the Indian Island Reservation on Nov. 17, 1903, about 20 years later than Lucy Nicolar, with whom she performed early in her career.

As Molly Spotted Elk, she started out on her own performing Indian dances along with the Charleston and the Black Bottom. She carried her typewriter into dressing rooms and between shows wrote poetry and adventure stories, literary fiction and traditional Penobscot tales.

In 1930, she starred in the film documentary The Silent Enemy. The next year Molly Spotted Elk left for Paris in the ballet corps of the International Colonial Exposition. When the troupe returned home, she stayed behind.

Shortly after she arrived in France, she met Jean Archambaud, a reporter for Paris Soir newspaper. Soon he wrote passionate love letters to her. She agreed to marry him, and they had a daughter. She worked on a book of Penobscot stories and found a publisher willing to bring it out.

The Nazi invasion of Paris separated Molly and Jean. She fled with her daughter on foot over the Pyrenees and found her way home to Indian Island. For the rest of her life, she drifted between New York and the reservation, taking menial jobs. She died on Indian Island on Feb. 21, 1977 at the age of 73, in poor physical and mental health. But she left a legacy: a book of traditional Penobscot stories in English and a dictionary of the Penobscot language.

Buffy St. Marie

Buffy Sainte-Marie was a rising pop star in the 1960s until her activism on behalf of her Native-American people put a lid on her career.

Buffy Sainte-Marie, 1970

She was born Feb. 20, 1941, on the Piapot Plains Cree Nation Reserve near Craven, Saskatchewan. Her parents abandoned her as an infant. Albert and Winifred Sainte-Marie, a Wakefield, Mass., couple of Mi’kmaq descent, adopted the baby known only as Beverly.

Nicknamed Buffy, she played piano and guitar by the time she went off to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

There she began to write songs about Native-American rights, addiction, incest and war. When the singer Donovan recorded one of her songs, Universal Soldier, it rose to the top of the charts. That launched her on a successful recording career – which began to sputter in the mid-1960s.

Starting in the 1990s, Buffy Sainte-Marie came out and said the industry blacklisted her in the 1960s because of her activism. She sent money to buy water for the Indians who seized Alcatraz Island the year before. She’d also set up a foundation to send young Indians to law school.

Her career took a twist in 1975, when Sesame Street called to ask her to make a one-time appearance on the show. Buffy Sainte-Marie then appeared on Sesame Street for the next five years.

Gladys Tantaquidgeon

Medicine woman Gladys Tantaquidgeon revived dying Indian traditions, published books on traditional herbal medicine and helped the Mohegan tribe gain Federal recognition.

She was born on June 15, 1899 to Mohegan parents, a descendant of the Mohegan chief Uncas. She grew up on Mohegan Hill in Uncasville, Conn.

Indian women elders selected her when she was five years old for training in traditional pharmacology and culture. While studying anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, Gladys researched traditional Indian herbal medicine. Over her lifetime, she published several books about traditional medicine.

In 1931, Gladys, along with her father and brother, started the Tantaquidgeon Indian Museum. It displays eastern Indian artifacts and is still run by the Mohegan tribe.

During the Great Depression, she worked as a native arts specialist with the Indian Arts and Crafts Board. She helped western tribal artisans preserve traditional skills and arts by finding ways to sell their work. She also saved customs like the Ghost Dance and the Sun Dance, banned in the 19th century.

Gladys saved tribal records and correspondence, documents that helped the tribe’s case for federal recognition.

Gladys Tantaquidgeon died in 2005. Her great niece, Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel, continues her work as an author and the current Mohegan Medicine Woman.

End Notes

Images: Gladys Tantaquidgeon By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37390510. Thanks to Bunny McBride for research on Lucy Nicolar and Molly Spotted Elk in Sifters: Native American Women’s Lives (Viewpoints on American Culture) edited by Theda Perdue and Molly Spotted Elk: A Penobscot Indian in Paris . Thanks to Annalyssa Gypsy Murphy for her research on Betsey Guppy Chamberlain in Dissent Along the Borders of the Fourth World: Native American Writings as Social Protest and Judith A. Ranta in The Life and Writings of Betsey Chamberlain: Native American Mill Worker. And thanks to Jason Schneider for his research on Buffy St. Marie in Whispering Pines: The Northern Roots of American Music… from Hank Snow to the Band. For more about Weetamoo, read Longing To Be Free: The Bear, The Eagle and The Crown by Judith Guskin. This story was updated in 2022.

