150 likes | 269 Views
The Victorian Coalition. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union Anti-pornography and social purity advocates Religious leaders The American Medical Association. The WCTU White Ribbon Campaign. The “Comstock” Act of 1871.
E N D
The Victorian Coalition • The Women’s Christian Temperance Union • Anti-pornography and social purity advocates • Religious leaders • The American Medical Association The WCTU White Ribbon Campaign
The “Comstock” Act of 1871 • “Act of the Suppression of Trade In, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use” • Prohibits sending of obscene literature through the mails • Defines birth control information as obscene • Comstock appointed assistant postmaster to enforce the law Anthony Comstock
Victoria Woodhull • Stockbroker • Advocate of women’s suffrage and “free love” • First person to publish Marx/Engels’ “Communist Manifesto” in the United States • Ran for President of the United States, 1872
Asked by Marion Talbot of 705 U Chicago women 78 percent said good health 17 percent said bad health 5 percent said fair health How is your health? Marion Talbot in her later years
Pragmatism • An early 20th century philosophy that encouraged experimentation and measurement rather than theorizing • Rejected both Social Darwinism and Marxism • People need to learn how to change their minds –John Dewey
Howard Stern Are men an evolutionary fluke?? • Lester Frank Ward: the human race began with females – men an evolutionary add-on • Charlotte Perkins Gilman: men’s aggressiveness was an early evolutionary adaptation • Thorstein Veblen: patriarchy an evolutionary mistake
Do you want to goto graduate school? • Asked by Marion Talbot in her second study • 12 percent of men at U Chicago and 14 percent of women go to graduate school • 41 percent of men and 36 percent of women complete their doctorates
The DeweyUniversity of Chicago Boys • James R. Angell, George Herbert Mead, and James Tufts • Not part of an Ivy League old boys network • Pragmatists • Emphasized empirical data
Helen Thompson identifies 4 untested assumptions about gender: • Human physiology mirrors that of “lower” animals • Human psychology comes from human physiology • Men have a more active metabolism • Men better off tending to commerce and science; women to the home
Helen Thompson • Tested women and men for sensory and perceptual differences • Found a wide range of similar abilities between women and men • Published her findings in The Mental Traits of Sex (1903)
Edward Thorndike of Columbia University • Skeptical of overarching theories about human behavior • Wondered whether human behavior was based on reason or trial and error
Her tests indicate menstruating women’s mental facilities same as men’s facilities at same time. Leta Hollingsworth
Clelia Duel Mosher • Studied 3,350 thousand menstrual cycles in 400 women • Found that their attitudes toward menstruation harmed them • Not menstruation itself
Lewis Terman on women’s IQ, 1917 “There is no evidence of any wider range of intelligence among boys, such as has been commonly supposed to exist . . . “The difference, if any, seems to be in the opposite direction.”
Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, 1907, 1910 Freud, Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 1909