Dissertation Research: Fighting Science with Science: Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Politics of Women's Health

Cornell University, Ithaca NY

Investigators

Abstract

Historians of women and medicine have paid great attention to the history of the female body and its social construction by men of medicine in nineteenth-century America. But less attention has been granted to studying the medical science of women physicians and understanding how women's knowledge and practices reflected their own notions of gender, society, and politics. This dissertation research project provides travel funds to archives in order to examine the published works of Mary Putman Jacobi, Abraham Jacobi, and other relevant social activists and physicians. This research will contribute to the completion of a dissertation which examines the life and work of Mary Putnam Jacobi (1842-1906). The dissertation's aim is to achieve a greater understanding of how women physicians, especially those interested in women's rights and equality, produced scientific knowledge that reflected their social concerns. It will trace how women physicians like Jacobi used science to contest the pathological constructions of female biology that were employed to justify women's exclusion from the spheres of politics, the professions, and higher education. Mary Putnam Jacobi was the most respected and influential woman doctor of her time, well-educated and widely published on a variety of medical issues. She supported and put into practice the main tenets of scientific medicine, which helped her gain the support of medical men. Jacobi was also an adamant social activist who worked on behalf of women's rights, suffrage, and education. This cultural biography of Mary Putnam Jacobi will tie this activism to the results of her scientific inquiry, showing how Jacobi's social experience and political ideologies shaped her theories on menstruation, hysteria, and physiology. This dissertation will be the first scholarly biography to use Jacobi as a starting point for understanding the social experiences of women physicians, and the wider intellectual debates among physicians in the nineteenth century. This study will also add historical perspective to contemporary and sociological discussions on gender and science. Feminist theorists have challenged the notion of objectivity and argued for new forms of feminist empiricism. Jacobi stands as a historical example of a woman scientist who pursued scientific objectivity in the hope of producing medical knowledge that was more favorable to women. This dissertation will show, however, that like feminist scientists of today, Jacobi's work remained bound to her social, cultural, and political interests and concerns.