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The Antis: Women Who Fought Against the Vote

In the late 19^th century, women known as antis began to organize against women who wanted the right to vote.

A cartoon making the antis argument. Courtesy Library of Congress.

The antis viewed suffragists as angry killjoys who wanted to intrude on politics, the proper realm of men. They argued women didn’t need the vote because men could conduct government for both sexes. Further, they contended, the vote alone assssscouldn’t fix any injustice women suffered.

Maine native Kate Douglas Wiggin, who wrote Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, supported the antis. She told a group of women in 1912 she would have ‘woman strong enough to keep just a trifle in the background, for the limelight never makes anything grow.’

As extraordinary as it seems today, the antis got plenty of support from women.

Who Were The Antis?

Suffragists started their first national organization in 1869. It would take the antis another 42 years to form theirs. They called themselves the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, or NAOWS. They passed out pamphlets that preached, ‘you do not need a ballot to clean out your sink.’ One pamphlet included household hints such as cleaning ink spots with sour milk — along with advice to ‘not waste time, energy and money’ on voting.

Other anti-suffrage propaganda pictured men caring for babies and doing household chores while women went off to vote.

The antis had many reasons for opposing the vote. Some with wealth and social prestige feared the vote would dislodge them from their comfortable positions.

Others viewed the suffragists as dangerous radicals associated with birth control, free love and the labor movement.

Some women became antis because they feared electoral politics would erode their ability to do good works. The Progressive Era, for example, got its name from women who tried to solve social problems in clubs, hospitals and settlement houses. They supported prison reform, shorter work days, an end to child labor and improved sanitation and diet.

The antis national organization. Courtesy Library of Congress.

Josephine Jewell Dodge

Josephine Jewell Dodge had wealth and prestige, but she also spent several decades promoting day care centers for working mothers. Dodge was born in 1855 in Hartford to Marshall Jewell, a prominent Connecticut politician who headed the Republican National Committee. She married Arthur Murray Dodge, son of wealthy Congressman William E. Dodge, in 1875.

After rising to prominence for her activism, Josephine Jewell Dodge turned her attention to fighting woman’s suffrage. In 1911, members of the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage elected her their first president.

As an anti, she faced accusations that she was a political cats’ paw. The suffragists, who mostly supported temperance, claimed she carried water for the liquor interests.

The suffragists, of course, met the same kind of allegation. The antis charged the suffragists fronted for corrupt male organizations like Tammany Hall.

Both sides used ridicule as a weapon. And as head of NAOWS, Josephine Jewell Dodge confronted the same kind of ridicule the suffragists endured.

Ladies Riot

In 1915, a newspaper reported the antis and the suffragists nearly rioted at a meeting before the National Democratic Committee in Washington, D.C. Josephine Jewell Dodge gave a speech that affronted the suffragists.

“Charges of bribery hurled against Mrs. Dodge met with tears, then a haughty rejoinder — altogether like a men’s political affair except for the smoke,” reported the Washington Herald.

A ‘Western woman’ shook a handful of suffrage leaflets ‘under the nose of the very dignified anti,’ reported the Herald. She shouted that Josephine Jewell Dodge received $75 for delivering her speech.

“Mrs. Dodge flushed angrily and tears filled her eyes,” reported the Herald. “Then she replied in her haughtiest manner:

“As a woman of independent means I not only have never received a cent for my services, but I have financed the work of many others.”

State Chapters of Antis

The antis, just as the suffragists had, began their organizing in Massachusetts, though much later than the suffragists.

An anti-suffrage cartoon showing how the vote would backfire. Courtesy Library of Congress.

In 1895, the Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Further Extension of Suffrage to Women was founded by such Brahmins as Mrs. J. Eliot Cabot, Cornelia Baylis Lowell and Kate Gannett Wells. They attracted nearly 37,000 members by 1915 and had a headquarters on Boylston Street in Boston.

By 1910, the antis spread to other states, including Connecticut.

Mrs. Grace G. Markham, founded the Connecticut Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage. It had branches in 161 cities and towns.

