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depended.∂Ω Finally, and perhaps most important, Zakrzewska was just one woman among many who were challenging gender stereotypes around midcentury simply by virtue of claiming space for themselves in the male-dominated medical profession.∑≠
Thus it is best, as has been argued, to see these women as developing diverse strategies for securing a means to the shared end of opening the doors of the medical profession to women.∑∞ Why Zakrzewska chose her particular path to this end stemmed as much from her personal style—she clearly relished the opportunity to challenge traditional gender stereotypes—as from her political conviction that women’s emancipation depended upon their willingness to replace what she eventually labeled ‘‘sentimental sympathy’’ with a scientific outlook. And this conviction, I argue, had much to do with her gradual immersion in the German radical community and the political meaning this group ascribed to science as a powerful weapon in battling arbitrary authority and promoting a radical democratic society.∑≤ As a symbol of reason, rationality, and objectivity, science seemed to these German radicals to promote the very mental attributes deemed critical in the battle against ignorance, superstition, and the church. At the time Zakrzewska penned ‘‘Weibliche Aerzte,’’ she had evidently already felt the influence of this group, primarily through her friendship with Heinzen. Over the next few years, she would sharpen her attack on di√erence into a more coherent battle not only for women’s right to study medicine but for women’s rights more broadly conceived.∑≥
. . .
In the meantime, Zakrzewska also published ‘‘Sind Hebammenschulen wünschenswerth?’’ This article had a much more specific focus than ‘‘Weibliche Aerzte’’; its purpose was to advise against the establishment of midwifery schools in the United States. It may seem odd that Zakrzewska would have chosen to write on this topic at a time when midwifery education was not actively being debated within the American medical community. By midcentury male physicians had emerged as the preferred birth attendants among white middle-class women, leaving primarily rural, especially black, and poor immigrant women in the hands of midwives. Few physicians challenged this division of labor until the last decades of the nineteenth century, when the arrival of millions of European immigrants greatly increased the number of midwives practicing in this country. Physicians, who were in the midst of an intense period of professionalization and specialization at that time, came to see
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these uneducated and unregulated practitioners as a serious threat. By the beginning of the twentieth century, a highly contentious ‘‘midwife controversy’’
was in full swing.∑∂
But if, in the 1850s, little interest in this topic could be evinced from the American medical community, this was not the case among German émigrés.
In fact, Zakrzewska’s essay was a response to an article calling for the creation of just such schools.∑∑ That this topic should have generated greater concern within the German community is hardly surprising. Not only was there a long tradition among German women of using midwives as their primary birth attendant, but a significant number of midwives had emigrated, many of whom, like Zakrzewska, had received formal training at home. The question of whether—and if so, how—to train the next generation of midwives was thus of immediate concern. Zakrzewska, who felt strongly that the establishment of midwifery schools was a mistake, decided to weigh in.∑∏
Zakrzewska built her argument around what she presented as a fact: that the education of German midwives ‘‘is the same as what the young men in obstetrics receive.’’ In her previous article she had already tackled the question of whether any innate di√erences existed between men and women; here she focused on the absence of any di√erences in what German midwives and physicians learned about obstetrics. Given her unique position as a graduate of the Prussian school of midwifery and an M.D., it would have been hard to challenge her assertion. In fact, Zakrzewska did not spend much time defending this claim but turned rather to an analysis of the legal culture in her native land. There, she explained, the midwife’s educational requirements as well as her rights and responsibilities were strictly laid down by law. Accordingly, despite her excellent training, she was forbidden from intervening in the birthing process. The state provided her with a superior education only to ensure that she could diagnose complications early enough to seek the appropriate help. Anyone who over-stepped these boundaries risked a prison sentence of one to twenty years and a fine.∑π
Zakrzewska posed the question of whether such a system could ever work in this country, but she immediately declared that it would ‘‘be made into a farce, a caricature.’’ She imagined two objections, one having more to do with the American character, the other with the legal system. If the midwife, she asked, knew exactly what to do when complications arose, ‘‘wouldn’t it be, according to American ideas, a certain stupidity to ask someone else for help and perhaps to sacrifice, thereby, one’s reputation and service?’’ But the more fundamental
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problem rested with the absence of any kind of restrictive legal code governing medical education and practice. At this point, Zakrzewska challenged her readers to consider whether such laws could ever be passed that would define the limits of the midwives’ responsibilities or that would restrict the number of midwives permitted to practice in order to ensure that each one could make a living. Such laws existed throughout Europe, she admitted, but ‘‘can one introduce such laws in the United States, and would they, if introduced, be followed?’’∑∫ Clearly, she expected her readers to respond with a resounding ‘‘no.’’
