Trailed: One Woman's Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders

by Kathryn Miles

In 1884, Edward H. Clarke, a physician and one of Pickering’s Harvard colleagues, published Sex and Education. In this book, Clarke maintained that both physical and educational exertion came with a heavy price for women, including, but not limited to, uterine disease, hysteria, chorea (an involuntary movement disorder), increased menstrual cramps and hemorrhaging, along with “a dropping out of maternal instincts, and an appearance of Amazonian coarseness and force.” For that reason alone, Clarke contended that women should be kept inside. His reasoning was twofold. First, from a physiological perspective, Clarke—whose medical specialty was in hearing disorders and the physiology of the ear—argued that women have wider pelvises, which when mounted with the weight of the body cause their thighs to splay out, making standing and walking more difficult (and thus more taxing) than it is for men. Second, he maintained that the development of a woman’s ovaries and uterus, particularly during her teens and twenties, was such an exhausting physical feat unto itself that the body could not tolerate any additional stress, particularly when it came to exercise and “outdoor pursuits.” As a result, Clarke advocated fewer physical and intellectual demands for women overall and total bed rest during the weeks of their periods. A failure to do so, he concluded, would undoubtedly cause a woman to lose “her feminine attractions, and probably also her chief feminine functions.”

Sex discrimination in outdoor recreation