Mrs. Markham warned the ‘suffs’ had joined the Reds and wanted to incite class and race hatred.

The fight over woman’s suffrage divided many Connecticut communities, including a prominent artist colony.

In 1914, about 50 suffragists organized the Equal Franchise League in Old Lyme.

Two years earlier, 16 ladies, including art colony founder Florence Griswold, formed Old Lyme’s group of antis. Within a year the antis filled Town Hall for a speaker who denounced the suffragists. Alice Hill Chittendon explained ‘some of the undesirable results of equal suffrage already discovered.’

In January 1919, Mrs. Hermon Hubbard wrote a blistering letter to the New London Day, excoriating the newspaper for supporting the suffrage movement. She called it ‘the most radical and socialistic movement of the day.’ Six months later, she wrote a follow-up letter arguing women should stay home minding their children, ‘not running in the streets.’

New Hampshire Antis

A typical antis argument against the vote.

How did antis respond in 1920 when Tennessee approved the 19^th Amendment, reaching the threshold required to give women the vote?

Some antis refused to vote. But the diary of an Exeter, N.H., teenager shows a typical progression from anti to voter.

New Hampshire antis organized a state chapter of NAOWS, and Exeter formed its own chapter. Effie Tufts, an ardent anti, took her 16-year-old daughter Helen to hear two antis speak at Town Hall in 1913.

Helen reported in her diary that the meeting was ‘very good,’ and she had decided, “I’m an anti.”

In 1919, Helen’s father, state Sen. James Tufts, voted against the 19^th Amendment .

“Father fought it, spoke etc, but N.H. passed the suffrage amendment 18 to 10,” wrote Helen Tufts. “Worse Luck!”

She changed her tune in 1920, when at 23 she could vote for the first time.

“Mrs. Illsley came at — and took Mother and me down to VOTE!!! My first X ever put on a ballot was for Father for State Senator.”

With thanks to the Exeter Historical Society and the Florence Griswold Museum. This story about the antis was updated in 2022.

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Lucy Downing Gets Her Son Into Harvard. By Founding It.

In the spring of 1636, Lucy Downing wrote a letter from England to her older brother, John Winthrop. Six years earlier he had led a group of Puritans to Massachusetts.

Lucy and her family wanted to join them, but she was reluctant because her son George couldn’t finish his studies in New England. “You have yet no societies nor means of that kind for the education of youths in learning,” she wrote.

She suggested Winthrop establish a college in the New World:

It would make me goe far nimbler to New England, if God should call me to it, than otherwise I should, and I believe a colledge would put no small life into the plantation.

Portrait of John Winthrop, American Antiquarian Society.

Later that year, the Massachusetts colony’s legislature — which included John Winthrop — voted to give 400 pounds to establish a college in Newtowne, later renamed Cambridge. The lawmakers dreaded ‘to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches, when our present ministers shall lie in the dust.”‍

Shortly thereafter, John Harvard died. A rich, childless minister, he bequeathed to the ‘infant seminary’ 780 pounds – half his estate. The other half went to his wife. He also gave the school 400 scholarly volumes from his library.

The grateful Legislature in 1638 ordered the school yet to be built should be called ‘Harvard.’

Lucy Downing

In 1638, Lucy Downing and her family sailed to the Massachusetts Bay Colony on the Thomas and Francis so they could lead spiritual and righteous lives.

Engraving of Harvard College by Paul Revere

Like her brother, Lucy Downing was a well-educated Puritan who gave up a comfortable life in England for an uncertain future in a wilderness. She was 37, mother of seven children and married to a respected barrister. In England they had maids and a summer house in the country.

They settled in Salem, built a farm and had more children. Emanuel represented the town in the Legislature and made frequent trips back to England.

George Downing

Son George graduated from Harvard in 1642, returned to England and made a fortune. He became Sir George Downing and built a street in London where the prime minister now lives.

Who Gets Credit for Founding Harvard?

Lucy Downing had a champion in none other than Harriet Hanson, the Lowell mill girl who grew into an acclaimed author and leader of the women’s suffrage movement.

Harriet Hanson Robinson

Whether Lucy Downing’s earnest plea to her brother…for a school in which to educate her son, prompted him, or hurried his attention thus early to act in this direction, we cannot now tell. It is as the history says, ‘certainly a remarkable coincidence.’

