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The Story of Miss G___

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The story of Miss G__

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The Miss G___ Project is named for, and dedicated to, the unidentified Miss G___. This is her story.

In 1873, Dr. Edward H. Clarke of Harvard Medical School wrote in Sex in Education: or, A Fair Chance for the Girls, of a certain "Miss G___" who was a top student "leading the male and female youth alike" at a time when women were just beginning to push the boundaries holding them from higher education.

Unfortunately, Miss G___ died.

Dr. Clarke, a respected Doctor and Man of Science, explained with the accepted "Conservation of Energy" theory that Miss G___ died because, as a woman, "she was unable to make a good brain, that could stand the wear and tear of life, and a good reproductive system that should serve the race, at the same time that she was continuously spending her force in intellectual labor."

Following in a whole line of theories (some that get rehashed even today) on how women are, by nature, ill-equipped to be included in education, Miss G__ and others like her were lost in history.

Resistance

Before we go any further, we should point out that there were doctors who wrote AGAINST the faulty theories of Dr. Clarke, and these resisters should be acknowledged.

In 1874, physicians and educators wrote a reply to Clarke entitled Sex and Education: A Reply to Dr. E.H. Clarke. Edited by Julia Ward Howe, a poet and activist, other contributors to the book included Dr Alida Avery, a resident physician at Vassar College.

Another strong critic of Clarke's work was a fabulous doctor, Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, who happened to be a woman. According to an article on Dr. Jacobi at the U.S. National Library of Medicine:

In 1876, Dr. Mary Jacobi's essay, "The Question of Rest for Women during Menstruation," won the Boylston Prize at Harvard University. In this influential paper she refuted the supposed physical limitations of women, in response to Dr. Edward H. Clarke's publication Sex in Education; or, A Fair Chance for the Girls (1873), which questioned the expanded role of women in society and the professions. (link)
We're working on getting an excerpt from her article on the site too. We need to give credit to one of the original Miss G___ sistah-friends!



Read what Dr. Clarke actually wrote (and people believed) back in the day:

Sex in Education; or, A Fair Chance for the Girls (1873), by Dr. Edward H. Clarke

"Spending Her Force in Intellectual Labor:

"Miss G___ worked her way through New-England primary, grammar, and high schools to a Western college, which she entered with credit to herself, and from which she graduated, confessedly its first scholar, leading the male and female youth alike. All that need be told of her career is that she worked as a student, continuously and perseveringly, through the years of her first critical epoch, and for a few years after it, without any sort of regard to the periodical type of her organization. It never appeared that she studied excessively in other respects, or that her system was weakened while in college by fevers or other sickness. Not a great while after graduation, she began to show signs of failure, and some years later died under the writer's care. A post-mortem examination was made, which disclosed no disease in any part of the body, except in the brain, where the microscope revealed commencing degeneration.

"This was called an instance of death from over-work. Like the preceding case, it was not so much the result of over-work as of un-physiological work. She was unable to make a good brain, that could stand the wear and tear of life, and a good reproductive system that should serve the race, at the same time that she was continuously spending her force in intellectual labor. Nature asked for a periodical remission, and did not get it. And so Miss G___ died, not because she had mastered the wasps of Aristophanes and Mecanique Celeste, not because she had made the acquaintance of Kant and Kelliker, and ventured to explore the anatomy of flowers and the secrets of chemistry, but because, while pursuing these studies, while doing all this work, she steadily ignored her woman's make. Believing that woman can do what man can, for she held that faith, she strove with noble but ignorant bravery to compass man's intellectual attainment in a man's way, and died in the effort...."
 

   
Copyright 2006 The Miss G__ Project