Why Intelligent Women Invariably Have a Narrow Pelvis; or, S.W. Mitchell Week Continues

This morning Mary Ann asked "What's up with the part [of the S.W. Mitchell's Quote of Quotes] that says 'over brain-work tends to contract [a woman's] pelvis.'"  Mary Ann, luckily you challenged this continent's foremost expert in Mitchellana (Mitchellalia?) to answer a question about ol' S.W. and his roundaboutly sexist theory of anatomical development in educated women. 

I say "roundaboutly" not because his ideas weren't retrograde—they certainly were—but because they were encompassed by his general theory that all Americans were unhealthily overworked.  In Wear and Tear, or Hints for the Overworked, Mitchell argued that the rise in nervous disorders among the educated classes could be directly attributed to the combination of a sedentary lifestyle, untreated "mental fatigue" and poor working conditions.  He prescribed the infamous "rest cure" to as many men as women; his reputation suffers because one of the woman it failed to "cure" wrote such a forceful account of its failure.

Not to defend Mitchell, but even by Gilman's own account, the "rest cure" worked.  In "Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper," she wrote Mitchell "put [her] to bed and applied the rest cure, to which a still-good physique responded so promptly that he concluded there was nothing much the matter with [her]."  Condemnations of Mitchell don't actually address the merits of his "rest cure" but his suggestion that Gilman "live as domestic a life as far as possible," "have but two hours' intellectual life a day," and "never touch a pen, brush or pencil again."  Those recommendations are consonant with Mitchell's treatment of patients with severe nervous disorders.  They are not general recommendations for women who seek intellectual stimulation, as three waves of feminist scholarship on Gilman have held. 

Women suffer, however, from "physiological limitations" which should limit such stimulation.  In "When College Is Hurtful to a Girl," Mitchell argues that

women at college work harder than men; out of their eagerness arise disregard of physiological limitations, the tendency to shirk play and exercise for study, the cutting short of meal leisure, and the robbing of sleep to add to the hours of the day.

Men don't have this problem because they are "foolish," "profligate" and love to "waste time."  Their weakness of character makes them better suited for intellectual labor because they're averse to it.  Because "the man yearns for exercise" he is less likely than his female compatriot to push himself past his "physiological limitations."  I balk at that notion as much as the next denizen of the 21st Century.  However, to return to Mary's question about why "over brain-work tends to contract a woman's pelvis," the reason for this isn't biological so much as social:

Women have to adhere to a strict (and constricting) standard of dress.  Too many hours spent in feminine attire at a desk curve the spine and narrow the pelvis.  Mitchell, ever the man of his moment, never advocated a change in female dress.  Instead he recommended fewer hours before a desk engaging in a practice known to cause nervous distress.  All of which is only to say:

Contra his reputation among literary scholars, Mitchell wasn't that kind of sexist.  He firmly believed in heteronormative relations and that women should consider themselves mothers above all else; but he was no biological essentialist.  One thing which irks me about much of the advocacy criticism I read is that, while correct in a general sense, all the specifics miss the mark. 

Was Mitchell a sexist?  Certainly.  Was he a sexist in the way contemporary critics define 19th Century sexism?  Certainly not.  That hasn't prevented contemporary critics from shoehorning him in there anyway.  As an historicist I'm not satisfied with presentist indictments followed by high-handed dismissals.  It's not enough to know that he was sexist. 

One should strive to know exactly what kind of sexist he was.

Comments

[Liz]

You really should stop blogging for a few days. I'm supposed to be studying Foucault and Derrida and Hegel and Nietzsche and about 30 other theorists, and so what am I doing commenting on your S.W. Mitchell thread?

[Brian]

Scott, thanks for sharing your excellent scholarship! I've had many a discouraging day in academia, but knowing that "[my] weakness of character makes [me] better suited for intellectual labor because [I'm] averse to it" has really lifted my spirits. Turns out I'm ideally suited for this lousy work!

[Jake - but not the one]

Because "the man yearns for exercise" he is less likely than his female compatriot to push himself past his "physiological limitations." I balk at that notion as much as the next denizen of the 21st Century.

Scott, clearly you haven't been paying attention. Mitchell's statement is objectively and verifiably true. The time YOU spend on this blog is proof enough in your personal case - and in mine for reading it.

'nuff said.

Jake

[N. Pepperell]

Several months back, I was making a somewhat analogous point to my partner, who thought about it for a moment, and then asked: "So, what you're telling me is, that it isn't enough for you, if someone decides 'So-n-so is an idiot' - you want to know 'why' they're an idiot?"