Whether Zakrzewska ever felt a sense of camaraderie with other midwives may be a reasonable question to pose, but certainly by the time she penned this article, she had exchanged whatever earlier identity she may have had as a midwife for one as a physician. Only in this way can one begin to understand why she did not propose establishing midwifery schools in the United States, modeled on the German system, that would produce high-caliber birth attendants. She could also have seen the absence of restrictive legislation as an advantage, for it would have removed the aspect of the German system she considered most unjust, that is, that despite their knowledge of how to handle complications, midwives were permitted to manage only normal births. But Zakrzewska herself was troubled by the prospect of producing midwives who would practice their skills in an unregulated environment. More than likely she feared that the line demarcating midwives and female physicians would be blurred, thereby jeopardizing her work to have women counted among the medical elite. Thus, whatever criticisms she may have had of Germany’s medi-colegal culture, Zakrzewska stopped short of embracing an open-market system. Not recognizing the inconsistency in her own thinking, she concluded her essay by denying the premise around which she had built her argument. Although she had begun by insisting that midwives knew every bit as much as medical students when it came to obstetrics, she ended by declaring that the responsibility of caring for other people’s health, and especially their lives, was great enough to demand that birth attendants receive the best education possible. For this reason, she explained, ‘‘I am . . . in favor of making midwives superfluous in America through female doctors, in fact, in getting rid of them.’’∑Ω
. . .
It is worth noting that at the time Zakrzewska made this statement she had already accepted her new position at the New England Women’s Medical College, an institution that trained midwives, nurses, and physicians. Small
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wonder she would soon become embroiled in battles with Samuel Gregory, the school’s director. It matters little that Gregory probably never read this German-language article; Zakrzewska most certainly made her views known to him in other ways.
Zakrzewska still had six weeks before she would leave New York. Later in life she claimed that she had
moved to Boston in order to be closer to Heinzen, but her reasons for leaving New York must have been more complex.∏≠ There can be no question that she was a highly ambitious woman, and while the o√er from Boston was not to run her own institution, she was being asked to create and then take charge of a clinical department at the college. The new position thus promised a greater degree of independence than what she had at the New York Infirmary, where, she later explained, ‘‘the two Drs. Blackwells controlled the direction of e√orts towards what seemed to them wisest and best.’’∏∞ Despite her
full participation in the life of the New York Infirmary, she had, it seems, never felt as though she was a full partner.
There are suggestions, moreover, that tensions had been building between the three women. To some extent this may have reflected di√erent personalities.
There was already a hint of this in the letter Zakrzewska had written to Harriot Hunt just after the opening of the infirmary in May 1857. She had confessed at that time her puzzlement with ‘‘these two women,’’ who had ‘‘all right to be satisfied with their work & e√orts as it resulted, & they are, but still they won’t acknowledge it either to [each?] other nor to themselves, they do persuade themselves, I believe, that they are not . . . or do they perhaps show their joy in their bedroom when nobody sees them? I really don’t know, but one thing is certain they do wrong not to reward their friends by showing them a pleased countenance.’’∏≤
Zakrzewska shows here the slightest hint of feeling unappreciated for all the work she had done, and although she went on to assure Hunt that ‘‘in spite of all I love them, and feel sad that nothing can cheer them up,’’ by 1859 she may have grown tired of their more subdued demeanor. But she may also have become increasingly aware of a deepening rift when it came to their political views.
