Science Has No Sex

by Arleen Marcia Tuchman

  To be sure, what made Zakrzewska unusual was not her praise of science; the vast majority of her peers agreed that medical education and practice must be grounded in scientific knowledge. Where she stood out was in the iconic status to which she elevated science, coupled with her critique of sympathy, the very virtue her peers so revered.

  Zakrzewska intrigued me immediately, and I found myself drawn more and more to a set of questions inspired by what I knew about her: Why, I wondered, did she so boldly claim science for women? Did others share her convictions?

  What, in fact, did terms like ‘‘science’’ and ‘‘sympathy’’ mean to her? Might they have meant something di√erent to her because of her German background? Zakrzewska’s writings on the place of science in medical practice reso-

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  nated with the material I had read for my book on nineteenth-century German medical theories and practices. Here, then, was an opportunity to look anew at the di√erences and similarities between German and American medicine at a time when most American physicians remained skeptical of what they believed to be taking place in the German laboratories and hospitals.Ω Zakrzewska’s story, it turned out, encompassed many intriguing twists: here was a German woman, trained in midwifery before she studied medicine, who was promoting European scientific medicine to a skeptical audience of American male physicians.

  The story I tell begins with an exploration of Zakrzewska’s German connections, something that historians have overlooked. Although Zakrzewska’s career as a physician certainly took shape in the United States, her emphasis on the natural sciences makes little sense divorced from her German upbringing, training, and connections. She grew up in a nineteenth-century German bourgeois family that held rationality, secularism, and the natural sciences in high regard, associating them with all that was considered modern and progressive. Moreover, during her midwifery training, which took place at midcentury at one of the best midwifery schools in Europe, she became familiar with the demands of young, academically trained German physicians that medical education be grounded more firmly in the laboratory and clinical sciences. To these physicians, the call for what was alternately called ‘‘physiological medicine,’’ ‘‘rational medicine,’’ or ‘‘scientific medicine’’ served two ends. First, it sought to bring greater certainty to medicine by deriving therapeutic practices from a knowledge of the laws governing pathological processes. Second, it served as a democratizing tool, challenging elite professionals who claimed that the true physician possessed a certain talent or intuition that could not be taught. Drawing on revolutionary rhetoric, popular during the years leading up to the revolutions of 1848, these young physicians insisted that since the scientific method was something that anyone, regardless of class background, could learn, the doors to the elite profession should be opened to all.∞≠ Zakrzewska would draw on all these meanings in her promotion of the natural sciences. Although there was hardly an elite medical profession in the United States when she arrived in 1853, she found this rhetoric of egalitarianism useful in her battle to open the doors of the medical profession to women.

  The German influence on Zakrzewska did not cease once she crossed the ocean. On the contrary, her appreciation of the political power of scientific

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  knowledge only increased when she became deeply involved within a few years of her arrival in the United States with the community of radical German émigrés, most of whom had fled their homeland following the failed revolutions of 1848. For these radicals, science was more than a tool for acquiring information about the natural world; rather, it represented something akin to a worldview. Frequently describing society as a battleground between religion (especially the Catholic Church) and arbitrary authority, on the one hand, and reason and political democracy, on the other, they linked science, atheism, and materialism to humanitarian ends, convinced that the abolition of misery would not occur until individuals abandoned their belief in a higher being and acquired the skills to think for themselves.∞∞

  Zakrzewska, who embraced the views of the community of German radicals, thus grounded her moral values in a secular, materialist philosophy. This distinguished her from most other American women physicians, who, like Ann Preston, dean of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, derived their strength from ‘‘the inviolable authority of religion.’’∞≤ Indeed, it distinguished

  her from the vast majority of middle-class Americans, for whom religion, whether mainstream or unorthodox, provided the foundation from which they derived their sense of right and wrong. This was even true of such radicals as William Lloyd Garrison, Theodore Parker, Wendell Phillips, Angelina Grimké, and Sarah Grimké, many of whom became Zakrzewska’s friends.∞≥ Zakrzewska may have joined with them in their fight to ensure justice for all, regardless of race, class, or sex, but her sense of justice did not stem from any belief in a divine being but rather from the conviction that the laws of nature, which science revealed, produced a world that was good in and of itself.

  . . .

  As I learned more about the reasons for Zakrzewska’s positive assessment of the sciences, I recognized the myriad ways in which her case complicated older assumptions about the relationship between gender and science. Certainly in the first wave of feminist work on women physicians, when scholars seemed particularly interested in Zakrzewska because of her germinal role in opening the medical profession to women, the dominant interpretive framework posited a fault line between femininity and morality, on the one hand, and masculinity and science, on the other.∞∂ Zakrzewska’s conviction that science and morality were intimately connected, however, and that women needed to reclaim traits such as rationality for themselves fit poorly into this framework. As a result, the

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  picture that emerged of Zakrzewska was highly confusing: we learned that she both promoted the idea of female uniqueness and ‘‘frowned on women who chose medicine out of female ‘sympathy.’ ’’ She was cast as both a proponent of the ‘‘holistic, subjective quality of nineteenth-century medicine’’ and an advocate of microscopy, thermometry, and scientific medicine. Zakrzewska supposedly regretted that she never married and was exuberant that she never had to compromise her independence. Finally, she appeared as someone whose pragmatism usually led her to appreciate the importance of compromises, while being cast by others as unsympathetic, inflexible, and authoritarian.∞∑