[Mary Ann]

Whew! As long as I'm blogging in my bathrobe, breaking occasionally for setting up exercises and IM'ing my daughter to reaffirm my motherhood role, I'm okay - even with patterned wallpaper.

Seriously, thanks for the insight. I'm absolutely with N Pepperell - I always want to know why...

[Rodney Herring]

Okay, I'll play devil's advocate for a minute.

Scott says, "It's not enough to know that he was sexist. / One should strive to know exactly what kind of sexist he was."

Now, the pronoun applies to Mitchell, but I like the effect of its not having an antecedent because that forces us to ask: In what circumstances do (or should) we strive to know "what kind" or "why"?

Is it not possible to imagine an instance of someone saying "so-n-so's an idiot" and we care so little about who "so-n-so" is that we don't ask why and don't care to ask why?

In the same way, someone 100 years from now will likely think David Horowitz was an idiot, and a reactionary, and (as a corollary) had all kinds of distasteful attitudes. But how many people will ask "why" or "what kind"? How many people should ask why or what kind? What would necessitate a dissertation-length study of Horowitz's work?

Now this is not to question the premises of Scott's research (indeed, I'm just playing devil's advocate), but to point out that invoking the necessity of a method--always "ask why," be skeptical, or seek to know "what kind"--is bound to fail in justifying why a particular writer deserves attention. Some egregious examples of racists, sexists, and otherwise assholes should not have had a voice in the first place (shh! don't tell Alan Dershowitz) and to find out why they were assholes seems, in such times, to be anything but necessary.

To find out why the assholes were given a voice strikes me as a different and differently fruitful project.

Anyway, Scott's trying to answer the question of "why Mitchell should be studied in spite of his sexism" and "why Mitchell's sexism ought to be more accurately understood (especially in relation to his work as a whole)," but not quite "why Mitchell's sexism should be studied." I distinguish the latter because since it establishes no prior usefulness for studying Mitchell, it can be no better than saying "let's study the sexism of Scott's (or my) great-great-grandfather (or any other random guy or gal in, say, 1880."

All of which boils down to: "No really, why study Mitchell?" But I take it that question has been answered (here), will be answered (elsewhere), and need not be answered anyway for this particular audience.

[Rich Puchalsky]

I'm not sure if I understand your devil's advocacy, RH. The question of why anyone should study Mitchell I thought was implicitly answered in terms of his popularity or influence in his time. To be a devil's advocate in turn, isn't any other kind of answer pretty much precluded by contemporary concerns, which denigrate ideas of aesthetic quality or value of writing? I don't see how anyone justifies studying *any* writer now except in terms of: a) popularity, b) influence, c) marginality.

[Adam Roberts]

Hmm. Watched The Aviator for the first time last night ... great film ... but I found myself thinking: it does such a powerful job of presenting Howard Hughes as (a) a sort of genius, and (b) a sort of OCD nutjob, that it bugged me, and bugged me increasingly as the film went on, that Scorcese completely elided Hughes's passionately advocated and virulent anti-Black and anti-Semitic racism. Something very wrong seemed to me to be happening; as if the point of the film was to say 'Hughes was a genius, and yes we know he was a flawed genius, but the heighth and breadth and depth of those flaws was carrying his own soap in a little box and repeating phrases like "the way of the future" seventy or eighty times.' If the film had instead been saying 'Highes was a genius, but a flawed genius, and his flaws were these Nazi attitudes ...' it would have been a much more interesting and uncomfortable piece of cinema.

By way, oblquely, of agreeing with Rich and disagreeing with Rodney H. I appreciate it has nothing to do with Mitchell ...

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

I'm (Surprise!) going to have to agree with Rich and Adam on this one. I'm not studying Mitchell's sexism per se but Mitchell as an important historical figure whose novels were among unrivaled in popularity and he's considered by many the father of modern neurology. (At the very least he popularized as no one had before, writing articles for majority of the most widely circulated periodicals.) So I suppose here I'm revealing my cultural studies bias: I'm more interested in the period, in how the debates about the evolution of human society percolated through American culture during a period in which the word "evolutionary" refered to eight or nine identifiable but mutually exclusive schools of developmental thinking.

