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Silencing Shakespeare's Sisters: Science and Society, May 24, 2009
(This is a comparative essay I wrote on "Shattered Nerves": Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian England and Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood called Silencing Shakespeare's Sisters: Science and Society).
"It was thus I found myself walking with extreme rapidity across a grass plot. Instantly a man's figure rose to intercept me. Nor did I at first understand that the gesticulations of a curious-looking object, in a cut-away coat and evening shirt, were aimed at me. His face expressed horror and indignation. Instinct rather than reason came to my help; he was a Beadle; I was a woman. This was the turf; there was the path....The only charge I could bring against the Fellows and Scholars of whatever the college might happen to be was that in protection of their turf, which has been rolled for 300 years in succession, they had sent my little fish into hiding"
She was neither allowed to walk on the grass, nor allowed into the halls of academia, including the library as readers later find out, solely because she was a woman, an independent woman at that, and not a man. Because of men's newly proclaimed science and ancient traditions, men viewed education as destructive to a woman's energy and purpose in society.
During her life, Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) came to be an author of both fiction and nonfiction, including the vignette above from A Room of One's Own (1929). Most importantly, she was a feminist, who critiqued society's mores with reference to the differences between the two sexes--just as scholars do today. Like many of her successors, Woolf rightly believed that sexual differences were trivial, certainly in intellectual matters. Woolf specifically thought that any honest person was androgynous: having both male and female characteristics. To many individuals these sexual differences actually represented reality. Woolf further hypothesized that if William Shakespeare (1564-1616) had been a woman or had had a female sister of exactly identical intellect, she probably would have neither been provided opportunities to write, nor have been remembered because she belonged to the female sex. His symbolic sister represents all of the women who, like Woolf, have been unjustifiably silenced for thousands and thousands of years. Traditional history has long neglected herstory; only in the past sixty years or so have scholars slowly rediscovered and celebrated the past achievements of women.
During the European Renaissance and Reformation (c. 1400-1600) and during the Enlightenment (c. 1700s) as society underwent numerous rebirths, transformations, and upheavals, people searched for some kind of order, reason, and definition in their lives. Frequently, explorers, ministers, painters, and poets, for example, provided various answers to these questions for the newly emerging modern world. Significantly, scientists, all or virtually all white European males, also provided powerful answers to these questions using so-called new and more credible evidence and methods. Science acquired a new, extraordinary power. Many of the most powerful and long-lasting scientific discoveries discussed in this essay occurred during the Victorian (1837-1901) and Edwardian (1901-1910) eras. Most twenty-first-century contemporaries studying these movements inevitably see a sustained, direct link between the ancient socially prescribed status of men as superior and women as inferior and these varyingly successful scientific discourses. These discoveries also justified treating so-called savages as inferior individuals. A few exceptional individuals such as John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) publicly supported equality for females; although, he still supported inferior treatment for those people not living in a so-called civilization.
Science was and is very much a cultural and social construction. According to these constructions and expectations reinforced by science, women were not to study, read, write, speak in public, or even think because of their fragile nature. This dogma only truly began changing in the twentieth century. Far too often science and society have silenced Shakespeare's sisters.
Learned Professor of History at Yale University, Cynthia Eagle Russett's (1937- ) Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (1989), traces the efforts by male scientists to prove woman's inferiority. During this same time, women were seeking more autonomy. In fact, historiographically, Russett is the first scholar to compile Victorian justifications for a woman's inferiority compared to her male counterpart, in a single volume. Although her book is a synthesis, it remains a goldmine of primary sources because the voices of that era that disseminated unequal treatments for men and women are emphasized. While she does not have a thesis per se, her Sexual Science clearly demonstrates how science is a social construction. She focuses especially on European countries and the United States where "science became a weapon."
This weapon polarized men and women. Russett opens with a background chapter called "How to Tell the Girls from the Boys." Through new and developing branches of natural and social sciences, such as physical anthropology, scientists sought to measure and classify every part of a person's anatomy, biology, physiology, and psychology, including the brain and skull through craniology and phrenology. Through their discoveries, scientists increasingly focused on men's and women's biological limitations. Scientists argued that women had smaller, lighter, and underdeveloped brains when compared to male brains, which were bigger, heaver, and developed brains with a much greater potential. Even when evidence seemed to prove women were more capable in some areas, science sometimes simply rejected the findings. Upon discovering, for example, that women were more efficient readers, researcher Francis Galton (1822-1911) concluded that the experiment was not valid to test intelligence. Science used such reasoning as this, too: "Negroes were the shortest-trunked of all. Hence shortness of truck could not be a mark of superiority." Russett's book proceeds with further such discussions of males and females according to recapitulation, variability, labor, and energy.
G. Stanley Hall (1844-1924) furthered theories of recapitulation, which stated that each individual represented the life history of that race. European males, of course, represented the highest, most developed human possible. Savages and women stopped growing too soon, thus needing European males to care for them. This theory not only justified the subjugation of women, but it also justified the newly established imperialism and older systems such as raced-based plantation and urban slavery. Women were "repositories of both ontogenetic and phylogenetic human traits." In terms of recapitulation, women who sought intellectual activities rather than maternal fulfillment were endangering the entire race and its advancement. Moreover, girls were not to receive education beyond knowing how to be a proper mother. The science of recapitulation said that women had to be carefully watched because of their deviant behaviors and morals. Women, as they had been for centuries, were to be mothers, not laborers or thinkers. Surprisingly and without explanation, Russett concludes this section and others with an odd comment. For example, "Most students of sex differences were more discreet; they were careful to balance women's disabilities with their strengths." She does not focus on anyone who was discreet.
Charles Darwin (1809-1882) provided a recognized solution as to why women lagged behind men: greater male variability. This theory stated that womankind contained fewer idiots (Russett's term) and fewer or no geniuses. Even the "best" women would "never become Edisons," according to this theories. A typical woman was average and not that different from all other women; thus, women were also denied individuality. But, why was this the case? I believe Russett misses a key point at this juncture. The theory of greater male variability allows "rich," "smart," "white," European men to justify why they existed and were allowed to create and circulate these theories. Obviously, according to all of their other theories and rigid social structures, the European male elite did not feel that poor white Europeans were their equal counterparts. Additionally, their elitist theories denouncing women and others required an explanation as to why all white European males were not perfect, rich, and smart. They needed to account for white European males who did not fit their mold, such as the homeless and criminal; the social construction of the scientific theory of greater male variability provided a solution. This pseudoscience, then, allowed men to justify their elite existence and to explain why women, savages, and substandard European men deserved to be written off as inferior, all in a neat package. Masculinity, further, was glamorized because of men's increased diversity and the chances masculinity allowed for men to be extremely smart or extremely dumb. Furthermore, this pseudoscience condemned all of Shakespeare's sisters before they were born. Men could work toward improvement under the greater male variability thesis; whereas, women were stuck in an evolutionary, biological, permanent second place.
Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), among others, studied the physiological differences between men and women. In the most primitive, savage societies, Spencer and his colleagues, as incredible as it may seem, said that there were no physiological difference between men and women. Slowly and forever, men and women would become different and more and more different at that. Men and women would always be "increasing [in their] complexity,...
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