Dorothy G. Rogers - Women Philosophers Volume II - Entering Academia in Nineteenth-Century America-Bloomsbury Academic (2021)

WOMEN PHILOSOPHERS
VOLUME II
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLOOMSBURY
Women Philosophers Volume I: Education and Activism in Nineteenth-Century

America, Dorothy Rogers
The Bloomsbury Companion to Arendt, Ed. Peter Gratton and Yasemin Sari
Classical American Philosophy: Poiesis in Public, Rebecca Farinas
Why Iris Murdoch Matters, Gary Browning
On the Feminist Philosophy of Gillian Howie: Materialism and Mortality, Ed.
Daniel Whistler and Victoria Browne
WOMEN PHILOSOPHERS
VOLUME II
Entering Academia in
Nineteenth-Century America
DOROTHY ROGERS
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vi
About the Cover ix
1 Introduction: Women and Early Academic Philosophy

in America 1
2 Institutional Strength and Support: Women at Cornell 11
3 A Window of Opportunity: Women at Michigan 99
4 Beyond Philosophy: Women at Chicago 145
5 Isolated in the Ivy League, Prestige without Support:
Women at Harvard and Yale 195
6 Overcoming the Odds: Women on Their Own
at Johns Hopkins, Smith, Bern, and the Sorbonne 237
7 Conclusion 291
Notes 303
References 347
Index 355
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As with any academic endeavor, there are a number of people who deserve
thanks for their assistance and support of my research. I again thank my editors
at Bloomsbury for their enthusiasm and helpful directives along the way. Lucy
Russell provided organizational and editorial guidance throughout the writing
process. Lisa Goodrum coordinated the review process and addressed technical
issues. Claire Weatherhead provided direction on the permissions process.
The sections on Marietta Kies and Eliza Sunderland were first published in my
monograph, America’s First Women Philosophers: Transplanting Hegel, 1860–
1925 (Continuum Publishing, 2005), and appear here with relatively minor
changes; they are used by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
I thank colleagues at Cornell University for readily providing me with
valuable information and resources about the university in its early years.
Michelle Kosch, editor of The Philosophical Review, shared information and
helped make connections with Cornell graduate student, Erin Gerber. Immense
thanks to Ms. Gerber for reviewing materials in advance of my visit there and
devoting time to conducting research along with me in the university’s archives.
Dalhousie University librarians, Geoffrey Brown and Creighton Barrett also
deserve thanks for providing me with access to university catalogues and for
following up to share information about Eliza Ritchie that surfaced days before
I was due to deliver my manuscript to the publisher. I am grateful to Mother
Miriam, CSM, of St. Mary’s Convent in Greenwich, New York, for taking time
to share the information available about Grace Neal Dolson when she served
at the convent.
Librarians at Bentley Library, University of Michigan, were eager to follow
up on previous research to be sure that there were no materials I’d missed.
Many thanks to Madeleine Bradford and Diana Bachman for their assistance.
Acknowledgments vii
I was delighted to receive the university’s recently compiled list of all women
doctorates from the 1880s until 1950 and thank Caitlin Moriarty for providing
them. Similarly, Sarah Hutcheon at Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library was kind
to send me a list of the institution’s first women doctorates between 1902 and
1930—a valuable resource.
Catherine Ueckerat at the University of Chicago conducted preliminary
archival searches on my behalf in the James Hayden Tufts papers and directed
me to the library’s list of freelance researchers in the area. Hilary “Mac” Austin
proved to be a wonderfully efficient and effective researcher, making visits to
the archives on my behalf and sending top-notch photos of correspondence
for my perusal.
Chris Bennett and Jeanna Purses at Lake Erie College, William Garvin
at Drury College, and Helen Bergamo at Wells College each were kind
enough to check and double-check special collections and alumni/staff files
for information about women who studied or taught at their institutions.
Although no materials surfaced, I do appreciate their time and help. The late
Mary Pryor at Rockford College was able to provide helpful information about
its former president, Julia Gulliver.
Research conducted on my behalf years ago at Wilberforce and Oberlin
by Bonita Kates, at that time a staff member and student at Montclair State
University, proved to be immensely helpful. I thank Ms. Kates for her time,
effort, and foresight in collecting materials from the alumni files of Anna Julia
Cooper, which filled in many question marks about her life and career.
I appreciated the willingness of Paul Raushenbush, director of public affairs
at Interfaith Youth Core and descendant of Walter Rauschenbusch, to share
information with me about his great-great aunt, Emma Rauschenbusch.
Our conversation reinforced my sense that her academic work deserves
more attention.
Again, I have received support close to home. Librarians at Montclair State
have been readily available whenever a research inquiry arises: Interlibrary
Loan staff have quietly but efficiently worked behind the scenes to locate even
viii Acknowledgments
the most elusive and obscure nineteenth-century texts. Catherine Baird and
Siobhan McCarthy continued to help me to locate hard-to-find items and to
navigate online materials when hard copies were not to be found. Colleagues
at Montclair State have provided ongoing support throughout my research and
writing process: Mark Clatterbuck, Maureen Corbeski, Yasir Ibrahim, Jessica
Restaino, John Soboslai, Jeff Strickland, and Kate Temoney each deserve
recognition for exchanging ideas and/or providing feedback. Montclair State
alumna, Erica Rankin provided valuable editing and proofreading assistance
and produced the index.
Those closest to me also deserve recognition and thanks. My sister-in-
law, Andria Smith, was thoughtful and diligent enough to read the entire
manuscript of this volume and provide expert proofreading and editorial
comments. Ira L. Smith, and our daughter, Alma, have continued to support
me in my research on women in philosophy and cheered me on when the task
seemed endless. They were also willing to listen when my reflections on these
women appeared to be endless! They were again patient when my papers and
books took over territory that was not rightfully mine to take. For this and
much more, they deserve my deep and sincere thanks.
ABOUT THE COVER
The book cover was designed by Charlotte Daniels, Bloomsbury Publishers.

The Thinkeress is a work by sculptor Olivier Duhamel, who readily and
graciously gave permission to use this image. The letter collage, as arranged by
Ms. Daniels, depicts correspondence by or about women in this volume, with
these key passages visible, from bottom left to right:
James Creighton to Henry Norman Gardiner, recommending Grace Neal
Dolson for a faculty position (April 6, 1899): “Miss Dolson is anxious to teach
philosophy but the opportunities for women in this line are not very numerous.
If you are interested I shall gladly write you in more detail about her work. She
is a woman who will rank with Miss Calkins and Miss Washburn in ability and
influence.” In Henry Norman Gardiner Papers. Used with permission from
Smith College Archives.
Lucinda Hinsdale Stone to James B. Angell, president of the University of
Michigan, urging Eliza Sunderland’s appointment to a faculty position (October
19, 1891): “I know that Mrs. Sunderland is second only to Dr. Dewey. . . . Why
should she not be an instructor in that department?” In James B. Angell
Papers. Used with permission from Bentley Historic Library Archives.
Celia Parker Woolley to Harry Pratt Judson, president of the University of
Chicago, objecting to racist campus housing policies (August 16, 1907): “The
case of Miss [Georgiana] Simpson . . . is one which has aroused deep interest
and concern. . . . We understand that your action in this matter was based upon
the consideration of the feelings of southern students. We respectfully submit
that nearly every colored young man and woman seeking the benefits of your
institution is a ‘southern’ student, whose rights and feelings deserve equal
consideration. . . . Moreover, [other white] southerners remained in the hall
and expressed approval of the action of Miss Breckenridge and Dean Talbot in
x About the Cover
admitting the colored student.” In Office of the President Harper, Judson, and
Burton Administrations Records 1869–1925; available online: https://www.lib
.uchicago.edu/ead/pdf/ofcpreshjb-0041-013.pdf. Used with permission from
the University of Chicago special collections.
Caroline Miles Hill to Eliza Sunderland, while on fellowship at Bryn Mawr
(February 13, 1892): “The Prof. of Pol. Econ. is reported to have said that it
is no longer a question whether women do not work better than men, but
whether it does not pay better to educate them. He is the best man there is
here (Giddings) and Miss Kies says he is the strongest in theory of anyone
who has yet written in America.” In Eliza Read Sunderland Papers. Used with
permission from Bentley Historic Library Archives.
Marietta Kies to George Holmes Howison, regarding faculty positions in
philosophy (June 15, 1892): “Mrs. Cheney has written to me the result of her
interview with you. I had been thinking for some time that I would write to
you about the matter. I very much wish that an arrangement could be made by
which I could do some teaching at the University.” In George Holmes Howison
Papers. Used with permission from Bancroft Library Archives, University of
California, Berkeley.
1
Introduction
Women and Early Academic
Philosophy in America
The first volume in this pair of works on women in the history of philosophy
in North America focused on women who entered philosophical discourse
through education and social/political activism in the nineteenth century.
The sixteen women in that volume generally studied philosophy far less
formally than we do today—among fellow educators in the public schools,
in parlor discussions, or in and through social/political conflict. The group
under discussion in the current volume are the first women to have completed
doctoral work and to teach philosophy or related disciplines at colleges and
universities in the United States. The majority of them earned their degrees
before 1900.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the academic world was becoming
more accessible to women. Prior to 1900, just over 200 women were awarded
doctoral degrees in all fields—or just over 7 percent of the total doctoral
degrees awarded by 1900. Twenty of these women completed doctoral degrees
in philosophy proper, and twenty-seven more did so in related fields—twelve
in psychology, two in sociology, five in political science, four in economics,
two in religion, and two in law.1 After they earned their degrees, the majority
of the women in philosophy secured full-time positions, primarily in women’s
2 WOMEN PHILOSOPHERS VOLUME II
colleges, and became active in professional networks, like the Association of