I'm interested in this because it effects the way we still think about the application of scientific theory to human society. (Cue Crooked Timber's seminar on The Republican War on Science, conveniently published today.) I don't have the numbers on this computer, but when I started my dissertation I did an exhaustive search for the appearance variations of the phrase "social darwinism" since 1900. It appeared most often in the 1940s as something to be prevented by supporting New Deal policy and the putative subject of Hofstadter's book; appeared infrequently in references to Hofstadter or the Gilded Age/Progressive Era for another fifty years; then came back with a vengence in the '90s as a way to argue against New Deal policies; then again after Bush was elected to refer, frequently nonsensically, to anything related to science and/or social engineering. All of which is only to say that I began this project interested in the '30s and '40s and worked backwards to a figure like Mitchell, a neurologist who thinks professionally about somatic development and whose popular novels about the relation of individual development and the founding and sustaining of the American Republic. What better place to see works informed by scientific thought which, for one reason or another, struck a chord with the American reading public at the turn-of-the-century?

The reason, then, that his sexist or racism would be important is because it tells us something crucial about a pivotal moment in the history of America's relation to scientific thought. I won't go so far as to say that moment's determinative, because it isn't: Hofstadter's mythifying of it in the '40s is far more important. But debunking Hofstadter's revisionary history, demonstrating that these ideas thought to define an era had very little weight, and that the social ills characterizing it therefore don't originate with the widespread adoption of a particular scientific theory and its application to social and economic policy, strikes me as important.

I was going to refute the idea that, generally, the impulse to skepticism is always salutory, but then I remembered there's evidence on this here blog that one of my next chapters will concern Thomas Dixon and I don't want to be that hypocrite quite yet. Although, the cultural historian in me does think that it'll be interesting to analyze Horowitz's movement a hundred years hence, trying to suss out the source of its appeal, &c. But so do you . . . at least, I'm assuming he falls in the category of "Asshole Given a Voice."

[Rodney Herring]

I feel misread...

but that's a consequence of being contrarian, I suppose. Anyway,

Rich: "I don't see how anyone justifies studying *any* writer now except in terms of: a) popularity, b) influence, c) marginality."

Me either. But I don't think any of those criteria were precluded by my post, which argued, rather, that "invoking the necessity of a method--always ‘ask why,’ be skeptical, or seek to know ‘what kind’--is bound to fail in justifying why a particular writer deserves attention."

To which you may say, this post didn't claim that this or any "method" was justification for writing about Mitchell. And you'd be right. Except that N.Pepperell did argue that "if someone decides 'So-n-so is an idiot' - [I] want to know 'why' they're an idiot" and got a vote of confidence from Mary Ann, which is admittedly something different from saying that "why" is a sufficient question to propel a research inquiry.

And yet, I was contrarian enough to intervene and say "let's be careful not to take our valorization of 'asking why' too far," which probably didn't need to be said, except that I was preoccupied by a different question.

So Scott is right to “agree with Rich and Adam on this one,” though I don’t see how that negates my comment. As I see it, your comment gives (at least) three sufficient reasons for working on S.W. (if I may refer to him familiarly!), perhaps best of all that his sexism/racism "tells us something crucial about a pivotal moment in the history of America's relation to scientific thought." But note that this is a claim about what causes or reflects (the historicist in me would say) and reinvigorates larger trends, not about why a singular author revealed distasteful attitudes.

And finally, to come full circle, indeed, you're "not studying Mitchell's sexism per se," which is what I intended to say when I wrote,

Scott's trying to answer the question of "why Mitchell should be studied in spite of his sexism" and "why Mitchell's sexism ought to be more accurately understood (especially in relation to his work as a whole)," but not quite "why Mitchell's sexism should be studied" (emphasis added).

Oh, and I'll be interested to see what you do with Dixon.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Rodney, I apologize if I seem to've misread you; I think I understood what you were getting at and hit it in that final paragraph, but I didn't address it in any sustained fashion. (Largely because I got sidetracked justifying project. Given that I'm eyes-deep in it right now, I'd wager that was more for my benefit than yours. "If I can articulate why my project's then I'll be able to hurdle this paragraph which has been giving me fits for hours." You know what I mean.

Reading that link to your blog (which reminds me, must update the blogroll), I see more clearly, i.e. unblinkeredly, what you're up to:

But then I think that's only always the case if we're saying something about the accused, and many times we won't, and I wonder if we should use this reasoning to argue that we should say something about every sexist, racist, or asshole.

Of course we shouldn't say something about every asshole; there's neither time enough nor words. But I think we're obligated to say something about the "important" ones, by which I mean even fifteen-minuters like Lenihan.

Another part of me wants to respond something more snarky like "Well, would we even be in this profession if we weren't compelled to say something about, well, everything?" because that would into a conversation about when tongues need biting and why, but that's for another night, since it already annoyed me for enough of the last one. (Not having anything to do with you, obviously.)