Gender, Education, and Careerism: The Recurring “Conflict” Between Ovaries and Brains in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries

Introduction

Women have long had their status as intellectuals and political agents devalued due to the ancient prejudice that, because women are able to bear children, they are unsuited for the rigors of professional and/or public life. Under the doctrine of propter defectum sexus (Latin for “due to the defect of her sex”), women were sheltered in the private sphere, living disconnected from the larger events of society, essentially as servants of men and their bodies’ reproductive capacities (Swartz & Tardio, 2019). This status—woman subordinated—was reinforced by legal precedent, politics, science, and violence, and was prevalent in the worlds of work and politics, among other things. For women living under such conditions, intellectual pretentions or aspirations were quickly squashed as they suffered an enforced ignorance of the public and professional worlds. Many developed psychosomatic diseases and were labeled “hysterics” and, in turn, this was used as evidence of their inferiority, justifying further repression (Ehrenreich & English, 1978).

Outside the home, women encountered additional legal and cultural constraints preventing them from participating in the public sphere or from challenging men intellectually and professionally. Women were politically and legally disenfranchised as well as prohibited from most educational opportunities and professions. The few professions that were open to women such as librarianship, nursing, prostitution, teaching, and secretarial work, were tightly regulated by men and reinforced the gendered stereotypes that constrained women and made them subservient to men.

Arguments made for the subordination of women included natural or divine law, moral necessity, and economic realism (that helped preserve men’s wages); in addition, biologically essentialist reasons suggested that women were physically unable to handle the strain of the man’s world of work, both due to their overall constitution and to their presumed “delicate” reproductive functions. It is this last concern, the physiological argument, that we will study in this chapter, as it is one that people still make today—albeit more subtly. We will argue that there is a deeply ingrained belief in Western society of a natural “conflict” between ovaries and brains, that is, between male and female nature, making women less qualified than men for certain jobs or to serve certain roles in society. Following Aristotle’s arguments about the inferior quality of the female nature, we will show that the tradition of this belief (i.e., presenting the difference between the male and female natures not as two complementary and interdependent biological beings, but as two separate, merely co-existing entities, an inferior/imperfect female and a superior/perfect male) goes all the way back to the ideology of exclusion developed in democratic Athens of the fifth century BCE and perpetuated across time by the Western educational system that focused on the study of the classical canon.

In contrast, we maintain that women and men are “different” only because society decided to name a difference and highlight its saliency. We begin by exploring the philosophical foundations for this condition. From there we engage the various ways in which what was called the “gynecological dangers of a brainy woman” manifested in education, professional life, and in arguments against suffrage.