  These conflicting pictures reflected in part Zakrzewska’s complex personality and, as we will see, the way she changed as she aged. But they also stemmed from the di≈culty of fitting her into a theoretical framework that pitted, in Regina Morantz-Sanchez’s words, ‘‘ ‘femininity,’ ‘feminism’ and ‘morality’ ’’

  against ‘‘ ‘masculinity,’ ‘professionalism’ and ‘science.’ ’’∞∏ Subsequent feminist

  scholarship has, however, questioned whether such divisions were ever quite so entrenched as we had once thought. In recent years, intrigued by the multiple meanings of such terms as science and professionalism, historians have argued that many women physicians did not so much critique science and professionalism as define these terms di√erently than did the majority of their male colleagues.∞π They have also complicated the picture of men’s professional practice, showing, for example, that male physicians who practiced in rural settings spent their days struggling to balance their public and private lives in a fashion once assumed to be peculiar to women.∞∫ And they have documented the lives of women physicians who publicly aligned themselves with new scientific techniques and the new professionalism, exploring in particular the gendered meanings of such an a≈liation.∞Ω

  The analysis I o√er of Zakrzewska’s life and work has been shaped by this revisionist approach to gender and medicine. It has also been informed by feminist scholarship on what is alternatively labeled ‘‘situatedness’’ or ‘‘positionality
,’’ which explicitly attacks the kind of binary oppositions that had shaped the older scholarship. Motivated by a desire to avoid the problems inherent in both cultural feminism’s essentializing definition of ‘‘woman’’ and poststructuralism’s tendency toward nominalism, many feminist theorists sought to destabilize the category ‘‘woman’’ while still retaining a loose definition of what it might mean to be a woman in any given situation. These theorists held that while essential-ism o√ered them a clear picture of who and what they were fighting for, the price was a fixed definition of what it meant to be a woman, which both excluded

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  those who did not fit this definition and ignored the changing nature of that category over time. Poststructuralism, on the other hand, provided a powerful apparatus for analyzing the discursive construction of gendered identities, but the category of ‘‘woman’’ threatened to disappear in this kind of analysis, along with the rationale not only for feminist analysis but also for political action.≤≠

  As a way out of this quandary, several theorists embraced a notion of gender as ‘‘situational’’ or ‘‘positional.’’ Accordingly, a woman’s subject identity, her actions, and her beliefs are all understood in relation to a specific and always changing context—a particular set of conditions, opportunities, and constraints

  —and not against an idealized notion of how women should behave.≤∞ This understanding of gender encourages exploration of the di√erent kinds of personal and political negotiations that become necessary as contexts change. It also draws attention to the highly unstable nature of gender categories. Multiple understandings of masculinity and femininity have circulated at any given time, constantly threatening to subvert the rigid binary oppositions upon which power depends. Traditional boundaries must, as a result, constantly be reas-serted or, in Judith Butler’s terms, ‘‘performed.’’≤≤ In this sense, gender is neither a foundational category nor a meaningless category but rather a set of practices that individuals perform repeatedly and that aim to create the appearance of two and only two genders.

  Focusing on Zakrzewska’s ‘‘situatedness’’ led me to think of her as someone who, unlike many of her colleagues, rejected the option of empowering a set of allegedly feminine virtues as a way of justifying women’s entry into the medical profession. Instead, recognizing the multiple and competing understandings of masculinity and femininity available to her, she tried, sometimes more successfully than others, to use these meanings to challenge the gender-based claims that functioned to keep women out of the public sphere. Zakrzewska, I realized, was engaged in her own struggle to dissociate science from gender by casting science and rationality as universal rather than masculine traits. The title of this book stems from a comment Zakrzewska made when o√ering a comparison of di√erent nations’ attitudes toward women physicians. ‘‘I am sorry,’’ she wrote, ‘‘to be forced to say that it is not the Republic of America which has given the proof that ‘science has no sex.’ . . . But it is the Republic of Switzerland which has verified this maxim.’’≤≥ Zakrzewska was referring to the decision on the part of the University of Zurich to let women study medicine as early as 1864.≤∂ That only a republic could be the site of such momentous change Zakrzewska never doubted for the simple reason that only a nation

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  committed to equal rights for all human beings would ever be capable of extending such rights to women.

  . . .

  Zakrzewska’s battle to dissociate science from gender involved more than words. She also presented a di√erent image of what it meant to be a woman.

