| Chapter 1: | The Uncorseted Bostonian: Health, Physical Culture, and Dress Reform for Women in Nineteenth-Century Boston |
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girls approached adolescence, they were expected to curtail their energy and prepare for womanhood. The widening of the pelvis was believed to weaken the knees and required girls to end all forms of running.4 Medical experts recommended that girls be “put out to grass” for at least two years surrounding their adolescence.5 Experts such as Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), a biologist and Darwinian socialist, believed that evolution had freed women from hard physical labor and that they had subsequently lost their strength. To fulfill their evolutionary destiny in motherhood, Spencer told women that they needed to be self-sacrificing and refrain from expending energy meant for procreation on other interests.6
Experts also used these arguments to obstruct higher education for women. The staircases at two-story schools were considered injurious to the menstruating female and risked her future fertility. It was commonly thought that energy spent studying weakened the already-compromised female system, threatening fecundity, and that competitive or athletic activities incited nervous stimulation and led to masculinization.7 As women enrolled in colleges in greater and greater numbers in the latter part of the nineteenth century, male doctors saw themselves as playing an important role in stemming the tide of social change. Their scientific authority gave them power to assert the dangers of education, exercise, birth control, and mental stimulation and helped to maintain male dominance.8
In addition to myths surrounding education, exercise, and menstruation, women faced additional prejudices regarding female intelligence. Nineteenth-century physicians believed that intelligence was closely related to brain size. The smaller female brain was, therefore, considered inferior to the male brain.9 It was theorized that evolution had selected men with larger brains and men had selected women according to physical appeal, not mental capacity.10 The mental inferiority of Western women was considered a hallmark of civilization.11 Mental development in women was thought to have a direct correlation to infertility. Women, lacking the mental facilities for higher thinking, were perceived as incapable of participating in social or political decisions. Conservatives