Collegiate Alumnae (now AAUW) and the American Philosophical Association
(APA). In fact, several of the women in this volume were charter members of
the APA: Mary Whiton Calkins (Harvard/Radcliffe, 1895), Anna Alice Cutler
(Yale, 1896), Grace Neal Dolson (Cornell, 1899), Clara Hitchcock (Yale, 1900),
Vida Moore (Cornell, 1900), and Ellen Bliss Talbot (Cornell, 1898).2 For the
first three decades of the APA’s existence, women made up just over 10 percent
of its membership. In 1918, the APA elected its first woman president. Mary
Whiton Calkins was well known and well respected as chair of the department
of philosophy at Wellesley College, and served well in this role. A few years
later, Anna Alice Cutler was the first woman to serve on the APA’s Executive
Committee. Women’s participation in the APA is more significant than it may
at first appear, because membership in the organization was by invitation only
at the time. This leads to another critical factor in women’s success in academic
philosophy: male allies. Henry Norman Gardiner and James E. Creighton
were among the founders of the APA and were highly supportive of women
in the discipline—serving as thesis advisors, soliciting or reviewing work for
publication, and providing referrals or recommendations for open positions.
A number of male colleagues, both within academia and outside of it, were
supportive in similar ways: J. G. Schurman, George S. Morris, William Torrey
Harris, Thomas Davidson, George Holmes Howison, John Dewey, James Tufts,
George Herbert Mead, William James, and Josiah Royce.
Even with the support of male colleagues, larger social forces often shaped
women’s career options. Of the twenty-five women discussed at length in this
volume, the majority taught at single-sex colleges. Only five held positions
at coeducational institutions: Anna Julia Cooper (Wilberforce, 1885–7;
Frelinghuysen [no longer in operation], 1930–43), Marietta Kies (Butler
College, 1896–9), Ella Flagg Young (Chicago, 1900–5), Eva B. Dykes (Howard,
1929–44), and Georgiana Simpson (Howard, 1931–9). With some overlap, just
over half of the women in this volume held positions at women’s colleges for ten
years or more. Again with some overlap, roughly a quarter of the women under
INTRODUCTION 3
discussion taught at secondary schools for up to ten years after completing

their doctorates. Four women were unable to obtain full-time college-level
positions at all, primarily due to sex-biased hiring policies, especially against
married women with children: Christine Ladd-Franklin taught part-time
or on a volunteer basis at Johns Hopkins and at Columbia University. Eliza
Sunderland taught informal classes at the University of Michigan. Caroline
Miles Hill taught and served as a principal at some fledgling private schools,
volunteered at Hull House, and held a part-time librarian position at the
University of Chicago. Ethel Puffer Howes does not seem to have held any
full-time positions after she married. Two additional women appear to have
remained outside the academic world by choice: Emma Rauschenbusch
worked as a missionary, and Anna Louise Strong became a journalist and an
activist.
In regard to the larger social forces that influenced women’s career choices,
however, we need to take a step back and ask ourselves: Who earned doctoral
degrees in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? The demographic
profile of this group of women speaks volumes about gender, culture, and
privilege in this era. (And, sadly, evidence points to demographic patterns
being similar today.)
Across academic fields, women in this era tended to be older than men
when they entered graduate programs and earned their degrees. Often women’s
personal circumstances or social norms led them to delay attending college or
embarking on graduate study. Nine women in this volume completed their
degrees before the age of thirty, but the average age at time-of-degree was
thirty-five years. Six women earned their doctorates after the age of forty-
five. Interestingly enough, May Preston Slosson was the first woman to earn
a doctoral degree in philosophy, in 1880, and she was one of the youngest at
time-of-degree: twenty-two years old. Anna Julia Cooper was the last woman
featured in this volume to earn her degree, in 1925. She was sixty-seven years
old at the time. Slosson was the daughter of a white clergyman. Cooper was
born into slavery. And the two were born in the same year.
Slosson was among twenty-one women in this volume who were of European
descent. Roughly two-thirds of them were from middle or upper-middle class
families, with fathers who were educators, ministers, lawyers, or businessmen.
Four or perhaps five of them were from poor or working-class families. Four
or five more appear to have been extremely wealthy. Even geographically, there
was little diversity in this group. Nine were from the northeastern United
States. Nine were from the midwestern states. Only three were born in the
mid-Atlantic or southern states. Two were raised in the western plains, and
two were from the maritime provinces in Canada. Two were the children of
immigrants.
This is one of two important reasons for going beyond the confines of
philosophy proper in this study: diversity. Given the barriers to higher
education that were in place for white women in this period, it should come
as no surprise that barriers were even greater for women of color. Based
on extensive searches, it appears that the first woman with Latin American
heritage to earn a doctorate in philosophy was Matilde Castro who completed
her studies at the University of Chicago in 1907. The first woman of Asian
descent to do so was Grace Lee Boggs over three decades later—at Bryn Mawr
in 1940. The first woman of African descent to earn a doctorate in philosophy
proper, Joyce Mitchell Cook, did so two decades after that—at Yale in 1965. The
record is not much better among men of color. Only three African American
males earned degrees in philosophy proper before 1930. If we expand to
related fields—religion, sociology, and history—that number increases to only
nine in the same period of time.3 I have not been able to locate documentation
about other doctoral recipients who were men of color, but it seems clear that
philosophy has not had the best track record in regard to cultural inclusion.
In order to be inclusive as I explored the contributions of women to the
development of American philosophy as it became a professional academic
enterprise, I made two decisions that disrupt any neat categories of thought
that might currently exist in the discipline: I extended the period under
discussion from 1900 to the early 1920s, and I included women whose work
INTRODUCTION 5
was in “philology” and history rather than only “philosophy” proper. While
doing so did not retroactively dismantle barriers to the advanced study of
philosophy that so many women faced in the past, it did open a passageway in
the barrier, which allows us to consider their work today.
These two decisions have allowed me to include five women of color in
this volume. Three of these women completed their studies at the University
of Chicago: Matilde Castro, mentioned before, who earned a doctorate in
philosophy in 1907; Rachel Caroline Eaton, a Native American woman who
completed a doctorate in history in 1919; Georgiana Simpson, who earned a
doctoral degree in German philology in 1921. Eva Dykes also studied philology,
but focused on English literature, earning a degree from Radcliffe in 1921.
Anna Julia Cooper completed a degree in history at the Sorbonne in 1925. The
work these women produced either intersected with ideas under discussion
in philosophy at the time or bring our attention to issues of importance to
philosophy today. The last four contributed to laying the foundation for
critical race theory to develop later in the twentieth century. They, along with
Sadie Mossell (economics, Chicago, 1921) and Otelia Cromwell (literature,
Yale, 1926) were the first women of color to earn doctorates in any field before
1930. I seriously considered including these two women in the volume as well.
Unfortunately, Mossell produced few publications and devoted her career to
practical work in economics. And the majority of Cromwell’s writings were
produced in the 1930s and 1940s; thus her work took on a more modern,
twentieth-century tone than the other women in this volume. Perhaps there
will be an occasion to study their lives and work in a future project.
Yet, even if I had been content to ignore the lack of diversity in philosophy,
inclusion of these women makes sense, because disciplinary boundaries were
considerably more fluid at the turn of the twentieth century than they are
today. The social sciences were just emerging as independent fields of study
in this period. Many women who earned doctoral degrees in “philosophy”
wrote dissertations in psychology, published additional work in this newly
emerging field, and were offered positions in which they taught psychology
throughout their career. This is true of nearly half of the women who earned
doctorates in philosophy from Cornell. Similarly, education/pedagogy was
often central to the curriculum in philosophy departments in this period.
At both long-established traditional departments, like Yale, and at new and
innovative departments, like Cornell and Chicago, the study of pedagogical
methods as well as courses in the history and theory of education were key
features of graduate education in philosophy until roughly 1910. Among the
twenty-five women discussed at some length in this volume, therefore, eight
crossed today’s disciplinary boundaries in this way.
This volume is arranged in clusters with each chapter focusing on women
who earned degrees within a specific institution, each of which conferred
doctoral degrees on three or more women. An exception is the final chapter—
on women who did not have female peers at their degree-granting institution.
Cornell University was the first institution to open the study of philosophy
to women in 1880. Like most departments of philosophy in this era, German
idealism was influential, but women at Cornell appear to have been free to
explore ideas and thinkers that interested them. A total of eleven women
studied philosophy at Cornell by 1900, five of whom moved into psychology or
education. The remaining six women are featured in this volume: May Preston
Slosson, Eliza Ritchie, Ethel Gordon Muir, Ellen Bliss Talbot, Grace Neal
Dolson, and Vida Frank Moore. Their written work demonstrates that they
were independent thinkers, discussing matters like aesthetics and free will,
along with the ideas of Spinoza, Henry More, Nietzsche, Fichte, and Lotze.
Each of these Cornell women also succeeded in obtaining teaching positions
and held them for ten years or more. Three of them remained in academia
throughout their careers.
The next institution to produce a core group of women doctorates was
the University of Michigan, in 1891 and 1892. German idealism was again
a central focus, although the department also seems to have encouraged
study of the history of philosophy, including American intellectual traditions.
Marietta Kies, Caroline Miles Hill, and Eliza Read Sunderland completed
INTRODUCTION 7
doctoral studies there, and the influence of German idealism is apparent

in their work—in Kies’s political theory, in Sunderland’s discussion of
religious and philosophical history, and in Miles Hill’s attempt to reconcile
transcendentalism and idealism. Kies and Miles Hill held faculty positions for
considerable periods of time. Sunderland was in her fifties when she completed
degree work and was never considered for the academic positions for which
she applied.
Women began studying at the University of Chicago as soon as it opened in
1892. This institution became well known for producing an “instrumentalist”
school of philosophy and facilitating growth of the pragmatist tradition. At
this early stage in its history, pedagogy and psychology were also important
features of the curriculum, as was the institution’s commitment to serving
the needs of the city of Chicago. Six women who completed degrees here
are discussed in this volume: Ella Flagg Young, Clara Millerd, Anna Louise
Strong, Matilde Castro, Rachel Caroline Eaton, and Georgiana Simpson. These
women’s career paths were diverse. Young remained solidly within education/
pedagogy and produced several publications. She held a faculty position at
Chicago before becoming the superintendent of the city’s schools. Strong took
on the study of philosophy to challenge herself, then abandoned academia by
choice. Millerd, Castro, and Simpson remained in academic positions most
of their lives. Millerd spent the majority of her career at Grinnell College and
the University of Oregon. Castro taught at Vassar for a short time, then helped
establish a strong program in pedagogy at Bryn Mawr. Eaton spent the majority
of her career at reservation schools, namely, the Cherokee Female Seminary
and Nowata tribal school. Simpson taught at the well-regarded Dunbar High
School in Washington, DC, before closing out her career at Howard University.
Yet with the exception of Young and Strong (who became a journalist), none
of these women published a great deal. Like many academics in this era, they
were expected to teach rather than conduct research—especially in women’s
college networks. This was also the case with the women who completed
doctorates at Yale, interestingly enough.
Harvard was formally closed to women, and when Mary Whiton Calkins
and Ethel Puffer (later Howes) challenged the institution by studying with
Harvard faculty and completing all requirements for the doctoral degree, the
college balked. Harvard was a men’s institution, and it was not until 1902 that
women could be conferred with a Radcliffe doctoral degree, which Eva B.
Dykes received in 1921. The work these women produced does not resemble
each other. Calkins succeeded in balancing her interests in philosophy and
psychology; Howes did a bit of work in experimental psychology and in
aesthetics. Dykes completed her degree work considerably later, and with an
advisor who had previously taught ethics but had moved to literary theory.
Yale opened its doors to women for graduate study in 1892, but there was a
lack of cohesiveness in the philosophy department at this time.4 The institution
had very traditional roots, and the new faculty who were eager to explore the
then-new field of psychology were rebelling against the chair, George Ladd,
and other senior faculty. Yale produced a small group of women doctorates in
philosophy who spent their careers as teaching professors at women’s colleges:
Anna Alice Cutler chaired the department at Smith College, Blanche Zehring
taught biblical studies at Wells College, and Clara Hitchcock taught philosophy
and psychology at Lake Erie College. Available accounts indicate that these
women were beloved professors, but none of them produced scholarship
beyond their dissertations.
The closing chapter is devoted to a discussion of women who were “solo acts”—
that is, women who were the first to complete degrees in the discipline in this era
without the benefit of female peers to confer with when needed. Their areas of
focus are as distinctive as the institutions at which they studied: Christine Ladd-
Franklin (Johns Hopkins) was an intellectual powerhouse who published work
on mathematics, psychology (specifically color theory), and logic. Julia Gulliver
(Smith College) focused on social and political theory. Emma Rauschenbusch
(University of Leipzig) produced what is quite likely the first full-length study
of Mary Wollstonecraft by a woman. Anna Julia Cooper (Sorbonne) focused on
social/political thought, especially as related to race.
INTRODUCTION 9
Each of the women under discussion in this volume was highly accomplished.
Yet, they were exchanging ideas apart from their male colleagues, and at this
point in history, men were in more prestigious and powerful institutions.
Women in philosophy did not get as broad a hearing as they would have
had they taught in coeducational institutions or elite men’s institutions. Still,
investigating the work of these women is instructive, both in terms of mapping
out the genealogy of women’s thought in America, and as a way to point to the
directions philosophy might have taken had it been more gender inclusive.
10
2
Institutional Strength
and Support
Women at Cornell
Introduction
Eleven women completed doctoral degrees in philosophy at Cornell between