  The few photographs we have indicate a woman who shunned traditional feminine markers such as ribbons and lace, preferring instead an unadorned and austere look. In addition, in stark opposition to the idealized construction of Victorian womanhood as pious, domestic, and dependent, Zakrzewska denounced religion, defended unwed mothers, and encouraged women to take on positions of authority. To be sure, few nineteenth-century women actually embodied this Victorian ideal, and certainly any woman who studied medicine at the time defied normative gender scripts.≤∑ Still, Zakrzewska stood out not only for the extent of the challenges she posed but also for the public nature of her challenges. Displaying her wit, using logic to ridicule opponents, even assuming the directorship of a hospital—these were all acts that highlighted her anomalous gender position and functioned (she hoped) to challenge assumptions about the true nature of woman. That she experienced such public displays as transgressive is evident in her comment that her father, who disapproved of her move to Boston, claimed she was ‘‘disgracing the family, and German womanhood in general, by accepting a position which caused my name to come prominently before the public.’’≤∏

  Zakrzewska challenged normative roles in her private life as well. Indeed, a kind of symbiosis existed between her public attack on the cultural stereotypes that functioned to constrain women’s options and the alternative family she created for herself. Although Zakrzewska did not leave the volumes of personal material that biographers usually mine when they write their subject’s life, enough has survived to paint a picture of a woman who flouted middle-class conventions by rejecting the institution of marriage and creating instead a family centered around two individuals: Karl Heinzen and Julia A. Sprague.

  Heinzen, a German radical émigré and political journalist, shared Zakrzewska’s home for twenty years. Despite the controversy that later erupted over the nature of their relationship, this was not a romantic a√air. Heinzen was considerably older, married, and a father, and when he moved into Zakrzewska’s home, he brought his wife and child with him. The strength of their bond had rather more to do with their shared political convictions. As Zakrzewska once

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  explained, she had been drawn to Heinzen because of his commitment to abolitionism and women’s rights.≤π

  Sprague, a women’s rights reformer and founding member of the New England Women’s Club, lived with Zakrzewska for forty years. Her name appears only a few times in the old but standard biography of Zakrzewska, published in 1924. Agnes Vietor, the author of A Woman’s Quest: The Life of Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D. , did, however, include the intriguing line that Sprague was Zakrzewska’s ‘‘faithful friend and home companion for life.’’≤∫ Nevertheless, the nature of their relationship, like so many other same-sex relationships in the past, remained obscure until the recent discovery of roughly fifty letters of Sprague’s, all written to the woman’s rights reformer Caroline Severance, a close friend of both Sprague’s and Zakrzewska’s.≤Ω

  These letters attest to the depth of the bond that developed between these two women over the forty-year period during which they shared their home and their lives. In exploring their relationship I have relied on the work of women’s historians, who have radically altered our understanding of same-sex relationships. As they have shown, nineteenth-century women lived, worked, and traveled together at a time when emotional attachments between women did not evoke suspicion of a lesbian relationship. Some formed ‘‘Boston marriages,’’ a label that, as early as the nineteenth century, came to describe two women, usually both middle-class professionals, who shared a household. While some formed Boston marriages as a way of sharing the many responsibilities and chores associated with running a household, for others, the decision to become partners for life grew out of their romantic love for each other.≥≠ The relationship between Zakrzewska and Sprague seems to have begun as a convenient arrangement, but it grew slowly over the years into a committed and caring partnership. Zakrzewska may never have married, but she created a rich life for herself in which she was never alone.. . .

  What follows, then, is the story of a woman who established a central place for herself in the nineteenth-century American medical community while also being active in radical political circles throughout her adult life. Zakrzewska arrived in th
e United States in 1853, a time of great turmoil: the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 marked the formal beginning of a movement for women’s rights; the passing of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 heightened tensions between the North and the South; and the growth of cities, coupled with the

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  massive influx of immigrants from Ireland and Germany, was forcing Americans to confront expanding problems of urban poverty and disease. Within a few years of her arrival, Zakrzewska positioned herself on the radical fringe of those seeking reform; she did this not only through her German connections but also through her involvement in the radical wing of American political and social movements. Thus, Zakrzewska became an abolitionist and su√ragist, serving briefly as a vice president of the Massachusetts Women’s Su√rage Association. Her greatest contribution to social change came, however, through her founding of the New England Hospital for Women and Children, an institution she hoped would level the playing field for women in at least two ways: by providing poor, sick, and pregnant women with the same quality of care that wealthier women could purchase, thus o√ering them an alternative to the almshouse; and by creating a female-run teaching hospital, where women who aspired to the practice of medicine would have clinical opportunities otherwise denied to them. ≥∞

  I first examine the New England Hospital as one of many social welfare institutions founded in the mid-nineteenth century to address the social problems linked to massive immigration and the resultant increase in urban poverty.

  Zakrzewska may not have ascribed to the mixture of Christian stewardship and Victorian moralism that inspired many of the founders of these institutions, but she still viewed her responsibilities as director of a new hospital to be a blend of medical care and moral education. Sharing with other founders a sense of obligation toward the poor and needy, combined with a reformist impulse that sought to discipline them, she too refused refuge to those she deemed unworthy.≥≤ Nevertheless, her political radicalism, particularly her concern for the plight of poor women, led her to draw such lines more loosely. At a time, for example, when some hospitals refused to establish lying-in wards for fear of the kind of women who would seek refuge and other maternity hospitals refused to admit unwed patients, Zakrzewska spoke out publicly in defense of unwed mothers, declaring it inhumane to limit care to those who possessed a marriage