‘‘That They Might Live,’’ which aired on 19 October 1942, opens at the Charité, where Zakrzewska, portrayed as a physician rather than as a midwife, has just successfully completed ‘‘a very delicate operation.’’≥≤ Her mentor, ‘‘Dr.
Joseph,’’ informs her immediately that, despite objections from those who are vehemently opposed to women doctors, he plans to hand over to her the direc-
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torship of the hospital when he steps down. That, of course, does not happen.
As soon as Doctor Joseph passes away, Zakrzewska is derided as the ‘‘daughter of a Polish mid-wife’’ and dismissed. From this moment until the end of the episode, which concludes in America with the founding of the New England Hospital, Zakrzewska is cast as a symbol of ‘‘progress’’ in battle with those who represent ‘‘the age of darkness.’’ Armed with microscopes, test tubes, thermometers, a strong sense of justice, and compassion for the poor, she conquers misery, ignorance, and prejudice.
Although in di√erent ways, both Vietor and Barringer embraced the link Zakrzewska had made between science, progress, and morality. Their goal was to ensure that women be allowed to participate in the scientific work that would promote not only their own careers but also a better world in which to live. When Zakrzewska was rediscovered in the 1970s, however, the link between science and morality had been subjected to a devastating critique. The disillusionment with an idea that had inspired Enlightenment thinkers and nineteenth-century radicals alike had grown in the immediate World War II period as intellectuals considered with horror both Germany’s use of science and technology to mastermind the Holocaust and the coming together of great scientific intellects to produce the ultimate weapon of destruction, the atom bomb. Within a few decades, feminists had added to this critique an analysis of the way professional communities used science to erect institutional barriers and to define constrictive social roles that made it di≈cult for women to enter the public sphere. It is hardly surprising that science itself would come to be seen by many as antithetical to the advancement of women’s goals, a position from which it was impossible to make sense of Zakrzewska’s own convictions. Small wonder a confusing picture of her emerged, one that, in the end, showed her at best to be embracing a masculine discourse for strategic purposes, determined that women achieve equality in a man’s world.
The first wave of feminist scholarship is responsible for exposing many of the deep-seated cultural, political, and institutional barriers that functioned to deny women power. Over the past few decades, however, a number of feminist scholars have been questioning the very binary oppositions that had once shaped this work. Thus, instead of continuing to contrast public and private, masculinity and femininity, professionalism and feminism, heterosexuality and homosexuality, morality and science, they now employ concepts such as ‘‘situatedness’’
and ‘‘positionality’’ to draw our attention to how such binary oppositions function to erase the great multiplicity of positions that fit uncomfortably on one side
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or the other of the dyad.≥≥ In terms of the scholarship on women and science, some of the most exciting new work asks no longer whether women have a di√erent style when they practice medicine. Instead, it focuses on whether a feminist perspective, defined as the embodiment of a commitment to gender equality, can make a di√erence in how science is practiced. This approach has several advantages: it encourages us to look at the questions that are deemed important as much as the methodological styles that are employed; it allows for a multiplicity of styles in the practice of science but does not assume that these styles stem from the sex of the practitioner; and since both men and women can be feminists, it views a scientist’s political orientation as more important than his or her sex.≥∂
Zakrzewska’s story brings home the power of these feminist insights, for although she lived in a society very much structured by a discourse of binary opposites, she found cracks and fissures that allowed her to position herself di√erently than many of her peers. She did not, like the majority of her colleagues, justify women’s entry into the medical profession by embracing a picture of women as more nurturing and compassionate. Instead, she set out to redefine women by emphasizing their rational capabilities, thus claiming science for women and using it as a weapon against the arguments put forth to keep them from claiming their rightful place in the public sphere. Most significant, Zakrzewska insisted that science, morality, and social progress went hand in hand. Inspired by German radical thought, she viewed science as a political weapon in the battle against all forms of inhumanity, but especially against sexual discrimination. In the end, Zakrzewska’s project faltered. She proved unable to fully disassociate science from gender and to link it with a vision of freedom. But the debate that animated Zakrzewska and others in the nineteenth century has not yet been put to rest, bringing home the importance of continuing Zakrzewska’s battle to prove that ‘‘science has no sex.’’