Hanson complained that historians ignored Lucy Downing was ignored by history, as did her son George. When Emanuel Downing died in 1658, she moved to London. She soon found herself in straitened circumstances.

Lucy wrote to one of her sons:

I am now att ten pounds a yeare for my chamber, and three pounde for my servants’ wages, and have to extend the other ten pounde a yeare to accomodat for our meat and drink, and for my clothing and all other nessessaries I am much to seek, and more your brother Georg will not hear of for me, and he says that it is only covetousness that makes me ask more.

Her nephew John Winthrop the Younger, governor of Connecticut, got wind of her distress. He then begged George to help ‘aunt Lucy in her tyme of age and infirmity.’ George replied he couldn’t do any more for his mother than he already had. Lucy Downing died in 1679, at the age of 78.

Harriet Hanson compared Lucy’s treatment by her son George with Harvard’s failure to admit women.

John Harvard

Harriet Hanson wasn’t the only person to credit Lucy Downing with founding Harvard.

John Harvard had many detractors who call it a myth that he founded Harvard College. In 1934, the Harvard Corporation’s secretary tried to straighten the record. He did it with a letter that said there is no myth to be destroyed:

If the founding of a university must be dated to a split second of time, then the founding of Harvard should perhaps be fixed by the fall of the president’s gavel in announcing the passage of the vote of October 28, 1636. But if the founding is to be regarded as a process rather than as a single event [then John Harvard, by virtue of his bequest “at the very threshold of the College’s existence and going further than any other contribution made up to that time to ensure its permanence”] is clearly entitled to be considered a founder. The General Court … acknowledged the fact by bestowing his name on the College. This was almost two years before the first President took office and four years before the first students were graduated.

This story was updated in 2022.

Images: Harvard Yard By The original uploader was Mancala at English Wikipedia. – Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by Vinhtantran. Created by user:Mancala., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5922104.

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Lydia Chapin Taft – New England’s First Woman Voter

Lydia Chapin Taft was the first woman to legally vote in New England.

Illustration of a colonial kitchen

The year was 1756, and the issue of taxation without representation was a hot concern in the American colonies. Boston minister James Mayhew was preaching about the injustice of British colonial rule in election year sermons that would give rise to the issue.

In the town of Uxbridge, Mass., meanwhile, the issue took on a more local tone. The town needed to raise funds to contribute to its defense in the French and Indian Wars. Voting was restricted to male landowners at the time. Uxbridge had just lost one of its largest property owners: Josiah Taft.

Josiah was a civic leader in Uxbridge, serving as a selectman and town moderator. In 1756, Caleb Taft – son of Josiah and Lydia – became sick while attending Harvard. When Caleb died, Josiah retrieved his body, and Josiah, too, soon fell ill and died.

Lydia Chapin Taft Casts a Vote

The town needed to select a new moderator, and it also needed to vote on whether to fund the ongoing war. Henry Chapin, a descendent of the Tafts, would later document in 1864 that the town took the unusual step of giving Lydia the right to vote at town meeting.

With her eldest surviving son Bezaleel not yet 10 years old, no male representative of the Taft’s large estate could vote the family interests. The town meeting, however, remedied this by asking Lydia to vote. She did, casting her vote to support the request for funding. And so the first recorded vote by a woman in Massachusetts occurred.

It would be more than 160 years and countless protests before all women could vote. The full reasoning behind the town of Uxbridge’s decision to ask Lydia to vote isn’t documented. Henry Chapin suggested, however, the spirit of “no taxation without representation” inspired the decision. But he also notes that her vote decided the issue, and perhaps her side needed her vote for political purposes.

Regardless, records show Lydia Taft appeared at least twice more at town meeting conducting her affairs: once to address tax issues and once to change the school district she was assigned.

This story updated in 2022.

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Edward Hammond Clarke and the Chance for Girls

Education was a hot topic in the 1870. How much education should one have and who should get it? Edward Hammond Clarke sought to put the debate into a new perspective – before too much education made everyone sick.

Edward Hammond Clarke (Harvard University Archives)

By the 1870s, there was an established consensus that for boys education should extend well beyond the simple reading and writing demanded in colonial days. Math, science and philosophy were all valued subjects.