1880 and 1900—more than at any other institution in the United States in
the nineteenth century. The majority of them were academically successful,
holding faculty positions for a decade or more. Six of these women established
themselves within philosophy and are featured at some length here: May
Preston Slosson (1880), Eliza Ritchie (1889), Ethel Gordon Muir (1896), Ellen
Bliss Talbot (1898), Grace Neal Dolson (1899), and Vida Frank Moore (1900).
With the social sciences under development during this period, four other
Cornell doctoral alumni in philosophy moved into careers in psychology:
Margaret Floy Washburn (1894), Alice (Hamlin) Hinman (1896), Eleanor
Acheson McCulloch Gamble (1898), and Stella Emily Sharp (1898). Given
the relatively fluid disciplinary boundaries that existed at this time, another
doctoral recipient, Louise Hannum (1895), settled into a position as an
English professor and dean of women at a teachers college. The majority of
these women were active in academic professional organizations: Washburn,
Hinman, Gamble, Sharp, and Hannum became members of the American

Psychological Association shortly after it was founded in 1892; Talbot, Dolson,
and Moore joined the organization after the turn of the century. Ritchie,
Washburn, Hinman, Talbot, Dolson, and Moore were active in branches of
the American Philosophical Association. Hinman became a charter member
of the (philosophy) APA’s western division in 1900; Washburn, Talbot, and
Moore hold the same distinction in its eastern division in 1901.
The women featured in this chapter earned their doctorates and remained
primarily within philosophy. Each of them entered academia after completing
their degrees, but just two finished out their careers as a college professor:
May Preston Slosson focused on aesthetics and taught at Hastings College in
Nebraska for a decade before serving as a prison chaplain, then moving on to
feminist issues and community work. Her only published work was a book
of poetry. Eliza Ritchie started her career at Wellesley College, teaching there
for ten years before returning home to Nova Scotia, where she volunteered
for a time as the dean of women at Dalhousie University. During this period,
she also devoted herself to social and cultural concerns in Halifax, women’s
issues among them. Ritchie published a fair number of works about the nature
of personhood, philosophy of religion, the free will/determinism debate, and
Spinoza’s ethics and metaphysics. Ethel Muir held positions at a number of
institutions: Mount Holyoke, Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham
University), Briarcliff School (no longer in existence), Wilson College, and
Lake Erie College. She published only her dissertation, a discussion of Adam
Smith. Her biggest commitments were to teaching and to volunteer work in a
small fishing community in Newfoundland, where she took a group of students
each summer. Ellen Bliss Talbot was the most successful Cornell graduate in
philosophy. She taught at Mount Holyoke College for over thirty years, chairing
the department for much of that time. She also published a good deal—on Fichte,
ontology, and metaphysics. Grace Neal Dolson taught at Wells College and at
Smith for a total of fifteen years before undergoing a personal transformation
and entering a women’s religious order. Her published work consisted of articles
INSTITUTIONAL STRENGTH AND SUPPORT 13
on Henry More, Malebranche, and Bergson and her dissertation on Nietzsche.

Vida Frank Moore earned her doctoral degree in the first year of the twentieth
century. Like Talbot, she entered academia and remained there, teaching at
Mount Holyoke College and Elmira College for nearly twenty years before
her life was cut short by illness. After publishing her dissertation on Lotze,
Moore did not produce original work but only a handful of book reviews. As
noted, Ritchie, Talbot, Dolson, and Moore were among the first women to
join the American Philosophical Association. Talbot, Dolson, and Moore also
maintained membership in the (psychology) APA for many years.
Although the university did not admit women when it was first established
in 1865, key members of Cornell’s leadership urged for gender inclusion, and
it became a fully coeducational institution in 1870. There is every reason to
believe that this early commitment to equality was genuine and ran deep,
as evidenced by the charming letter founder Ezra Cornell wrote to his
granddaughter in 1867 when she was just four years old:
I want to have girls educated in the university as well as boys, so that they
may have the same opportunity to become wise and useful to society that
the boys have. . . . I want you to keep this letter until you grow up to be
a woman and want to go to a good school where you can have a good
opportunity to learn, so you can show it to the President and Faculty of the
University to let them know that it is the wish of your Grand Pa, that girls
as well as boys should be educated at the Cornell University.1
This commitment to equity was matched with major funding by Henry

Sage and his wife, Susan Linn Sage, in 1872 to provide adequate housing,
accommodations, and graduate fellowships for female students. Evidence
shows that Cornell’s first president, Andrew White, and the majority of
faculty he hired were “on board” with educational egalitarianism, although
May Preston Slosson reported resistance to allowing her to study at the
graduate level. White would later marry Helen Magill, the first woman to
earn a doctoral degree at any institution in the country—a PhD in Greek
from Boston University in 1877. Cornell was among the most welcoming
institutions available to women, other than a same-sex college. Thus, the
institution provided an ideal environment for them to thrive as they studied at
an advanced level and prepared for careers in academia.
Unfortunately, there is little evidence of racial, cultural, religious, or
economic diversity among women who earned doctorates in philosophy at
Cornell. The first women of color with graduate degrees from the institution
did not appear until the mid-1930s, and they studied the sciences. The first
doctoral recipient among them completed her work in 1936, with a degree
in nutrition.2 All of the women under discussion in this chapter were white,
appear to have been Protestant, and were certainly middle or upper-middle
class. Women of color fared better at Chicago—and Radcliffe, interestingly
enough, where a modest Howard-to-Harvard/Radcliffe pipeline began to
develop after W. E. B. DuBois’s success at Harvard on the cusp of the twentieth
century.
Cornell’s pivotal role in providing opportunities to women is relatively
easy to trace. The institution has a good deal to be proud of and makes its
history accessible online. Archival materials for both the department in this
early period and the journal it housed, The Philosophical Review, were also
preserved, allowing more detailed documentation of women and their role at
the university than is the case at many institutions.
Faculty and the Academic Climate at Cornell
The philosophy department changed considerably in the span of time during

which this group of women studied at Cornell—a period of twenty years.
When May Preston Slosson was a student in 1878–80, a small collection of
faculty members provided instruction in philosophy and related areas of
study: William Dexter Wilson, professor of intellectual and moral philosophy;
Charles Chauncy Shackford, professor of rhetoric and oratory; William
Channing Russell, professor of history; and Hiram Corson, professor of

