Lydia Reeder is an award-winning author. Her first book, Dust Bowl Girls, was a Junior Library Guild Selection, a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award and the WILLA Literary Award, and won the For the Love of the Game Award from the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame. It was named a 2017 top nonfiction book by Amazon, Bustle, Romper, and Bookbub and has been optioned for film five times. The Cure for Women is her second book.
What’s the big idea?
For centuries, women have had to fight the notion that their own female bodies are a biological weakness. Medical arguments that women are “objectively” frail and less capable than men have been used to control women’s choices and opportunities. Since the rise of female doctors in the 19th century, women have been adding scientific proof to their feminist arsenal.
Below, Lydia shares five key insights from her new book, The Cure for Women: Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Challenge to Victorian Medicine That Changed Women’s Lives Forever. Listen to the audio version—read by Lydia herself—in the Next Big Idea App.
1. Women healing other women was a moral choice.
During the 19th century, women suffering from serious illnesses were often unwilling to violate the Victorian ideals of purity, chasteness, and social propriety by exposing their bodies to male physicians. Consequently, many women were not receiving necessary care.
Elizabeth Blackwell, a beacon of courage, became the first woman in America to graduate from medical school in 1849. Her unwavering determination to provide sick women the option of seeing a woman doctor led her to open her own infirmary, after being rejected by every hospital and clinic in New York. In the beginning, she felt isolated in her fight against prejudice. However, her encounter with Ann Preston, a recent graduate from the newly opened Female Medical College of Pennsylvania, changed everything. Preston’s words, “It was women’s destiny to become doctors,” ignited a fire in Blackwell. If women were supposed to remain in their own separate, feminine world, why should men be allowed to treat them at all? Like good mothers, women doctors should care for the health of other women and their children.
Blackwell’s powerful argument, echoed by Preston, sparked a significant change. The country’s most popular women’s magazine wrote editorials saying women were “by nature, better qualified than men to take charge of the sick and suffering.” This marked a turning point in history as more women began asking for female doctors, signaling a hopeful shift in societal attitudes towards women in medicine.
2. Mary Putnam Jacobi practiced fearless determination to achieve her goals.
The eldest child of New York publisher George Palmer Putnam, Mary Putnam Jacobi grew up in a household that entertained elite writers and thinkers. She was always the cleverest person in the room. Nicknamed “Minnie” because of her size, her view of the world was tall, wide, and clear, as if she were always gazing from a mountaintop.
Mentored by Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell, Jacobi fell in love with science. She became the first woman in America to earn a degree in pharmacy. But she didn’t stop there. She set her sights on the finest medical school in the world at the Sorbonne in Paris, even though the institution had never accepted a woman in the 600 years it had existed.
“She became the first woman in America to earn a degree in pharmacy.”
It took two years of brilliant, relentless clinical work and networking, but Mary Putnam became the first woman accepted into the Paris Medical School in 1868. She wore black dresses to hide her femininity, charmed her professors with her wit and intelligence, and even survived the 1870 siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian war. In 1871, she graduated at the top of her class to become one of the best-educated physicians in the world.
3. Jacobi changed the course of American medicine.
While attending medical school in Paris, Jacobi worked in a state-of-the-art laboratory for Louis-Antoine Ranvier, an assistant to the French physiologist Claude Bernard. Bernard, known as one of the most remarkable men of science, advocated directly applying experimental methods (physiology, chemistry, biology, microscopy) to clinical medicine. Jacobi arrived in Paris just in time to help invent scientific medicine.
When she returned to America, she brought Bernard’s science with her. She held her fellow male physicians to the highest standards and criticized their findings if they lacked scientific evidence. As one male physician friend later wrote, her knowledge of science was so wide and her criticism so “keen, fearless, and just that in our discussions we felt it prudent to shun the field of speculation and to walk strictly in the path of demonstrated facts.”
Jacobi was professor of materia medica at the Women’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary, the world’s first medical school for women established by Elizabeth Blackwell and her sister Emily. As a teacher, Jacobi inspired future generations of women to strive for medical innovation. Most radically, in her research, she explored the idea that men and women were not so different and that social restrictions, not biology, threatened female health. Her pioneering scientific research de-pathologized women’s bodies and led to the beginning of a cultural paradigm change: the belief that women have a right to be educated and choose their destinies.
4. Junk science about reproductive biology is used to curtail women’s freedoms.
In the mid-19th century, the success of women doctors and the rise of suffrage caused a furious backlash. Elite male physicians gave lectures and wrote “scientific” papers claiming “biological” proof of women’s innate frailty. The most popular of these writings was “Sex in Education, or, A Fair Chance for the Girls,” published in 1873 by Dr. Edward H. Clarke. He wrote that scientific evidence proved that if a girl studied as much as a boy, her intellect—a masculine function—would grow at the expense of her ovaries, which, like the untended rose, would wither and shrink. According to Clarke, “The course of education which would make a manly man would kill a woman, and the course of education which would make a womanly woman would emasculate a man.” He recommended that girls study less than four hours per day and take a week off during menstruation.
“Courts across the country continue to rely on discredited science to impose restrictions on women’s healthcare access.”
Clarke’s book was an international bestseller. Newspaper articles across the country amplified his dire predictions. One journalist wrote that he hoped the new science would end women’s suffrage. Today, we see echoes of such pseudoscience in the so-called “fetal heartbeat” argument used to impose abortion bans in numerous states. Anti-abortion rhetoric falsely claims that abortions lead to breast cancer and mental instability while asserting that birth control pills cause prostate cancer and promote abortions. Unfortunately, courts across the country continue to rely on discredited science to impose restrictions on women’s healthcare access, underscoring the urgent need for accurate information and equitable rights for women.
5. The convergence of medicine, science, and feminism elevated women’s status.
Women had absorbed the widespread cultural view that their bodies were sick, wrote Jacobi in her essay “The Question of Rest for Women During Menstruation.” Composed in response to Clarke’s findings, Jacobi’s influential paper won Harvard University’s Boylston Prize. Jacobi was determined to replace this cult of weakness with her theory of women’s strength, but she needed help. In response, wealthy women philanthropists joined forces with prominent suffragists to forge a robust data-collection network, allowing Jacobi to perform medical tests on women during their menstrual cycles for the first time. She surveyed hundreds of women and asked them to comment on their own health, adding their voices to the official medical record.
In her essay, Jacobi argued that menstruation was a time of “increased vital energy,” not sickness. She found that menstruation was like any other bodily function and recommended more healthy activity, not more rest. She summarized with mocking humor: “[I]f Clarke’s arguments for rest were to be enforced among young women, he should consign them to the inactivity of a Turkish harem, where indeed, anemia, if not dysmenorrhea [pain during menstruation] is said to be extremely frequent.”
Through the power of networking, women made great strides in the fight for gender equality. Their activism changed the world.
To listen to the audio version read by author Lydia Reeder, download the Next Big Idea App today:
