Bluestocking-era Sensibilities

In response to Women and Education by betenoire:

I've got to find a compilation of these sorts of quotes. I recall hearing one in which it was claimed women's uteruses would explode if they rode bicycles. Which is why I don't believe any of the misinformation that comes out about women along these lines, and it still does, it most certainly does, like a never-ending stream of sewage.

To add to your compilation:

Fig 1.3 Progressive and liberal, the French artist Honor� Daumier was nevertheless ambivalent about women who aspired to be more than mothers. The caption to this lithograph read: "The mother is in the heat of writing. The child is in the bath water!" While Daumier read books like La Physiologie du bas blue (The Physiology of the Bluestocking), and produced cruel charicatures of freakish and non-nurturing women for his series entitled Les Bas-blue, back in England an early evolutionist, Herbert Spencer, was struck by the fact that "upper-class girls" reproduced less than "girls belonging to poorer classes," even though the latter were less well fed. Spencer decided that the "deficiency of reproductive power among [the advantaged] may be reasonably attributed to the overtaxing of their brains" and that "the flat-chested girls who survive their high-pressure education" would be "incompetent" to breast feed.

-- Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection, caption to figure on p. 16

The "social Darwinist" presumption of the time, that the less educated, and hence less evolved, female of the species had the "natural" (and hence less human) function of producing offspring, exclusive of all other purposes, lead to the logical fallacy that any woman who did not exhibit this "maternal instinct" had to have some pathology to explain it.

Leave it to the prejudiced mind to say, in one breath, that education (as encompassed in "standing on the shoulders of giants") is evidence of higher evolution in one group, and then in the next breath, to assert that education, when seen in another group, is a pathological condition to the detriment of the entire species. (A hypocrisy not limited to misogynist sentiment.)

However, Blaffer Hrdy re-examines the relationship between child-bearing/rearing (measured, in evolutionary terms, as "reproductive success") and social rank (and the education that tends to be associated with social rank in modern society), and makes the following, somewhat unsettling, observation:

In the modern world, status (whether socioeconomic or professional) is, if anything, inversely correlated with reproductive success. This is especially true for women who earn their status. Not long ago, sociobiologist Susan Essock-Vitale looked at the reproductive success of people listed on Forbes Magazine's annual listing of the four hundred wealthiest Americans. Those whomen who had inherited wealth had significantly more children on average than successful businesswomen who had acquired their wealth through their own efforts. This should not come as a surprise. When given the opporuntity, many women value upward mobility over time devoted to rearing a family. We need only look at the grueling hours that working mothers put into jobs as lawyers, doctors, and research scientists, careers with demands as insatiable as those of children. But if our evolutinary heritage has any relevance to what we are, how can this be? 

The answer is simple. In worlds where there was no birth control, and where no female was ever celibate, there was no possibility that female rank and maternal reproductive success could be other than correlated. Nature built no safegards to ambition run awry, as it were, to energies diverted to status ends that were not linked to the production, survival, and prosperity of offspring. Now that status and the survival of offspring have been decoupled, will there be selection against women who are especially inclined or driven to achieve? Probably, if our species survives long enough, and if circumstances in the workplace don't change. [Bold added.]

Myself, I'm in favor of changing the workplace, or more generally the societal structures that mandate that human beings, irrespective of gender, make irreconcilable choices between providing for, on the one hand, and caring for, on the other, not only their offspring, but their kin and communities. If we want any proof of the pathology that can arise from education, we need only look to Levitt's "bedroom" communities, Wright's porchless houses, and Robert Moses's highways.

Blaffer Hrdy quotes a surpressed manuscript of Cl�mence Royer (Darwin's translator before she scoffed at his notions of pangenesis):

Up until now, science, like law, has been exclusively made by men and has considered woman too often an absolutely passive being, without instincts, passions, or her own interests; a purely plastic material that without resistance can take whatever form one wishes to give it; a living creature without personal conscience, without will, without inner resources to react against her instincts, her hereditary passions, or finally against the education that she receives and against the discipline to which she submits following law, customs, and public opinions. 

Woman, however, is not made like this.

So too, the pathology of education is to consider society (or the natural world, for that matter) "too often an absolutely passive being...a purely plastic material that without resistance can take whatever form one wishes to give it". Society, however, is not made like this. Nature, however, is not made like this.

The sooner we decouple educational status from the presumption of superiority over our fellow human beings, the sooner ambition is decoupled from scholarcentric, androcentric, and anthropocentric bias, the sooner we can get on with the task of finding ways of relating to one another that don't reproduce the materialist assumptions of a fancifully plastic world conforming to an elitist will.