English literature. University catalogs and histories show that Wilson and
Shackford were considered philosophers. As was the case with so many
colleges and universities in this era, both men had studied theology and spent
time in parish ministry before joining the faculty at Cornell. Wilson was
trained as a Unitarian, but found it too liberal, so became an Episcopalian. He
remained involved in his chosen denomination throughout his life. Shackford
was trained as a Congregationalist but grew to be more progressive over time,
so became a Unitarian. He and Wilson were hired in the first few years of
Cornell’s existence. Wilson was something of an academic “utility man” at the
institution. Not only did he teach a rather daunting array of courses over the
years—moral philosophy, history of philosophy, philosophy of history, political
philosophy, political economy, logic, psychology, history, Constitutional law,
geography, physiology, and Hebrew—he also served as the university’s registrar
and its primary student advisor. Interestingly enough, Slosson recognized the
influence of Shackford, Russell, and Corson by name in an alumni update she
provided to the university later in life, but she failed to mention Wilson—a
member of the staff who was formally identified with philosophy.3
By the time Eliza Ritchie entered the university ten years later, Wilson and
Shackford had retired. Corson was still teaching English literature, but given
Ritchie’s interests, it is more likely that she studied with Horatio Stevens White,
a professor of Greek, Latin, and German who had joined the faculty in 1876. It
is clear that she also studied under J. G. Schurman, who had been a professor
at Dalhousie University when Ritchie was among that institution’s first women
graduates. He made his own transition to a faculty position at Cornell just
before Ritchie undertook doctoral study there. She would do so alongside
fellow graduate student and Dalhousie alumnus, James Creighton, who would
later become a central figure as a Cornell faculty member and co-editor of
The Philosophical Review with Schurman in the 1890s. All available materials
demonstrate that both Schurman and Creighton were egalitarian-minded
leaders at Cornell who supported women’s achievements in philosophy,
although traces of the gender hierarchies and implicit bias that prevailed in
academic life at this time are sometimes evident.
Jacob Gould Schurman (1854–1942) was born on Prince Edward Island
and attended colleges in Nova Scotia before graduating with a degree in
philosophy from the University of London in 1877. He completed graduate
work at Edinburgh and London, earning a doctorate in 1878. By 1882, he was
teaching both English and philosophy at Dalhousie University in Halifax,
Nova Scotia—the same year the university began admitting women, among
them Eliza Ritchie and her sisters. In 1886, he began teaching at Cornell.
Both Ritchie and her fellow Dalhousie student, James Creighton, would soon
follow him there. In 1890, Schurman was named the dean of Cornell’s Sage
School of Philosophy, not only providing administrative leadership but also
teaching courses on ethics and ethical thinkers deemed important in the day,
most notably, Wundt, Spencer, Martineau, and Sidgwick. He also team-taught
a course with James Creighton on “Kant’s Critical Philosophy” in 1895–96.4 In
1892, he became Cornell’s president, serving in that capacity until 1920.
As a thinker, Schurman focused on ethics and philosophy of religion,
publishing a number of works while both a professor and an administrator:
Kantian Ethics and the Ethics of Evolution (1881), The Ethical Import of
Darwinism (1888), Belief in God (1890), and Agnosticism and Religion (1896).
He was also interested in practical affairs. Even while Cornell’s president, he
became involved in international diplomacy, by establishing the US Philippine
Commission (1899), then serving as US ambassador to Greece (1912–13),
minister to China (1921–5), and ambassador to Germany (1925–9).5
James Creighton (1861–1924) was born and raised in Nova Scotia and
studied alongside Eliza Ritchie at Dalhousie University, where he earned a
bachelor’s degree in 1887.6 Following J. G. Schurman to Cornell, Creighton
earned a doctorate in philosophy in 1892 at which time he was immediately
offered a position as an assistant professor of philosophy at the university. By
1895 he was appointed chair of the department and remained in this position
until 1914 when he began serving as the dean of Cornell’s graduate school.
During the period of time the women featured here studied, Creighton taught
courses that explored logic, metaphysics, and post-Kantian idealism. He
also offered seminars on figures who have long been considered important
in modern philosophy—Spinoza, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant—as
well as Lotze, Fichte, Bradley, and Bosanquet. He team-taught courses on
occasion, not only with Schurman, as noted earlier, but also with Ernest Albee,
on metaphysics.7
Creighton co-edited The Philosophical Review alongside Schurman for eight
years before becoming its lead editor and serving in that capacity throughout
his career (1894–1924). He served concurrently as the American editor for
Kant-Studien most of that time (1896–1924). His book, An Introductory Logic,
was used as a textbook in the field for over two decades. He worked with
Albert Lefevre to translate Immanuel Kant: His Life and Doctrine, by Friedrich
Paulsen, and collaborated with E. B. Titchener to translate Wundt's Human
and Animal Psychology. The remainder of his work was published in The
Philosophical Review, Journal of Philosophy, and International Journal of Ethics.
In a memorial address Creighton’s former student, Katherine Gilbert (1886–
1952), noted his many contributions to the discipline while also highlighting
the philosophical ideals he embraced. As the first president of the APA, for
instance, Creighton presented a paper entitled “The Social Nature of Thinking,”
about the value of this new organization, because in his view philosophy is a
communal endeavor. He remained a philosophical idealist until the end of his
life, writing to her about the importance of the distinction “between what may
be called the physiological mind and the historical mind—between Seele and
Geist. . . . [which allows an individual] to become conscious of itself as spirit.”8
Like many idealists, Creighton was critical of philosophical pragmatism, which
he believed is “still trying to construe reality as if they were pre-Kantian.” In his
view, pragmatism does not make use of “that better tool for the understanding
of reality which is called the ‘transcendental method.’”9
A number of other influential men held full-time positions in the philosophy
department at Cornell by the mid-1890s, when Talbot, Dolson, and Moore
entered the institution. Henry Sage had supplemented his already laudable
gifts to the university with a fund to endow the department of philosophy. Now
it was filled with faculty who taught alongside Schurman and Creighton and
would become prominent in academic philosophy as it entered the twentieth
century: William Hammond, F. C. Schiller, and Ernest Albee taught philosophy
in the department throughout the 1890s. William Hammond was a specialist
in ancient philosophy, regularly teaching courses on Plato, Aristotle, and
ancient understandings of both ethics and metaphysics. He was the up-and-
coming intellectual who penned a scathing review of Ellen Mitchell’s book on
Greek philosophy, discussed in volume one.10 F. C. Schiller (1864–1937) held
a master’s degree from Oxford and began teaching while a doctoral student
at Cornell. He became the department’s expert on realism and skepticism
during the 1890s, and later would become well known for his contributions
to pragmatism and humanist thought. Ernest Albee (1865–1917) also began
teaching while he was a doctoral student at Cornell, delivering a wide range of
courses: metaphysics, Spinoza’s ethics, utilitarianism, and psychology. Albee
provided what appears to be the first course at Cornell on “rationalism” versus
“empiricism.” As noted in volume one, a formalized distinction between these
two approaches to epistemology had only begun to emerge in this era, as is
apparent in the majority of courses listed in Cornell’s catalog in the late 1890s.11
Other faculty who made their mark on Cornell in this period include David
Irons (1869–1907), another of Cornell’s doctoral recipients, who began work
as a teaching fellow in the department in 1892–93 and became an instructor
in 1895–96. At Cornell, Irons taught courses that focused on German
philosophy, including Lotze and Schopenhauer. He also offered a seminar on
Bradley’s Appearance and Reality. He then accepted a short-term position at
the University of Vermont before becoming an associate professor at Bryn
Mawr in 1899, chairing its philosophy department.12 James Seth (1860–1925)
also held a position at the institution for a short time, between 1896 and 1898.
But he returned to his native Scotland to teach alongside his brother, Andrew
Seth (1856–1931) at the University of Edinburgh, where James chaired moral
philosophy and Andrew chaired logic and metaphysics. Frank Thilly (1865–
1934) spent the majority of his career at Cornell, but he was not on the faculty
during the time the women under discussion studied there. After being hired
as an instructor in 1891, Thilly accepted positions at the University of Missouri
(1893–1904) and Princeton (1904–6) before returning to Cornell (1906–34).
With pedagogy, religion, and psychology still considered branches of
philosophy, Charles M. Tyler (1832–1918), Samuel G. Williams (1827–1900),
and E. B. Titchener (1867–1927) were members of the department at this time.
Tyler was an ordained minister who held an endowed position in the history
of philosophy and religion as well as Christian ethics early in the 1890s. By
1897 he shifted focus and began teaching courses on applied ethics; Lotze;
Martineau; and the philosophy of religion, including pantheism, agnosticism,
and theism. He is one of the first thinkers to focus on comparative religion at a
university in the United States. By contrast, Williams remained solidly within
his own area of specialization—pedagogy and the history of education—until
his death in 1900. Pedagogical theory and practice continued to be considered
branches of philosophy into the opening decades of the twentieth century at
Cornell and a number of other institutions. Titchener was the most influential
among these cross-disciplinary educators in regard to the career development
of women, although he certainly had a mixed legacy. While he is said to have
been a strong supporter and mentor to female students, he had contentious
relationships with some women in his peer group. He rather famously did
his best to bar female colleagues from attending meetings of an experimental
philosophy organization he established, for instance.13 Perhaps he was more
comfortable working with women when a combination of professional and
gendered hierarchy was in play. The courses he taught at Cornell examined
aesthetics, experimental psychology, and systematic philosophy.
Cornell was founded with egalitarian educational ideals in mind, and
the contributions of the men who shaped the philosophy department
in its first decades helped the institution realize those ideals. Schurman
and Creighton as a team not only set high standards for excellence in
philosophy, but also facilitated women’s entry into the discipline as it

became a professional academic enterprise. Correspondence between
each of the two men in university archives demonstrates that they had
collegial relationships with Cornell women, among them Ritchie, Talbot,
and Washburn, as well as women at other institutions, like Mary Whiton
Calkins at Wellesley and Julia Gulliver at Rockford. With the Review, the
pair elevated the level of philosophical discourse in the United States.
Creighton told Katherine Gilbert that he “would rather stop issuing The
Philosophical Review than publish what was poor or mediocre in its kind,
. . . [and] he returned a large proportion of the manuscripts submitted” that
were not up to par.14 Holding all writers to the same standard, Schurman
and Creighton provided a venue in which many women published their
earliest work. Now it is time to turn to an examination of the work and
careers of such women.
Philosophy’s First Female Doctorate

May (Preston) Slosson (1858–1943)
BA, Hillsdale College (1878)
PhD, Philosophy, Cornell University (1880)
Dissertation: “Different Theories of Beauty”
Career: Hastings College (1880–91); Wyoming State Penitentiary, chaplain