For girls, the debate still percolated. Girls had finishing schools and schools that taught home economics. But many schools discouraged girls from studying science and math.

Emma Willard

Connecticut’s Emma Willard had been fighting this trend as early as 1819 with publication of her Plan for Improving Female Education. Willard opened a school for girls in Troy, N.Y., the following year. Catherine Beecher opened a school for girls in Hartford, Conn. in 1823. Public high schools opened for girls in Boston and New York in 1826.

Inevitably, greater education led to greater demands for equality in other areas. For example, while Willard never supported the women’s suffrage movement, the girls who graduated her school did. As more and more girls received a high school education, more began contemplating college.

Edward Hammond Clarke

Edward Hammond Clarke found that idea dangerous as well as disturbing.

Clarke, a Harvard-trained physician, moved in the right Boston social circles. His patients included abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Born in 1820, he received his Harvard degree in 1841. He took his medical training in Philadelphia.

In 1872 the New England Women’s Club, an organization of progressive Boston women, invited Clarke to speak. By then Clarke had a position as a professor at the Harvard Medical College and had reached peak of his profession. He had a reputation for treating medical disorders successfully with the latest medications.

New England Women’s Club headquarters, ca 1903

Clarke chose as the topic for his speech the appropriate education for girls. The thrust of Clarke’s talk was that educating girls was fraught with peril. If girls during the ages of 13 to 17 spent too much time learning, the efforts they put into developing their brains would hinder the needed growth of their ovaries and uterus.

The state of womanhood was dire, Clarke observed in his practice, as disease ran rampant. Food and fashion were in part to blame, he acknowledged. Too much cake and pie contributed their part. Corsets and binding clothes were to blame for some problems, as well. But not all disease could be explained this way.

“Leucorrhoea, amenorrhea, dysmenorrhea, chronic and acute ovaritis, prolapsis utari, hysteria, neuralgia and the like are indirectly affected by food, clothing and exercise; they are directly and largely affected by the causes that will presently be pointed out and which arise from a neglect of the peculiarities of a woman’s organization,” Clarke said. “The regimen of a college arranged for boys, if imposed on girls, would foster it even more.”

Girls vs. Boys

Clarke’s theory was straightforward. “Brain work and stomach work interfere with each other if attempted together.”

This put girls at a particular disadvantage. Boys, he postulated, entered the world much more fully developed than girls. They would withstand the rigors of school and college and still turn into men with functioning reproductive organs. Girls simply couldn’t do both. What’s more, too much time in school doomed women to a lifetime of sickliness, or as he put it: “A youth of study and an old age of nerves.”

Clarke believed that boys in adolescence would withstand six hours of schooling a day and occasionally as much as eight. Girls should be limited to four and never exceed five.

More time spent studying contributed to the puny, unhealthy population Clarke was treating in his practice. The brain and the body were at war, and the brain was too often winning.

Halifax

To buttress his observations, Clarke told of a recent trip to Halifax. There he noted that boys of 11 grew as tall and broad-shouldered as a 16-year-old from Massachusetts. And the young girls? “Girls of 10 or 11 were there who looked almost like women – that is, like ideal women – simply because they looked so calm and undisturbed.”

At civic functions on his Canadian trip, Clarke noted, he was surrounded by healthy and happy men and women. The reason, he concluded, was that Halifax had no public schools.

Controversy

Clarke’s presentation caused quite an uproar. He would research further and publish his theories in book form in 1873: Sex in Education: Or, A Fair Chance for the Girls. In the book, he added research from Europe that argued girls flourished when they dropped out of school as adolescents and pursued their studies more leisurely at home. Clarke then visited the National Education Association in 1874 to deliver his findings.

Clarke’s own life may have driven his thinking. He was a studious but sickly youngster, too sick to attend his graduation exercises. He also suffered from maladies of his digestive system throughout his life. Clarke died in 1877 – just four years after he published his book on education for girls.

Nevertheless, his book had influence that lasted long after his death. The book went through 17 printings. The American Association of University Women, founded in 1883, spent decades funding research to debunk Clarke’s theories.

This story about Edward Hammond Clarke was updated in 2023.

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