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NOTES
a b b r e v i a t i o n s
AR
Annual Report of the New-England Hospital for Women and Children.
Boston: Prentiss and Deland, 1863–1902.
Countway
Boston Medical Library in the Francis A. Countway Library
of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts.
Dall Papers
Caroline Healey Dall Papers, Massachusetts Historical
Society, Boston, Massachusetts.
GStA PK
Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Files of the Ministry of Culture, Berlin, Germany.
HL
Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
LBC
Labadie Collection, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
LC
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
NEHWC
New England Hospital for Women and Children.
PBL
Potsdam-Brandenburgisches Landeshauptarchiv, Potsdam,
Germany.
PI
Marie E. Zakrzewska. A Practical Illustration of ‘‘Woman’s Right to Labor’’; or, A Letter from Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D. Edited by Caroline H. Dall. Boston: Walker, Wise, and Co., 1860.
Severance Papers
Caroline Maria Seymour Severance Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
SL
Schlesinger Library, Radcli√e, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
SS
Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton,
Massachusetts.
UA der HUB
Universitätsarchiv der Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
WQ
Agnes Vietor, ed. A Woman’s Quest: The Life of Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D. 1924. New York: Arno Press, 1972.
Zakrzewski file
Martin Ludwig Zakrzewski’s personnel file, Rep. 76 I, Sekt. 31, Lit. Z, Nr. 2, Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Files of the Ministry of Culture, Berlin, Germany.
NOTES TO PAGES 1 – 5
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i n t r o d u c t i o n
1. ‘‘That They Might Live,’’ Archives and Special Collections on Women in Medicine and Homeopathy, Drexel University College of Medicine, Philadelphia, Pa. On ‘‘The Cavalcade of America,’’ see Grams, History of the Cavalcade of America; Grams, ‘‘Cavalcade of America’’; and Riley, Lucas, and Pettit, ‘‘Cavalcade of America.’’
2. For earlier works on Zakrzewska, see WQ; Walsh, ‘‘Doctors Wanted’’; Drachman, Hospital with a Heart; Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science (unless noted otherwise, all citations of this work are to the 1985 edition); and Abram, ‘‘Send Us a Lady Physician.’’ While the medical school Zakrzewska attended was popularly known as Cleveland Medical College, its o≈cial name at the time was the Medical Department of Western Reserve College. I
n 1967 Western Reserve University joined with the Case Institute of Technology to form Case Western Reserve University.
3. The first quotation is from Mary Putnam Jacobi, ‘‘Women in Medicine,’’ 166. The second is from Mary A. Smith, who interned at the New England Hospital in 1874; cited in Fiftieth Anniversary of the New England Hospital, 14.
4. Cited in WQ, 459.
5. [Zakrzewska] Eine ‘‘Aerztinn,’’ ‘‘Weibliche Aerzte.’’ On nineteenth-century women physicians’ use of satire, see Wells, Out of the Dead House, 92–99.
6. See Abram, ‘‘Send Us a Lady Physician’’; Blake, ‘‘Women and Medicine in Ante-Bellum America’’; Cayle√, Wash and Be Healed; Drachman, Hospital with a Heart; Moldow, Women Doctors in Gilded-Age Washington; Morantz, Pomerleau, and Fenichel, In Her Own Words; Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science; Shryock, ‘‘Women in American Medicine’’; and Walsh, ‘‘Doctors Wanted.’’ For more recent studies, see, among others, Bittel, ‘‘Science of Women’s Rights’’; Bonner, To the Ends of the Earth; Kirschmann, Vital Force; Morantz-Sanchez, Conduct Unbecoming a Woman; More, Restoring the Balance; Peitzman, New and Untried Course; Schoepflin, Christian Science on Trial; and Silver-Isenstadt, Shameless. See also the new preface in the 2000 republication of Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science, ix–xxxi.
7. Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science.
8. Zakrzewska, Introductory Lecture; Morantz, ‘‘ ‘Connecting Link.’ ’’
9. On mid-nineteenth-century American physicians’ attitudes toward German medicine, see Warner, Therapeutic Perspective, esp. chaps. 3 and 6, and the very moving final chapter of Warner, Against the Spirit of System, 330–64.