(1899–1903)
May Preston Slosson was born in Ilion, New York, the daughter of Mary
(Gorsline) and Levi Preston, a Baptist minister.15 When she was a young child,
her father moved the family to Kansas where they were among the first white
settlers in the region before moving to Michigan about 1875. The details of her
early education are not clear, but she attended Hillsdale College in Michigan,
a Baptist school to which her grandfather had donated money, graduating in
1878. Hillsdale was one of the first institutions to admit women in the United
States and it is the college that Marietta Kies, discussed in Chapter 3, attended
for a short time in the early 1870s.
The very first woman to earn a doctoral degree in philosophy in the United
States and only the third woman to earn a doctorate in any field at Cornell,
Slosson completed graduate work in 1880, producing just one expository
work, a thesis entitled “Different Theories of Beauty.” Like Caroline Miles Hill,
discussed in Chapter 3 and Eliza Ritchie, discussed later, she also published
a book of poetry, From a Quiet Garden: Lyrics in prose and verse (1920). She
was married and had two children, but like many women in this era, her
professional life was shaped by her husband’s career path.
Preston was first hired as the “assistant principal” of Hastings College in
Nebraska, but then was enlisted to teach philosophy and Greek. She worked for
a total of ten years at Hastings before marrying Edwin Emery Slosson, who was
offered a position in chemistry at the University of Wyoming in Laramie and
whom she described as “versatile + brilliant.”16 As their children grew in the
1890s, she began volunteering at the local prison, occasionally offering addresses
on Sundays that were so well received she established a lecture series, which
featured her husband and other university professors. Reportedly, inmates
requested that she serve in the role of chaplain when a position opened at the
prison, and (perhaps more remarkably) administrators listened. As chaplain, she
gave a sermon on Sundays and made visits each Wednesday.17 She insisted on
volunteering her time and directed the funds for her salary to be used for books
in the facility’s library. Prison administrators offered their praise: “Mrs. May
Preston Slosson . . . is the only lady prison chaplain in the world, and possesses
an extraordinary influence over her convict flock. She has already averted one
dangerous mutiny, and has done much to ameliorate the lot of the prisoners.”18
In addition, the warden marveled that there was a 50 percent decrease in
punishments when Slosson was chaplain. She worked at the penitentiary in
Laramie until it was moved to a new facility in the town of Rawlins.
In 1903, Edwin Slosson made a career shift and accepted a position as
editor of the New York Independent magazine, so the couple relocated. May
did not hold a professional/paid position after that time but moved again in
1920 when her husband had accepted a position as director of the Science
Service news agency in Washington, DC. Following Edwin’s death in 1929,
she went to live with her son, a history professor at the University of Michigan
in Ann Arbor, and remained in his household for the rest of her life. At her
request, she was cremated, and her ashes buried in the same cemetery as her
young son, Raymond, who had died in Laramie in 1900.
Much like Eliza Ritchie, discussed further in the chapter, May Preston
Slosson was active in local women’s rights organizations and in educational and
cultural institutions all her life. She was especially devoted to promoting the arts
in community life. In addition, she and her husband both lectured in support of
women’s voting rights in New York. No documents survive to reveal their lines of
thought on this issue, but she reported having a disagreement with the suffrage
leader, Carrie Chapman Catt: Slosson and her husband wanted to be vocal about
their experience in Wyoming where women had voting rights and where Slosson
had been urged to run for Congress before Jeanette Rankin became the first
woman to do so. Catt’s response was characteristic of moderate feminists of that
era, however. Rather than encourage them to share their perspectives with the
somewhat more conservative women on the east coast, Catt instead “impressed
on us that we were to be quiet.”19 Slosson was active in the Association of Collegiate
Alumnae (now American Association of University Women) and supported the
then-new humanitarian organization, Save the Children. Unlike many women
of European descent in both volumes of this study, Slosson crossed racial and
cultural lines. Biographical sketches suggest that she became sensitive to cultural
difference while living close to a Native American community as a young girl
in Kansas. Toward the end of her life, she attended the worship services of both
a predominantly white Baptist church and Bethel African Methodist Episcopal
Church in Ann Arbor. She also actively supported Ann Arbor’s Dunbar
Community Center, which evolved from a small housing program for migrant
workers that was established by the African American community in 1923 to a
thriving educational and cultural organization.20
Philosophically speaking, May Preston Slosson did not make a big impact.
Her doctoral thesis is a slim volume of roughly 5,000 words. By today’s standards,
a paper of this length would be more suitable as a dissertation proposal than as
the thesis itself. Even so, years later she reported that opposition to admitting
a woman into graduate study in philosophy led to a “compromise” in which
faculty decided she would take “a harder course.” In her words: “I was to cover
a certain amt. of work, more than required of a man. One week, 8 hrs. a day
on examination.”21 It appears, then, that expectations for doctoral study had
not been standardized and gender equity was far from a reality when she was
a graduate student. While at Cornell, Slosson eagerly did extra work, “because
it was fascinating.” Her “great temptation,” she said, “was to read in the library.
I read Plato + Hegel in the original.”22
May Preston Slosson’s Philosophical Work
Slosson’s doctoral thesis demonstrates that she had read widely and had given
her topic, “Different Theories of Beauty,” a good deal of consideration. This
work provides us with evidence of the range of sources students of philosophy
were required to become familiar with and of the ways in which disciplinary
lines were blurred at this time. It also belies Slosson’s own critical distance
from philosophy as a branch of study. As will be discussed at the close of
this section, her commentary about some thinkers—German idealists in
particular—strongly suggests that she was not one of philosophy’s early “true
believers,” but was instead a skeptic who saw philosophical work as one of
many forms of literature—and a rather abstruse one at that.
Written with a great deal of nineteenth-century flourish, May Preston
Slosson’s thesis, “Different Theories of Beauty” provides an overview of a
number of philosophical and literary attempts to explain what “beauty” is and
speaks to the adequacy of each view. Toward the beginning of the work, she
notes that in some sense, any attempt to describe the beautiful or to agree
on the best theory of beauty will be subjective: “Who dares attempt invidious
selection among theories of beauty? . . . The choice dictated by prejudice will
be criticized by counter-prejudice, and perhaps the critic will have a right to
complain if his favorite [theory] is left behind.”23 She readily dismisses three
dominant theories as she understands them—Friedrich Schiller’s view that
beauty is a relation of our faculties; David Hume’s claim that beauty is not
an independent quality, but instead a product of the mind; and Immanuel
Kant’s notion that the beautiful is what we find pleasing.24 “Paradoxical as it
may sound, Beauty does not always please (especially at first sight), and that
which pleases may in many instances be far from beautiful. Still, such is our
unconscionable self-conceit, that we are sure to call our own pet and private
predilections by a name quite disproportionate to their value.”25
Presenting another set of theories, Slosson is not satisfied with Aristotle’s
attempt to logically/scientifically explain beauty. Nor does she accept Edgar
Allen Poe’s assertion that beauty is somehow a vague “immortal instinct.”26 She
also rejects the “associationists”—Francis Jeffrey and Archibald Alison—who,
she charges, attempt to describe beauty as merely a response to memory, a
reminder of previous interactions, or a representation of other objects and/
or experiences. Similarly, she is unhappy with thinkers who, in her view, link
beauty to utility: Socrates, David Hume, and George Berkeley.27She simply
lampoons Edmund Burke, who “in the fashion of universal geniuses . . .
has an opinion of his own upon every conceivable subject [and] invented a
most astonishing theory of Beauty . . . an effeminating, enervating principle.”
She then quotes Burke’s description of a response to beauty at length—one
complete with eyes rolling, a mouth agape, and half-audible, unselfconscious
sighs, which he asserts are “accompanied by an inward sense of melting.”28
Next on the list of theories that fall short in Slosson’s view: Francis Hutcheson’s
“internal sense,” Charles Batteaux’s “fidelity to nature,” Denis Diderot’s
perception of a relation, and Baron de Montesquieu’s surprise or novelty.29
Slosson prefers instead Plato’s observation that beauty is distinct from,
yet related to, goodness. She approves even more of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s
embellishment of Plato’s view, as she understands it, that beauty is an expression

of “the universe”—one element in quasi-divine triad: Truth, Goodness, and
Beauty.30 Continuing in this vein, Slosson settles on a theory that combines
Emerson’s view with the dynamism she sees in Herbert Spencer and Jean
Charles Leveque. She appreciates the attempt to cast beauty as a transcendent,
almost metaphysical force, which is what she sees in Emerson. After all, at one
point she reminds her readers that “our failure to find [or define] it is no fault
of Beauty, nor is it the slightest proof of its non-existence as an independent
entity.”31 She values Spencer’s evolutionary claims that human progress has
led to an accumulation of cultural artifacts, art and creativity among them.
This, combined with the sense of vitality and life force she sees in Leveque,
yields a theory of beauty that Slosson embraces—active, somewhat chaotic,
but vibrant. After all, high levels of activity in the organic world bring forth
“the highest types of beauty,” in her view. And at this point she retracts part of
her earlier critique of Schiller who “speaks of imagination, the creative power
in art, as the ‘Spieltrieb,’ the play-impulse of the mind. May it not be the play-
impulse of potential energy, liberated from long imprisonment,” she asks,
“which causes the loveliness of material things?”32
In Slosson’s view, Chaos/Spontaneity as a pair of forces in nature are active,
expansive, and meant to be a catalyst to fuel our passions. This duo stands
in contrast to Virtue/Order as a pair of forces in society that is meant to rein
us in.33A theory that unites an organic, dynamic understanding of science
alongside a sense of creative energy strikes her as far more explanatory than
theories that are abstract and removed from our experience in the world. It is
this theory that she settles on as her thesis draws to a close.
The fact that this essay is Slosson’s only expository work in philosophy is
significant, especially when taking into consideration some of the intellectually
comical comments she makes within the text. As noted before, she mocks Edmund
Burke, both for casting himself as an expert on any and all topics and for what she
saw as his overly expressive theory of beauty. This is not surprising, given Burke’s
place in intellectual history. His ideas would not have been in vogue at this time, with
the progressive era on the horizon. More telling is Slosson’s dismissive approach to
German idealism, G.W.F. Hegel in particular: “We come to the German systems,
of more or less comprehensibility,” she says, then observes wryly, “There is small
advantage gained by explaining anything one does not understand by what [one]
understands still less. But it is an axiom of which German philosophers have not
always felt the force.” She continues this line of criticism:
Schelling and Hegel have much to say concerning the ‘absolute ideal,’
‘subject and object,’ and use various other phrases that have the doubtful
merit of not being too intelligible. Hegel defines Beauty as “The ideal shining
through a sensuous medium” . . . [others] descant upon “the movement
of the Supreme Idea” in a manner sufficiently bewildering to an average
understanding. Even Schiller calls the Sublime, “the applied infinite.”34
It appears that German idealism, which was so dominant within philosophical

discourse in the United States at this time, did not mesh well with Slosson’s
intellectual inclinations. This, in combination with the personal interests
and priorities she had as a wife and mother, may have led her to abandon
her early interest in philosophy, “that most temperate of all the sisterhood of
sciences”35 in favor of the social and political issues that she saw around her in
the everyday world.
Scholarship Set Aside
Eliza Ritchie (1856–1933)

BA, Dalhousie University (1887)
PhD, Philosophy, Cornell (1889)
Dissertation: “The Problem of Personality”
Career: Vassar (1889–90); Wellesley (1890–1899); Study in Leipzig and Oxford

(1892–93); Dalhousie University, volunteer positions (1900–1930)
Life and Career
One of twelve children and the youngest daughter of John W. and Amelia
(Almon) Ritchie, Eliza Ritchie was born into a wealthy and influential family
in Halifax, Nova Scotia.36 Her father was a lawyer and politician who became
a member of the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia in 1870.37 He and other male
family members served on the Board of Governors of Dalhousie University
for decades. Eliza and her sisters were educated at home as children, then
attended Dalhousie after it began admitting women in 1882–83. Two sisters,
Mary and Ella, shared Eliza’s interest in women’s rights and joined her in
becoming prominent feminists in northeastern Canada. Although they often
worked collaboratively, a contemporary “described the differences in their
personalities thus: Ella was ‘charming,’ Mary ‘dynamic,’ [and] Eliza ‘superior
and aloof.’”38
Ritchie was among the first group of women to enroll at Dalhousie after it
became a coeducational institution. The university made efforts not only to
admit women but also to provide a positive environment for them, reportedly
posting a notice, “Ladies, we bid you welcome within the precincts of Dalhousie
College.”39 She was one of just three female students in a class of fifteen to
graduate with a bachelor’s degree in the liberal arts in 1887. Later in life she
reflected on the welcoming atmosphere the university provided for women.
Dalhousie, she said, succeeded in “relieving apprehensions of the timid and
encouraging the efforts of the ambitious.”40 The department of philosophy in
the 1880s consisted of James Ross, the former “principal” of the college who
taught there from 1863 to 1885; William Lyall (1863–90); J. G. Schurman
(1882–6); and James Seth (1886–92). Schurman was the first philosophy
professor at Dalhousie who was not also an ordained minister and was offered
the George Munro chair of philosophy and literature in 1884. (The same year
he married Barbara Munro, the daughter of the philanthropist for whom this
chair was named.) Ritchie noted that women readily enrolled in Schurman’s
literature classes before he left for Cornell where he rose through the ranks to
become dean of the Sage School of Philosophy, then the university’s president.
Years later, she corresponded with Schurman and a fellow student at both
Dalhousie and Cornell, James E. Creighton. A handful of these letters were
preserved in the Cornell University archives.
Although Ritchie was the fourth woman to earn a doctoral degree in
philosophy in the United States, she was the first Canadian woman to do so—
at home or abroad.41 She was a woman of “firsts” in other ways as well. She was
the first warden of a Dalhousie women's dormitory (Forrest Hall, 1912–15),
the first woman to serve as a member of the Dalhousie Board of Governors
(1919–25), and the first woman to receive an honorary degree from Dalhousie
(1927).42 She was also the first woman to publish discussions of Spinoza in a
philosophy journal in the United States. As was common for career-oriented
women in her era, she was unmarried.
Ritchie taught briefly at Vassar College before accepting a position at
Wellesley in 1890. She was appointed as an instructor, then promoted to
associate professor at Wellesley. Just two years into her tenure there, she began
to investigate opportunities to study in Europe. Writing to J. G. Schurman
at Cornell, she mused that Leipzig would probably be the best option, “tho’
if Berlin were possible, it may offer more advantages in some respects.”43 In
1892–93, she took a leave of absence to study at Leipzig and Oxford.
Ritchie returned to Wellesley the following year and remained there until
the 1898–9 academic year. Her departure from Wellesley presents a puzzle.
Patricia Palmeiri identifies her as a casualty of comprehensive changes
implemented by Julia Irvine (1848–1930), who was president of the college
from 1894 to 1899. Yet the faculty terminated during that time were generally
senior professors who had been at the college for decades and did not hold
advanced degrees.44 Ritchie held a PhD when she was appointed at Wellesley,
had only been there a few years when Irvine became president, was described
as characteristic of the “new woman” by students, and did not reach the rank
of full professor. It is hard to imagine why Irvine, a fellow Cornell alumna (BA
1875, MA 1876) would have terminated Ritchie’s employment at Wellesley.
Mary Whiton Calkins’s reference to Ritchie in a letter to James Creighton

