'The Academic Woman': Minds, Bodies, and Education in Britain

'The Academic Woman': Minds, Bodies, and Education in Britain and Germany, c. 1860 - c. 1914 Katharina Judith Rowold Ph.D. Thesis University College London 1996 ProQuest Number: 10106618 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest. ProQuest 10106618 Published by ProQuest LLC(2016). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 To my parents, Liz Rowold and Harald Rowold Abstract The thesis is a comparative study of British and German ideas about female nature, as reflected and developed in debates surrounding women's entry into university education. It consists of two parts, respectively on Britain and Germany. Contending conceptions of middle-class women's minds and bodies and their related social roles are explored from the time of the emergence of demands by the organized women's movements in each country to reform middle-class women's education, until after the institutionalisation of women's higher education. The thesis examines how in Britain scientists and physicians became the main participants, as well as feminists, in the public debates about women's education. As for Germany, it focuses on the intervention of academics, physicians, racial hygienists, and sexologists in the debates. It examines how feminists reconstituted, developed, and contributed to conceptions about female nature and women's social roles. It traces the ideas developed respecting the female mind and body and women's ensuing place in society; how they were contested; and how they changed in the period under examination. The contextual nature of the construction of gender difference is highlighted by the examination of two 111 distinct national cultures, which display differences and similarities in the cultural meanings at stake, affecting ideas about female nature and women's social roles and feeding into the education question. IV Table of Contents Abstract.............................................. ill Acknowledgements..................................... vi Introduction.......................................... 1 Part One: Britain Chapter One Equality and Difference: The Women's Movement, Female Education, and Gender until c. 1869 ........................ 28 Chapter Two Science and Gender: The Effects of Education on the Female Mind and Body, c. 1870 - c. 1885 ............... 81 Chapter Three Feminism and Science : Negotiating the Female Mind and Body, c. 1870 - c. 1890................................ 123 Chapter Four Eugenics and Feminism: The Politics of Reproduction and Women's Roles as Mothers of the Race, c. 1885 - c. 1914........ 166 Part Two: Germany Chapter Five The Bildungsbürgertum and the Women's Movement: Approaches to Female Education until c. 1888.... 211 Chapter Six The Sexual Division of Labour: Culture and Society, c. 1888 - c. 1900........ 266 Chapter Seven The Intellectual Woman: Agent of Degeneration or Regeneration? c. 1890 - c. 1914................................ 330 Chapter Eight A Masculine Mind in a Female Body: The Academic Woman as Sexual Invert, c. 1869 - c. 1914................................ 392 Conclusion............................................ 432 Bibliography.......................................... 451 V Acknowledgements My first acknowledgement must go to my supervisor, Roy Porter. I offer my profound thanks for his help, support, and encouragement. The Wellcome Trust has provided the funding, and the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine a great environment in which to work on this thesis. I also would like to thank Alison Bashford, Britta Benert (and Lucien Moissonnier), Bettina Bryan, Tony Felix, Johanna Geyer-Kordesch, Lesley Hall, Stephen Jacyna, Paco Romero, Sylvia Schmitz-Burgard, Alexander Rowold, Lynne Watton and Donate Wilms-Posen for the many different ways in which they have helped me. Some people I need to thank more extensively: Jo Bedford, for her far-reaching support; John Carson, whose comments on so many things I have written over the years (including a draft of the British chapters) have helped me enormously; Daniel Pick, for his advice and support since my undergraduate studies; and Sonu Shamdasani for commenting on a draft of the German chapters. Ergin Çavuçoglu has helped me in more ways than I could possibly mention here. Without him the time of the completion of the thesis would have been much less rewarding. It is, however, to my parents that I owe the most. It is to them that I dedicate this thesis. VI INTRODUCTION In 1869 the first women's college in England was established just outside Cambridge. More than thirty years after the opening of Girton College, in 1900, Baden became the first Land in Germany to admit women to its universities. In Britain and Germany access to higher education constituted an important aim of the organized women's movements. The attempt to introduce women into spheres of education hitherto open only to the male sex sparked off intense debates about female nature and how it related to women's social roles. These debates became a site for the negotiation of gender difference, in which those in favour and those against the demands of the women's movement, took up, discussed, developed and contested each others' views. This thesis is a comparative study of the constructions of gender in Britain and Germany in these debates, covering the period from the emergence of the organized women's movement in both countries during the 1860s until after the institutionalization of female higher education around the time of the outbreak of the First World War. In the debates there were similarities, but also significant differences between the two countries. In Britain, feminists' claims for reforms in women's education were located in a context of contesting notions of women's rights as individuals and perceptions of natural differences between male and female individuals which underlay their distinct positions in society. The emergence of ideas of universal equal rights since the Enlightenment had been paralleled by the scientifically- based elaboration of differences between the sexes, which justified the continuing inequality of rights between men and women.1 The separation of the public from the private sphere was formulated in terms of biological difference, in which women were constructed as finding their fullest expression in the family, and men in the public domain.^ Demands for women's admission to higher education challenged conceptions of differences between the sexes, which underlay middle-class social organization.^ The notion of women's right as individuals to the same education as men was negotiated in terms of the natural abilities of the female sex. As those who decoded the laws of nature, scientists and physicians acquired a high profile in the assessment of the implications of reforms in female education. Feminists' demands to make higher ^Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), part, chapter 8; Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), part. 193ff. ^Ornella Moscucci, The Science of Woman: Gynaecology and Gender in England. 1800-1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 3; Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments : The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid- Victorian England (London: Virago Press, 1989), p. 77. ^For an excellent study of "border cases", which potentially challenged the social arrangement of separate spheres, see Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments. education accessible to women led into controversies about the biological implications such changes would have for women as individuals and as mothers of future generations. In Germany similar conceptions of natural differences between men and women underlay an ideological separation of the public and the private. Nature had established women's domestic role as wives and mothers. The biological implications of higher education for women were also aspects of the debates in Germany. But in the German context the concept of the rights of the individual was more closely linked to the notion of duties to society as a whole. What was best for the individual was not necessarily best for the whole. In approaches to changes in women's education the effects on the nature of the female individual were not centralized in the same way as in Britain. Rather, these changes were to be assessed in terms of their effects on the social organism. The demands of the women's movement for greater female education drew upon an universalistic ideal of Bildung (self-formation through education). However, notwithstanding this ideal, Bildung was also a means to reinforce class boundaries and a separation of spheres between the sexes in the middle classes. Bildung, scholarship, and culture were central to the self- understanding of the educated middle class. The admission of women to university was debated in terms of the respective roles of middle-class men and women in the production and reproduction of cultural goods and values,

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