historyWellcome Collection1873 · Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
In 1873 a Harvard doctor argued that schooling would damage girls' reproductive organs
In 1873 Dr Edward Clarke, a Harvard Medical School board member, published Sex in Education, claiming that girls who studied alongside boys were draining energy from their reproductive organs. He based this on vitalism, the old idea that the body has a limited supply of vital force that disease depletes. Clarke's proposed Law of Periodicity told girls to rest from study and exercise for part of every fourth week during menstruation. Mary Putnam Jacobi challenged him in 1874 with a survey of 268 women, finding no link between education and menstrual pain. Clarke's book still ran to 17 editions in 13 years, showing how popular the idea was.
The theory shows how medical authority was used to limit women's education and work during the late 19th century, when more women were applying to university. It also explains why menstruation was treated as a health problem needing management, a framing that shaped women's medicine for decades.
Mary Putnam Jacobi's essay won Harvard's Boylston medical prize in 1874, but the committee refused to publish it after learning she was a woman; her father's publishing house printed it anyway.
Wellcome Collection · CC BY 4.0
Illustrative photo · Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