during the 1899–1900 academic year fails to bring clarity: “I had probably
misunderstood Dr. Ritchie’s plans about returning to Wellesley. I shall be
very sorry if she does not come back.”45 At this time, Mary Whiton Calkins
was operating Wellesley’s experimental psychology laboratory, the first at a
women’s college in the United States, and was joined by Cornell alumna
Eleanor Gamble to further advance experimental psychology and heighten
the college’s profile in this regard. Based on Ritchie’s published work, the
emphasis on experimental psychology at Wellesley did not match her talents
and academic interests. Two years after she had left, she made it clear to James
Creighton that she missed the academic world she had left behind:
Living as I do at present in complete isolation from every one [who is]

saturated in philosophical matters, the opportunity for self-expression is
limited to writing. . . . I am much hampered by not having access to any
books but those I own. Can you tell me if I would be allowed Library
privileges at Cornell if I were to go [there] for a month or so next autumn?46
Whatever the circumstances leading to her departure from Wellesley,

historical accounts report that she held the college in high regard throughout
her lifetime.47
After leaving Wellesley, Ritchie returned to her home in Halifax. Some
sources suggest she taught philosophy at her alma mater, but Dalhousie
University’s yearly catalogues from the period show no evidence of this. Walter
C. Murray was the sole professor of philosophy and chair of the department
from 1892 until 1908. He was followed by Robert Magill (1908–13), John Laird
as chair and Rupert Lodge as lecturer (1913–14), and Herbert Leslie Stewart
(1914–47). In an era in which academic credentialing was not as standardized
as it is today, only Robert Magill and Herbert Stewart held doctoral degrees,
from Jena and Oxford, respectively.48 Yet, despite the fact that Ritchie held a
doctorate and had prior teaching experience, she may not have been considered
a candidate for a position in philosophy at Dalhousie, because gender often
trumped credentials in this era. She had already seen gender hierarchies in
place during graduate study. She and James Creighton were contemporaries
who earned baccalaureates at Dalhousie the same year and were graduate
school classmates at Cornell. Yet it was Creighton who was offered a faculty
position there, not Ritchie. In their gendered academic world, this was not
unusual. With the doctorate in hand in 1889, Ritchie was considered an ideal
candidate for a position at a women’s college. Creighton, on the other hand,
was groomed for a position at Cornell, a large and increasingly prestigious
coeducational research institution. And he was offered that position in 1892,
after completing his degree—three years after Ritchie, incidentally. As we will
see in the chapters that follow, other women had similar experiences.
Given the gendered nature of professional life in this era, two factors were
likely to have been in play when Ritchie first returned to Nova Scotia. First,
she may have been fully aware that (as a woman) she would not be able to
obtain a faculty position and never pursued one. Second, she was a person
of privilege who had received a sizable inheritance after her parents’ death.
Therefore, she had no need to earn a living and/or may have had little interest
in maintaining a professional identity.49 If she sought a philosophy position
at the university just after returning but was overlooked, she may not have
been overly concerned. After roughly a decade of life back in Halifax, however,
words from Ritchie’s pen give us a better sense of both her role at Dalhousie
and her own self-perception. In 1912, she was in her mid-fifties and was
invited by the journalist John Daniel Logan to be included in his photograph
and autograph collection of prominent figures in the region. This was her
response: “I feel that I cannot send my photograph for the purpose you name.
I am assuredly no ‘philosopher,’ and I could not in any way countenance my
being so represented even when . . . ‘poetic license’ is admitted.”50 Although
one of the first women to earn a doctorate in the discipline and one of the most
prolific, it seems that Ritchie no longer identified as a philosopher. Of course,
we cannot be sure of her tone when she wrote these words—whether in mock
self-deprecation, satirically, dismissively, or with the false humility that was
common among women in this era. Yet those of us who have studied gender
dynamics cannot help but suspect that a combination of what we now identify
as “stereotype threat” and “imposter syndrome” were in play. For those not
familiar with these terms from psychology: stereotype threat describes the
anxieties a person feels about biased expectations of them, based on race/
ethnicity, gender, or social class. Imposter syndrome may be a more familiar
term, since it has crept into workplace parlance. It describes insecurity about
one’s achievements—a person’s sense that they are undeserving of recognition
or status they have attained. One needs only to review the foregoing paragraphs
to see how and why a woman in Ritchie’s era might have succumbed to both
dynamics and developed a diminished professional sense of self. Certainly, it
is possible that Ritchie simply decided philosophy was no longer of interest
to her. But given what we know about professional life for women in this era,
it is likely that the gender-biased practices she had seen over the years took a
toll on her. Colleagues she had studied alongside or exchanged competitive
academic barbs with were now at the height of their careers, but at this point
in her life she felt unworthy or unwilling to refer to herself as a philosopher.
No additional records or correspondence have been found to give us a
better picture of Ritchie’s interaction with colleagues at Dalhousie, but we do
know that she joined forces with Dalhousie’s philosophy department chair,
Herbert Stewart, to establish a literary journal, Dalhousie Review, in 1921. She
wrote for the journal and served on its editorial board until the end of her
life. She was also devoted to the university itself, generously giving her time
and resources to it. She helped raise funds for a women’s residence hall and
served as its “warden” from 1912–13 until 1914–15. The university formally
recognized her commitments to the university in its catalog, listing her as an
advisor to female students between 1912–13 and 1917–18; as a member of the
Board of Governors from 1919–20 until 1925–26; and as an interim lecturer—
in art, not philosophy—in 1930–31.
Like May Preston Slosson, Ritchie developed strong commitments to
promoting the fine arts in both education and community life after leaving
academia behind. She helped establish the Nova Scotia School of Art and
Design and the Nova Scotia Museum of Fine Arts, for instance. She was also
active in social reform and women’s issues in Halifax, serving in leadership
positions of the Victoria Order of Nurses, a health and social service agency;
the feminist-minded National Council of Women and Local Council of
Women; and the Nova Scotia Equal Suffrage League.51 She had plenty of
projects to occupy her time when she returned to her home turf without
holding a position at the university.
As a public intellectual and community leader in Nova Scotia, Ritchie
worked closely with the feminists, Agnes Dennis and Edith Archibald. She
appears to have been associated with the art historian, James William Falconer;
the politician and theorist, Sir Robert Borden; and the writers and historians,
Archibald MacMechan, E. J. Pratt, Charles G. D. Roberts, and Frederick Philip
Grove. M. Josephine Shannon was a colleague who not only contributed to
the Dalhousie Review but also held positions at the university—as a reader in
English and as an assistant librarian.
It is not clear if Ritchie maintained close ties with her female colleagues at
Cornell, but she certainly shared their philosophical interests. Most notably, like
Ellen Bliss Talbot, Ritchie produced discussions of the philosophy of religion,
including the free will/determinism debate. She also crossed paths with some
of the early academic women discussed in this volume: Mary Whiton Calkins
and Caroline Miles Hill both held positions at Wellesley in the 1890s when
Ritchie was at the institution—Calkins from 1887 until 1892, then again after
1895; Miles Hill from 1893 until 1895. In addition, Julia Gulliver and Marietta
Kies both studied in Leipzig the same year that Ritchie was there, in 1892–93.
She may also have crossed paths with Emma Rauschenbusch who studied at
Leipzig in the early 1890s. Unfortunately, no correspondence remains to tell us
whether of any of these women were close associates.
Ritchie contributed several articles and book reviews to The Philosophical
Review and the International Journal of Ethics, but published only two philosophy-
related articles after 1905—a sketch of the life and influence of Erasmus (1926) and
a similar sketch that focused on Spinoza (1932). Like May Preston Slosson and
their contemporary at Michigan, Caroline Miles Hill, Ritchie published poetry
toward the end of her life: an edited volume, Songs of the Maritimes (1931); and
a collection of original work, In the Gloaming, published posthumously (1936).
Ritchie’s published work focused on ontology, the free will/determinism debate,
Spinoza’s thought and influence, and philosophy of religion. Unlike many early
academic women, she openly expressed her feminist views, although more in
the popular press than in academic outlets.
Eliza Ritchie’s Philosophical Work
The Problem of Personality

Ritchie published her dissertation, The Problem of Personality, in 1889, the
same year she completed her doctorate. In this volume she explores the nature
of personhood, beginning with the mind/body problem before moving to an
examination of consciousness, identity, and individuality. Next, she considers
“character” as related to moral culpability, which then allows her to discuss
one of her central interests: the free will/determinism debate. The volume
concludes with the assertion that individual persons are manifestations of
a greater and ultimate absolute or Spirit, and in a sense that aligns with the
metaphysics of Spinoza and Hegel. The work as a whole serves as an illustration
of Ritchie’s historical placement within philosophy at the intersection of new
developments within the discipline, long-held traditions in religion, and
challenges to both from the emerging social sciences. An overview of her
arguments in the book will make this more clear.
In the introductory paragraphs of The Problem of Personality, Ritchie makes
a bold statement:
If philosophical study is to be a living force, leading [thinkers] to new truths

or giving them insights into truths already known, surely it must effect its
purpose—not by ignoring the results of modern scientific research . . .