10. Ackerknecht, ‘‘Beiträge zur Geschichte der Medizinalreform.’’ I discuss this program in detail in Tuchman, Science, Medicine, and the State.
11. On the German radical community in America, see Levine, Spirit of 1848; Nadel, Little Germany; Brancaforte, German Forty-Eighters, esp. the article by Hamerow, ‘‘Two Worlds of the Forty-Eighters’’; and McCormick, Germans in America.
12. Cited in Wells, Out of the Dead House, 77–78. For a brief discussion of the place of religion, orthodox or unorthodox, in the lives of nineteenth-century women physicians in the United States, see Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science, 102–6, 187–88. The only other well-known nineteenth-century female physician who came close to sharing Zakrzewska’s views
NOTES TO PAGES 5 – 9
≤ 263
on scientific materialism was Mary Putnam Jacobi. See Bittel, ‘‘Science of Women’s Rights’’; Harvey, ‘‘ La Visite’’; and Harvey, ‘‘Medicine and Politics.’’
13. On religion and American radicals, see, for example, Perry, Radical Abolitionism; Lerner, Grimké Sisters from South Carolina; and Grodzins, American Heretic.
14. Some classic examples of this interpretative framework are Wood, ‘‘ ‘Fashionable Diseases’ ’’; Ehrenreich and English, For Her Own Good; and Drachman, Hospital with a Heart.
While Drachman presented a more complex picture than the other two, she nevertheless subscribed to this dichotomy.
15. Compare Drachman, Hospital with a Heart, 39, 150–53; Walsh, ‘‘Doctors Wanted,’’ 58–59, 86; and Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science, 63, 133–34, 177.
16. Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science, 200.
17. In Sympathy and Science, Morantz-Sanchez did much to challenge this dichotomy by representing the great diversity of positions women physicians held in the past. Nevertheless, the chapter in which she compared Elizabeth Blackwell and Mary Putnam Jacobi, although intended to represent two ends of a spectrum, had a tendency to reify this dichotomy.
Morantz-Sanchez’s own realization of this led her to write a subsequent piece, ‘‘Feminist Theory and Historical Practice,’’ in which she cast Blackwell as someone who, while critical of modern laboratory methods and especially vivisection, nevertheless valued knowledge derived from scientific methods of investigation as long as it was combined with knowledge acquired through such qualities as sympathy and compassion. See also More, Restoring the Balance.
18. Leavitt, ‘‘ ‘Worrying Profession.’ ’’
19. Morantz-Sanchez, Conduct Unbecoming a Woman; Bittel, ‘‘Science of Women’s Rights.’’
20. See, for example, Alco√, ‘‘Cultural Feminism versus Poststructuralism,’’ and the various essays in Nicholson, Second Wave.
21. Alco√, ‘‘Cultural Feminism versus Poststructuralism.’’ See also Fraser, ‘‘Structuralism or Pragmatics?,’’ 391; Keller, ‘‘Developmental Biology as a Feminist Cause?,’’ 17; and Haraway, ‘‘Situated Knowledges.’’
22. Butler, Gender Trouble, esp. 134–41.
23. WQ, 359.
24. Bonner, To the Ends of the Earth, 32–48.
25. On the idealized feminine type, see Welter, ‘‘Cult of True Womanhood.’’ On the rhetoric of domesticity, see Sklar, Catherine Beecher, and Evans, Born for Liberty, 101. For a provocative analysis of the transgressive gender performances of nineteenth-century American women physicians, see Wells, Out of the Dead House.
26. WQ, 268.
27. Zakrzewska to Paulina Pope, 28 October 1901, NEHWC Collection, box 1, SS. On Heinzen, see Wittke, Against the Current.
28. WQ, 296–97. I have been unable to find much biographical information on Sprague.
Most of what I know I have culled from her own correspondence and the occasional reference to her in histories of the New England Women’s Club.
29. Sprague wrote these letters between 1886 and 1911. They are all housed in the Caroline
NOTES TO PAGES 9 – 14
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Maria Seymour Severance Papers at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. I am grateful to Virginia Elwood-Akers, who is writing a biography of Caroline Severance, for informing me of these letters and for arranging to have them copied and sent to me.
