This is a proposal for a Scholars Award to provide research funding to study the science and politics of Mary Putnam Jacobi (1842-1906), one of the most important women practitioners of scientific medicine in late nineteenth-century America. The objective of this project is to investigate the relationship between science and women's rights activism, and to study the biological knowledge produced by Jacobi, and women in her cohort, to understand contested views on the female body in the post-Civil War era. This will be done through archival research, using personal correspondence, photographs, institutional and medical society records, unpublished writings, and birth and death records. It will also involve an in-depth reading and analysis of medical texts and published articles in nineteenth-century medical journals, newspapers, and collected works. It will result in the completion of a book-length study.
Intellectual Merit: The intellectual merit is fourfold. First, it will provide historians of gender and science the first full-length study of a central figure in the history of medical science. Mary Putnam Jacobi was one of the most significant women doctors of the late nineteenth century because she boldly opposed the masculine monopoly of scientific medicine. She was the first woman admitted to the Ecole de Medecine in Paris and to several medical societies in the United States, including the New York Academy of Medicine. Her achievements and scientific identity gave her an entree into both men's and women's medical circles. Widely published in medical journals, literary magazines, and newspapers, she supported a scientific model of medicine when such models were subject to great debate in medical communities. At the same time, she was a devoted activist who believed science could not only reform society, it could elevate the status of American women. This study also uses Jacobi to analyze several key themes in the history of medicine and science, including definitions of positivism, debates about animal and human experimentation, and disagreements about the role of the laboratory for therapeutics. It also uses Jacobi to address several themes in science and technology studies, including knowledge production, boundaries between science and non-science, and definitions of expertise. Second, this project will use Jacobi as a starting point for analyzing the knowledge produced by women physicians and its relationship to their political activism. Third, this project will also add to theoretical discussions about gender and science as it analyzes how Jacobi constructed her scientific identity and created medical knowledge to oppose the gendering of scientific medicine. Fourth, it will provide new perspectives on questions about gender and knowledge production, using examples from medicine to help revise the idea that science in the nineteenth century was essentially a masculine project. As a result, it will show how Jacobi and other practitioners and activists contested explanations for "female maladies," notions of female physical and mental weakness, and theories of sex differences. The project will reveal how women weighed in on the science of sex differences and produced their own "sexual science" to describe female characteristics in more positive and politically favorable terms.
Broader Impacts: This study will have broader impact in three areas. First, it will be a teaching tool to advance understanding of the history of women in the scientific disciplines. Second, this research will provide a unique opportunity to introduce Science and Society to Loyola Marymount University with the hope of integrating its interdisciplinary methods and subject matters into the curriculum. Third, this project will help broaden the participation of women in the sciences by providing historical perspective on current debates about women practitioners, sex differences, and female cognition. This issue garnered national attention in 2005 when Harvard University President Lawrence Summers cited biological differences in women as one way to explain why women were less successful in the scientific disciplines. Critics of Summers, and the new literature on sex differences, worry that this biological focus on female difference ignores social factors, and will negatively shape how women are viewed as practitioners. Similar concerns were raised and debated by Jacobi and her colleagues. The current debate shows how the role of women in the professions and the female intellect is still contested, and that the science of female biology remains controversial, political and extremely significant in our own time.