but rather by cordially accepting the new side lights thus thrown upon its
problems.52
This is what Ritchie sets out to do in this work—draw on scientific research,

primarily from the relatively new discipline of psychology, and use it to better
inform philosophy. She begins by noting that the old philosophical and
religious concept of soul might better be conceived of as an ego, which is even
more aptly described in terms of personhood. Yet the concept of “person” is not
self-evident. Clarifying that she wants to set aside religious understandings of
personhood, soul, or spirit, Ritchie asserts that the term “person” is generally
invoked in reference to (a) a human individual (b) consisting of a mind or
spirit that (c) “is connected with a human organism, or body,” which (d)
experiences states of consciousness as a series that “pertain to itself ” and (e)
has an ability to anticipate future events.53 Examining these aspects of person
is a weighty task, and Ritchie recognizes this. Citing Descartes on the mind/
body problem as well as Kant’s “unity of apperception” (sans “transcendental”
in Ritchie’s text), she notes that these are problems “on the borderland between
psychology and metaphysics.” Her goal is not to solve Descartes’ mind/body
problem nor to challenge Kant’s “unity of apperception,” which she considered
the accepted “theory of cognition” of the day.54 Instead, her goal is to “mark out
the limits of mind.”55
As she proceeds with her argument, Ritchie engages in a careful discussion
of the mind/body problem, as elucidated by then-new developments in
psychology. Many of the claims she makes have long since been superseded
by neuropsychology. Even so, in this section of the work she articulates some
innovative ideas in regard to the interplay between cognition, consciousness,
sensation, volition, and bodily motions and/or responses. As a result of her
consideration of the mind/body connection, she draws two conclusions: first,
that humans are not the only creatures that have consciousness and perhaps
self-consciousness; second, that all material has some degree of mind—a
“psychical side” in Ritchie’s parlance.56
Ritchie then returns to matters more central to her overall concerns: the
connections between personhood/personality and (self-)consciousness. As
she plays out her argument—that a central feature of personhood is the ability
of an individual to identify a series of conscious states as their own—she
recognizes that this ability entails memory. And although any given memory
can differ “in respect to its clearness, vivacity, and extent,” she maintains that
“some degree of the power of recollection seems absolutely necessary to the
recognition of personal identity.”57 The ability to recall our experiences is not
one that exists, fully functioning in each human being, however. Instead, it has
evolved slowly in the human species and develops over time within individuals
as each person grows and matures. Self-consciousness is linked to memory
in this regard. “We can hardly speak of self-consciousness as actually present
till there is a distinctly individual memory” or series of experiences in each
person.58 In their simplest form, then, the two—consciousness and memory—
are inseparable in Ritchie’s view.
Yet, the subject-object dichotomy presents itself in Ritchie’s discussion, and
she aims to reconcile it by drawing on the idealist epistemology and ontology
that was current in her day. In one sense, we are isolated individuals, locked, as
it were, in our own unique set of experiences that we identify as a self. Ritchie
describes this dynamic as a “stream of impressions . . . which in their relatedness
as a series constitute, in Kantian phraseology, our ‘empirical ego.’”59 And
although we perceive others with their own “streams of impressions,” Ritchie
notes that “the life of each individual seems a thing apart . . . the assumption
generally made [is] that the individuality of each person is thorough and
inviolable.”60 Ultimately, she determines that each individual is witness to the
activities of other individuals, and that all “streams” are manifestations of a
larger metaphysical reality—namely, Spirit. Setting aside this set of claims for
the time being, she turns to “character” as a component of personhood that
merits consideration.
Ritchie notes that an individual’s “own distinctive marks, mental, moral,
and physical . . . habits, preferences, modes of speech, gesture and action . . .
constitute [their] personality.”61 Yet, it has long remained unclear the degree
to which individual characteristics are due to a person’s heredity or to their
environment. Rather than delude herself and her readers into thinking she
can solve this puzzle, she instead makes a bold move and discusses these two
influences as a pair: with “full and exact knowledge” of all aspects of a person’s
nature (heredity) and environment, she says, their “character might be deduced
. . . with mathematical accuracy.”62 From here, Ritchie embarks on a discussion
of moral culpability, and ultimately enters the free will/determinism debate.
She launches some common arguments against determinism that are mounted
by the free will camp. If an individual’s actions were to be determined—whether
by heredity or circumstances—they would then be exempt from culpability.
An individual is accountable for their behavior only if they are free to choose
their own course of action. Drawing on Spinoza and Leibniz, Ritchie embraces
the determinist’s view, although the stance she takes could be called a qualified
determinism.
Ritchie maintains that, as human beings, we are physical and
psychological entities with a fixed nature. Science can tell us more about
both our physical nature and our psychological behavior, thus helping us to
predict which choices we will make in any given situation. The fact that we
are determined in this way does not mean we are free from culpability, in
Ritchie’s view, because we are aware of the breadth of our options within the
fixed system in which we live. Furthermore, we are able to make conscious
decisions, routinely choosing from the wide range of alternatives before us.
In addition, the universe in which we live has been created by God/Spirit.
In this universe, God/Spirit is the author of the laws of nature, and (a la
Spinoza) God acts according to God’s own nature. God has also put us into
existence—making us such that we too necessarily act according to our
own nature—as physical and psychological beings who can make choices.
At this point, Ritchie uses the analogy of a cog in a machine, saying the cog
(i.e., a human being) plays a role in making the machine (i.e., the universe)
run properly. The human-as-cog in Ritchie’s universe has a fixed role, but
one that it consciously participates in fulfilling. Yet it is difficult to see

how and why, she believes this analogy serves to demonstrate that the
individual is free. Further muddying the determinist waters, Ritchie draws
on Leibniz’s claim that if the magnet in a compass had consciousness,
it would consider the directions in which it could turn, then choose to
turn north.63 It is unfortunate that Ritchie chose to retain the mechanical
analogies that were current in the era of Leibniz and Spinoza. Her aim was
to demonstrate that human nature is conscious and that we have the ability
not only to form intentions but also to make contributions to a dynamic
and active universe. Yet the cog/machine analogy locks human beings into
a fixed system with no room for variability or creativity.
As she closes her discussion, Ritchie makes sure to establish that God does
not stand outside nature. Instead, God/Spirit is the force of existence itself,
of which nature is the manifestation. God is not merely “bound” by the laws
of nature. Instead God is, in essence, the laws of nature in action. Therefore,
Ritchie concludes that God has not necessarily predetermined any specific
human actions. Instead, God has determined what our nature will be—
as individuals and as a species—and we are free to act in accordance with
that nature.
There are two aspects of Ritchie’s line of reasoning that are curious: first,
she insists that her notion of God is not pantheistic. It appears her concern
is that to embrace pantheism would be to argue that human beings are the
highest form of mind or spirit. But at this point in her life, she was devoted
to retaining the concept of a God that initiates, animates, and sustains all of
existence. Therefore, she takes pains to explain that humans are comprised of
spirit, but that only God is Spirit. As noted further in the chapter, later in life
Ritchie espoused atheism. It would be interesting to discover if, as an atheist,
she came to fully reject the concept of any ultimate reality, or if she continued
to affirm the Spinoza-inspired Spirit she embraced at this early stage in her
career. The other curiosity is Ritchie’s reaction against a religious version of the
free will/determinism debate in the opening pages of this volume. She appears
to deride the religious concern that individuals must be held accountable for
their actions—a distaste for traditional religion that becomes more evident
in the essay she published four years later, “The Ethical Implications of
Determinism,” in The Philosophical Review.
On Determinism
In “Ethical Implications” (1893), Ritchie covered much of the same ground
about the free will/determinism debate that she had discussed in her
dissertation. She refined and reified key elements of her argument in this essay,
however: she places greater emphasis on the need to incorporate discoveries
from the sciences into moral philosophy. She clarifies the role that human
cognition and intention play in her understanding of determinism. Finally,
she explains how culpability comes into play in a determinist understanding
of human nature.
The work of a moral philosophy is to establish such general principles as

may afford a rational support for . . . practical ethics, and a guide for the
formation of moral standards and judgments. And for this purpose we
must accept the validity of the scientific category of causation.64
This statement forms the foundation of Ritchie’s discussion in this article. In

her view, philosophers must use science, rather than speculative theories or
worn-out religious dogmas, to fully understand human behavior and thus
develop a rational moral philosophy. She reminds her readers that there are no
“uncaused events” in science.65 Why should human behavior be any different?
Although hereditary and environmental factors may cause human beings to
act as they do, Ritchie claims that we can still “recognize certain classes of
action as free.”66 Why? Moving away from her earlier mechanical analogy, she
asserts that human beings are not machines, they are free agents. A person “is
a conscious mechanism, [who] knows what will be the result [of their actions]
and why they will subserve an end [they] desire.” In short, human beings act
with “a purpose in view.”67 The key feature here is Ritchie’s emphasis on human
consciousness, the ability to see alternatives, weigh options, and arrive at a
decision. In a sense, then, her understanding of freedom is an epistemological
one: “Only in so far as it is a product of a reasoning process, can we call [an
action] voluntary or free.”68 Because human knowledge is limited, Ritchie
concedes that the freedom she affirms may be an ideal that is not actually
attainable. At the same time the more we use our rationality, the more free we
become. Furthermore, actions performed by habit or involuntarily have no
moral worth in her view.
Although Ritchie drew on thinkers like Spinoza, Leibniz, and Hegel in
developing her determinist moral epistemology, it is not clear that her system
really works. Her contemporary, Julia Gulliver, discussed in Chapter 6, wrote
a response to this article, saying just that. Gulliver cited Ritchie’s claim that
antecedent conditions—whether hereditary or environmental—fix the
selfhood of any given individual: “The ‘I’ of tomorrow,” Ritchie said, “is the
outcome of the ‘I’ of today . . . the ‘I’ of today is a product of the ‘I’ of yesterday.”
Reasonably enough, Gulliver charges that this statement demonstrates
that there is, in fact, no room for freedom in Ritchie’s system. It is difficult
to imagine how anyone could fail to agree with Gulliver on this point. Yet,
Ritchie was convinced that her view was the most reasonable one by far.
From her perspective, proponents of libertarian free will were naïve and their
arguments were weak. In reference to an unnamed male critic, she wrote to
James Creighton, “It seems a pity your professional correspondent should
allow ‘gallantry’ to interfere with his knocking my deterministic arguments on
the head.” Instead, he should exercise “true chivalry [and] come to the aid of
the ‘libertarians’ who need all the help they can get!”69
Ritchie also had a larger philosophical project in mind. Her ultimate goal
in this essay is not only to establish how individuals can be held morally
accountable but also to demonstrate that modern social science can be used
to intervene and alter outcomes. The dominance of Christian morality, she
argues, has made ethics seem “peculiar and unique” to each individual. But
by making use of social science to study behavior, we can anticipate social

dysfunctions, intervene when necessary, and influence the outcome:
What should be done is to introduce [a wrong-doer] into such new

conditions as shall be suited to modify [their] character. . . . Hence
punishment as reformatory is in perfect harmony with determinists’
contentions.70
Conversely, praising good behavior “is to some extent helpful in the production
of such conduct.”71 That is, if we reward good behavior, we will produce more
moral and/or benevolent acts. In this way, we can bring more goodness into
the world. Ritchie holds further that modern science has demonstrated a
link between goodness and beauty. (Note that her colleague at Cornell, May
Slosson, made similar statements.) And at this point, she re-aligns herself with
Spinoza’s thought, asserting that there is a unity, wholeness, and harmony
underlying the determinists’ worldview. Interestingly, in this article she places
less emphasis on the spiritual aspects of Spinoza’s thought and is also less
concerned about distancing herself from pantheism.
On Spinoza
Eliza Ritchie was among a select group of scholars and the first woman to
produce work on Spinoza at the turn of the twentieth century in US-based
academic journals.72 She published two articles in The Philosophical Review,
“Notes on Spinoza’s conception of God” (1902) and “The reality of the finite
in Spinoza’s system” (1904). Her work was followed by an article in 1907 in
the American Journal of Psychology by another early woman academic, Amy
Elizabeth Tanner (Chicago, 1898). As noted, Ritchie also published an overview
of Spinoza in the Dalhousie Review decades later, thereby introducing a more
general audience to the main lines of his thought.
Ritchie’s “Notes on Spinoza’s conception of God” was the lead article in The
Philosophical Review when it appeared in print. In this essay, Ritchie makes
it clear that she was well-acquainted with his thought, first explaining his
concepts of substance, attributes, and modes of existence to her readers. She

