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Originally Posted by hi_im_god
i thought the quote presented as "women beware" sounded like satire.
and it is. interesting article about its genesis:
https://blathering504.wordpress.com/...-the-internet/
sorry to sidetrack the discussion but the lack of attribution for the quote set off an alarm. |
Thank you for the correction! The quote in the piece I found it in was attributed to a collection of pieces from
For Her Own Good, but as it's not the original source I didn't attribute it. The article you linked was fascinating and fun reading on how a quote gets misattributed. Though it doesn't contradict the original point, which was that in the 19th Century, doctors really believed that education adversely affected women's fertility:
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While corsets distorted the bodily image of woman, woman's body in itself was viewed as suspect. The embodiment of "woman" continued to see women's bodies as a dark continent in an alien world--particularly in the realm of re production. "Misplaced ovaries" caused a "great deal of trouble" to women's health, according to Dr. S. W. Mitchell, the nineteenth-century neurospecialist made famous for his infamous "rest cure" for the "hysteric" woman, one of whom was Charlotte Perkins Gilman.5 Myths regarding women's menstrual process often served as a guise for misogynist and enslaving techniques. One famous menstrual myth appears with startling regularity in controversies over co-education in colleges and universities. Elaine and English Showalter note that in 1873 Dr. Edward Clarke of Harvard College published a work entitled Sex in Education in which he argued that higher education was destroying the reproductive functions of women by overworking them during a crucial time in their formative years. Supporting Clarke 's thesis, Mitchell pointedly noted the case of "Miss C." in his medical treatise entitled Nervous Diseases, a text devoted primarily to women. "Miss C.," a seventeen-year old, "lost" her menstrual cycle while attending (Mitchell pointedly reminds his readers) a "school in which boys and girls were educated together." Prior to attending the coeducational academy, the young woman's menstrual cycles, Mitchell claims, had been "regular." Once she was sent home, however, her menstrual flow miraculously returned in but a few short weeks and the young woman's health was gradually restored (96). Sadly, her educational process was not.
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http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/...95/Murton.html