According to Zakrzewska, at least, she preferred to travel in more radical circles. Indeed, she and Heinzen may have decided to move to Boston in part because of an expectation that that city would be more responsive to their goals.
New York’s Little Germany, according to one historian, was not even as reformist as the German American community in the Midwest, let alone the commu-
nity in Boston.∏≥ In addition, Zakrzewska had come away from her many visits
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to Boston with the impression that the prejudice against women physicians was less palpable there than anywhere else she had lived.
In making her decision to move, Zakrzewska had also considered that the New York Infirmary was on sound financial footing; that she had fulfilled her two-year commitment to the Blackwells; that her experience had shown her that two physicians could run the hospital alone; and that she would make a greater contribution to the advancement of women’s medical education in Boston. Still, if she found it easy to make the move for professional reasons, this was not the case where her personal life was concerned. More than anyone else, she had di≈culty leaving Mary Booth, to whom she had grown extremely close during the years they spent together in New York. Zakrzewska described how Booth would often stay overnight with her at the hospital, sharing ‘‘my room and bed when she was out at night as reporter of the New York Times too late to return to her home in Williamsburg.’’ Zakrzewska also spent the New Year’s holiday in 1858 with Booth and her parents in Williamsburg rather than traveling to her own family in Hoboken. Later in life, thinking back over her friendship with Booth, Zakrzewska commented that ‘‘[i]t is not through blood kinship that we feel the strongest; nay, we may even feel no a≈nity at all towards the sisters and brothers we so love, while the few kindred spirits we meet fill our souls with life and inspiration.’’∏∂
Carolyn Heilbrun once wrote that ‘‘the sign of female friendship is not whether friends are homosexual or heterosexual, lovers or not, but whether they share the wonderful energy of work in the public sphere. These, some of them hidden, are the friends whom biographers must seek out.’’∏∑ This would certainly describe the friendship Zakrzewska had with Booth. There is, in fact, little evidence that they were sexually involved, despite sharing a bed, which was, after all, quite common at the time. Physical contact between women in the Victorian period carried none of the meaning it would acquire after early twentieth-century sexologists began publishing tracts about the dangers of les-
bianism.∏∏ If any additional proof of this were necessary, then Zakrzewska’s willingness to state in print that she shared a bed with Booth would provide it.
Often going to great lengths to protect her privacy, Zakrzewska would not have paraded her relationship with Booth publicly were it not considered normal by nineteenth-century standards.
The absence of a sexual relationship did not, however, mean a lack of intimacy. In an obituary Zakrzewska wrote after Booth’s death in 1889, she explicitly used this term to describe the nature of their friendship. ‘‘Miss Booth,’’
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she wrote, ‘‘had many friends, but was intimate with only a few; therefore, the real depth of her nature was but little known. I am happy to say that I was one of those few, and our intimacy was only broken by death.’’∏π Theirs was an intense friendship, which the two women managed to sustain through a series of projects. The autobiographical sketch Zakrzewska published in 1860 actually began as a letter to Booth, undertaken after her friend had requested that she share some stories from her childhood. A few years later, they also set out to coedit a journal dedicated to promoting ‘‘the interests of women, and to furnish an impartial platform for the free discussion of these interests in their various phases.’’∏∫ And in the 1870s they traveled together, along with a few other friends, to Europe. This trip was the fulfillment of a wish Zakrzewska had earlier expressed to Booth that she would ‘‘be enabled some day to go with you to Berlin, to show you the scenes in which my childhood and youth were passed, and to teach you on the spot the di√erence between Europe and America.’’∏Ω
Zakrzewska’s friendships with Harriot Hunt and Mary Booth, and the bonds she would forge with other women in Boston, provide evidence of what Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has called ‘‘The Female World of Love and Ritual,’’ a world in which women’s relationships with one another were marked by an emotional and physical (although not necessarily sexual) intimacy.π≠ We will examine this world more closely in the next chapter, when we look at the forty-year-long relationship Zakrzewska enjoyed with Julia A. Sprague, a teacher and women’s rights activist she met in 1862. The only caveat one must add is that Zakrzewska’s circle of intimate friends included at least one man as well. Indeed, however strong her feelings may have been for Booth, she chose to leave New York in order to follow Heinzen to Boston and continue her political work side by side with him. Still, it was with mixed emotions and a heavy heart that she left Booth on 5 June for the city that would remain her home for the rest of her life.