30. On women’s relationships in the nineteenth century, see Smith-Rosenberg, ‘‘Female World of Love and Ritual’’; Sahli, ‘‘Smashing’’; Rupp, ‘‘ ‘Imagine My Surprise’ ’’; and Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men. On Boston marriages in particular, see di Leonardo, ‘‘Warrior Virgins and Boston Marriages,’’ and Freedman, Maternal Justice, esp. 107, 178, 242.
31. On the New England Hospital for Women and Children, see Drachman, Hospital with a Heart. This study, now twenty years old, looks at this hospital as both a medical institution and an example of the all-women’s institutions founded in the nineteenth century to provide a public space for women excluded from all-male schools and clubs. I build on Drachman’s work in my chapters on the New England Hospital, although I place greater emphasis on a third context for understanding the hospital: as one of many charitable institutions founded in the second half of the nineteenth century to deal with the rapidly increasing number of poor. I also do not always share her assessment of the reasons for the hospital’s decline.
32. On social welfare in the nineteenth-century United States, see Boyer, Urban Masses; Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled; Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse; Kunzel, Fallen Women, Problem Girls; Rosenberg, Care of Strangers; and Vogel, Invention of the Modern Hospital, 9–19.
33. On the policies at other hospitals, see Kass, Midwifery and Medicine, 103; Vogel, Invention of the Modern Hospital, 35; and Quiroga, Poor Mothers and Babies, 63–64. On Zakrzewska’s defense of unwed mothers, see, for example, Zakrzewska, ‘‘Report of the Attending Physician,’’ AR, 1868, 9–21.
34. See Rosenberg, ‘‘Inward Vision and Outward Glance’’; Rosenberg, Care of Strangers; and Starr, Social Transformation of American Medicine.
35. Walsh, ‘‘Doctors Wanted,’’ 76–105. Chapter 3 of this book, which deals solely with the New England Hospital, is entitled ‘‘Feminist Showplace.’’
36. Ibid., 76. On the founding of all women’s institutions in the nineteenth-century United States, see Freedman, ‘‘Separatism as Strategy.’’
37. Morantz-Sanchez, Sym
pathy and Science, 66–89.
38. Ibid., 73–74; More, Restoring the Balance, esp. 16–23, 45–56; Wells, Out of the Dead House, 126–28.
39. Kirschmann, Vital Force, 1–6; Rogers, ‘‘American Homeopathy Confronts Scientific Medicine’’ and Alternative Path, 1–9; and Warner, ‘‘Orthodoxy and Otherness.’’
40. Ludmerer, Learning to Heal.
41. See Drachman, Hospital with a Heart, 127; Walsh, ‘‘Doctors Wanted,’’ 83–84; More,
‘‘ ‘Empathy’ Enters the Profession of Medicine,’’ 25.
42. On the multiple meanings of science within the nineteenth-century American medical community, see the work of John Harley Warner, especially ‘‘Ideals of Science and Their Discontents’’ and Against the Spirit of System.
43. Rosenberg, Care of Strangers; Rothstein, American Physicians in the Nineteenth Century; Starr, Social Transformation of American Medicine; and Ludmerer, Learning to Heal.
44. Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science; More, Restoring the Balance; and Walsh, ‘‘Doctors Wanted.’’
NOTES TO PAGES 15 – 20
≤ 265
45. The literature is quite large. For some examples, see Abir-Am and Outram, Uneasy Careers and Intimate Lives; Kohlstedt, ‘‘Women in the History of Science’’; Kohlstedt and Longino, ‘‘Women, Gender, and Science Questions’’; Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies and Women Scientists in America: Before A≈rmative Action; and Schiebinger, Mind Has No Sex?
46. See, for example, Benjamin, Science and Sensibility; Jordanova, Sexual Visions; Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science and ‘‘Gender and Science’’; and Schiebinger, Nature’s Body and Has Feminism Changed Science?
c h a p t e r o n e
1. Marie’s last name is the feminine form of the family name and thus is di√erent from her father’s. Personal information on the Zakrzewski family is drawn largely from the Zakrzewski file in the Prussian archives. For useful definitions of the German bourgeoisie, see Blackbourn and Evans, German Bourgeoisie, xiv. See also Conze and Kocka, Bildungsbürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert, and Habermas, Frauen und Männer.
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