Fashioning a Home
Within a year of moving to Boston, Zakrzewska bought her own home. She saw home ownership as a mark of middle-class respectability, a sign of financial independence, and an indication that she could enter into any and all relations with others freely.∞ The home life she fashioned, however, had little to do with the idealized middle-class model, which by the mid-nineteenth century had become focused on a married couple, their children, and however many servants they could a√ord. Although in practice many middle-class households may not have fit the model exactly, in theory this nuclear family was ruled by a property-owning husband, whose responsibility it was to provide for and protect his wife and children. In return, the wife was expected to raise the children, manage the household, and, in the words of a contemporary advice manual, create ‘‘an elysium to which [the husband] can flee and find rest from the stormy strife of a selfish world,’’ where he spent his days in productive labor.≤
The family Zakrzewska ended up creating had, however, a radically di√erent structure. Instead of r
adiating out from a central married couple, it consisted of several overlapping circles. Not only did her sisters Minna and Rosalia live with her when she first bought her home, but shortly thereafter Karl Heinzen moved in with his wife, Louise Henriette, and their sixteen-year-old son, Karl Friedrich. Two years later, Julia Sprague joined the household. Zakrzewska was, moreover, the primary breadwinner in her home. Although the members of the household contributed financially to its upkeep, neither Heinzen nor Sprague earned enough to live comfortably on their own. Still, financial necessity alone did not bring these individuals together; the Heinzens and Sprague were not
‘‘boarders’’ in Zakrzewska’s home. Rather, shared political concerns and emotional ties bound them together as well. As Zakrzewska later commented, ‘‘Mr.
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Karl Heinzen, Miss Julia A. Sprague, and my sisters formed the closer family circle in my a√ections.’’≥
If the family is, in Karin Hausen’s words, ‘‘the ‘natural’ location of the sexual division of labour,’’ then it should come as no surprise that Zakrzewska would have created an alternative family structure.∂ The fact that she engaged in productive labor outside the home would not in and of itself have necessitated a radical change. According to one statistic, the percentage of women physicians who married in the nineteenth century was somewhere between one-fifth and one-third.∑ Yet it was one thing to practice medicine, which still took place in domestic settings and permitted flexible hours, and another to head the clinical department of a college or take on the directorship of a hospital. Zakrzewska was not in any position to assume the responsibilities traditionally expected of someone who wed.
Still, Zakrzewska’s decision to create an alternative family structure—indeed, to fashion a home that bore little resemblance to that of her parents—was not simply a pragmatic move on her part, a way of making sure other people were managing her household while she was away at work. Like many others of her day, she viewed the institution of marriage critically. Indeed, in her autobiographical sketch, she went so far as to compare marriage to prostitution, describing how women frequently ‘‘sold’’ themselves to men in exchange for a home or to settle a family’s debt.∏ The critics she joined spanned a wide spectrum. At one end were individuals like Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell, who embraced the institution of marriage, favoring what many have called ‘‘companionate marriage,’’ but challenged the institution’s conventions; when they married in 1855, Stone retained her own name, the right to own property, and the power to control her own body. At the other extreme were ‘‘free lovers,’’ who rejected marriage altogether, convinced that two individuals should remain together only as long as they felt a spiritual and emotional bond.π Zakrzewska’s position appears to have been closest, at least in theory, to that of the ‘‘free lovers.’’ Although there is no evidence that she was sexually involved with any of her housemates, criticisms she waged against the institution of marriage and the deep bonds she seemed capable of forming with both men and women indicate that the home she created was the one she believed would provide her with the greatest personal satisfaction. Zakrzewska may never have considered joining any of the alternative communities that were springing up around her, but it would not be going too far to say that she created a minicommunity, modeled on many of the same principles, within the walls of her own home.
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