then pre-emptively addresses common misreadings of Spinoza, asserting that
Substance is not a personal or anthropomorphic god figure; that the attributes
of Substance are infinite, despite the fact that we encounter only two—thought
and extension; and that modes are simply the way we encounter the infinite
manifold of experience, not independent entities apart from Substance. Ritchie
also makes sure to note that Spinoza’s decision to employ a cumbersome
geometric proof format was misguided and renders his ideas unduly difficult
to digest.73 Her next move is to put Spinoza in context, historically and
philosophically. She recognizes that Spinoza accepted an idea argued by
Descartes—that God’s essence must entail existence—and this necessarily
influences other aspects of his system.
As Ritchie explores Spinoza’s system in this essay, her placement as an early
academic thinker becomes clear. She had gained both breadth and depth in
her study of philosophy at Cornell, but she took pains to link Spinoza’s ideas
to idealism, which dominated philosophy in the decades following nascent
discussions of German thinkers among the New England transcendentalists
and St. Louis idealists. In fact, her interest in squaring Spinoza with Hegel’s
thought is the main focus of her second article about Spinoza, discussed later.
Ritchie recognizes that Hegel objected to aspects of Spinoza’s thought by
charging that his understanding of God led to a concept of Being that is too
abstract. God and Being, Hegel said, has to be concrete and experienced (or
experience-able), but in Spinoza’s system both are far removed from material
realities, distant and unknowable. Ritchie tries to defend Spinoza, saying that
in his view Being is a vague and poorly conceived term. In her understanding,
Spinoza held that an abstract term like “Being” is “in the highest degree
confused,” and is in use only because of “the limitations of the human
imagination.”74 Ritchie further explains that “The philosophy of Spinoza is not
an idealism in the sense . . . [of] the metaphysics of Fichte and Hegel. He never
builds up the existent world out of the thought-material of consciousness. For
him, the fact of facts . . . is the real itself.”75
At this point, Ritchie addresses other misinterpretations of Spinoza.

Erdmann, she says, understood Spinoza’s attributes to be essentially predicates,
but this too is misplaced. The source of his error is “attaching the attributes
to the understanding.” She clarifies that the attributes are not a faculty of the
mind for Spinoza but are characteristics of Substance itself.76 Trendelenburg’s
error, on the other hand, was to conceive of Spinoza’s attributes as eternal
independent entities, detached from Substance. She maintains instead that
the attributes have no separate existence of their own, but simply emanate
from God. Human beings may have the experience of viewing God’s attributes
independently, but they are, in fact, wholly of God. They express God’s nature
but are not separate from God in any sense.77 Ritchie’s discussion of Erdmann
and Trendlenburg is likely to have been influenced by James Creighton when
the article was under consideration at The Philosophical Review. She wrote:
Thank you much for your suggestions in re the Spinoza article. I must have
been too vague in writing of ‘the attributes,’ though the distinction between
my own view and Erdmann’s is pretty clear in my own mind . . . I should like
to rewrite or at least revise that part of the paper, so please send it back to me.78
Ritchie then brings a brief discussion of Kant into the mix. As an illustration
of the development of these ideas in early academic philosophy, it is worth
quoting her at length on this point:
It is not without interest to compare these somewhat shadowy conceptions

of Spinoza with the equally ghostly noumena of the Critique of Pure Reason.
The student of Kant will recall his dictum, “the concept of a noumenon is,
therefore merely limitative, and intended to keep the claims of sensibility
within proper bounds, it is therefore, of negative use only.” So we might
say that the Spinozistic attributes (other than thought and extension) are
intended to keep the claims of finite consciousness within proper bounds;
they are for the freeing of reality from limitations of all kinds, and are,
therefore, epistemologically of negative use only. It must be observed,
however, that Spinoza is not hereby positing the existence of an ultimate

reality which by its nature is unknowable and unapproachable like the
Spencerian Absolute; rather he claims for the infinite real that it is the
knowable, and as infinite must be knowable by an infinite number of ways,
of which, however, but two lie open to us.79
Having laid these misreadings of Spinoza to rest, Ritchie provides some of her
own insights into his thought. Most notably, she makes it clear that for Spinoza,
Substance cannot be static, but is active—in its very essence. God’s “power is no
mere possibility of acting, but is action itself.”80 Refining her argument on this
point, she continues, “God is being, but being in its very essence is active. . . .
Being and only being is, but since it is, it acts. God's essence and His power are
one, and this power is not mere potentiality . . . for the infinite things which
come from infinite nature He necessarily does.”81 Therefore, Ritchie concludes
that in Spinoza’s view it is just as impossible to conceive of God as not acting
as to conceive of God not having existence.
After acknowledging the challenges that continue to plague Spinoza—for
instance, the supposed infinite number of attributes, only two of which we can
experience, or the tautological nature of his claims about Being—she moves
to the question of whether Spinoza’s Substance has consciousness. In her view,
the problem is critics’ failure to see that Spinoza rejected anthropomorphic
understandings of God. Although he “frequently refers both to the divine
power and to the ‘infinite intellect’ of God, yet he also expressly warns us that
we cannot ascribe intellect and will to God, save in a sense wholly unlike that
in which we apply them to human beings.”82 Her conclusion on this point is
that “Spinoza’s God . . . is consciousness per se, eternal, all-embracing, and
self-sufficient; . . . [which] is cognizable by our reason, which . . . misleads us
when it represents it as analogous to our own [reason], since the latter, being
only a ‘mode,’ is finite, transitory, and dependent.”83
Two years after this article appeared, Ritchie published a second discussion,
“The Reality of the Finite in Spinoza’s System,” also in The Philosophical
Review. Here her main objective is, again, to defend Spinoza from the charge
that his system “relegate[s] the phenomenal world to the limbo of the illusory
and unreal”—a charge made by Hegel.84 In her view, Hegel misunderstood
Spinoza’s epistemology and ontology. The Spinozian attributes and modes
are not independent processes or objects that are separate and distinct from
Substance. Human beings do not possess faculties that are akin to or that
participate in the powers of the attributes. Instead, his attributes are the means
through which we are able to perceive aspects of the nature of Substance.
Similarly, his modes are not entities that stand apart from Substance; they are
simply manifestations of Substance (as perceived through the attributes) that
emanate from and retain some measure of the nature of Substance. Spinoza’s
Substance is a central and integrated whole in Ritchie’s view, a cosmic unity
that is expressed in and through diversity. He is guilty of neither atheism—
the most common charge against him, particularly in his own day—nor
“acosmism,” as Hegel suggests. In this article, Ritchie went to great lengths to
represent Spinoza fully and fairly, and she largely succeeded in doing so.
Ritchie’s eagerness to debunk charges of atheism against Spinoza is
interesting, because she took pride in her own religious skepticism. Reportedly
she announced her atheism while in college and once told a younger cousin
that becoming an atheist is “like coming out of a darkened room into the light
of day.”85 Even so, as we have seen, she expended a good deal of time discussing
ideas related to religion: the free will/determinism debate, discussed earlier,
religious truth claims, and morality in relation to belief.
Philosophy of Religion
In a set of writings published just before and after 1900, Ritchie questioned
the nature of religion itself, the duty of an individual to examine their own
religious views, and the common assumption that religious belief serves as a
moral compass. She addresses the first question in “The Essential in Religion”
(1901). This article stands as a good example of academic views of religion at
the dawn of the twentieth century, outlining as it does emerging approaches to

the study and analysis of religion—as creeds, communal practices, sentiments,
or intellectual postulates. To today’s scholar of religion, there is not a great deal
that is new in this article. Yet, there is much of value in it. Ritchie begins by
defining the term in question:
Religion is the intimate and vital apprehension, by the individual, of what is

conceived to be reality, in its fullest sense, la vraie vérité of things; whether
such reality be regarded as co-extensive with, as included in, as inclusive
of, or as distinct from, the world of natural phenomena . . . as in some way
related to the individual . . . [A]ny such apprehension must embrace belief,
emotional response, and the determination of conduct.86
In the pages that follow, however, Ritchie’s skepticism becomes apparent. She
declares that intellectuals have two alternatives in regard to religious belief.
They may “set as their mark, not truth, but orthodoxy, and search out with
painful ingenuity the strongest attainable props and guards for their tottering
creed, . . . till they at last ‘with much toil attain to half-belief.’” The other option?
An intellectual who wants to face the challenges that rationality and science
had presented in recent decades “must boldly apply to all theological questions
. . . the same methods, with equal frankness and impartiality, that they would
[use] for the disentangling of knotty problems in secular concerns.” She then
warns: “In the former case, the structure of credulity becomes subject to dry
rot, and in time will crumble away; in the latter case, it is liable to be shattered
at a blow.”87
In the end, Ritchie calls for a transformed understanding of religion in
this short essay, one that was embraced by the majority of New England’s
transcendentalists decades earlier and would be prevalent as humanism in
both academic life and popular culture after the turn of the twentieth century.
Authentic religion, she says, is the quest for truth in its highest forms. Truth
transcends religious creeds, community worship practices, and emotional
faith commitments. Therefore, our traditional understandings of religion will
evolve and transform over time. She assures her audience in closing that this
“will involve the loss only of what is temporary and extrinsic, and will lead the
way to a higher and purer form of religious life.”88
Published the previous year, Ritchie’s “Truth-Seeking in Matters of
Religion” consists of a somewhat more generous discussion, perhaps because
her intention was to guide others as they sift through their own beliefs. Here
Ritchie asserts that evaluating one’s views is a duty, one that has the potential
to open new doors to understanding. Of course, a person is at liberty to
follow Pascal’s lead and assert belief merely because doing so may be worth
the gamble. But Ritchie clearly has little respect for the “profound and almost
cynical skepticism that underlay” Pascal’s wager.89
Again making the claim that truth is the real aim of religion, in “Truth-
Seeking” Ritchie recognizes that intellectual postulates are not enough to
fulfill human beings. We have emotional and aesthetic needs, and religious
art, music, and literature certainly help to meet those needs. At this point,
she looks at literature as a helpful example. We believe in characters within
literature, she says, not as historical figures, but as “types.” In this sense, Ritchie
anticipates claims that would develop within theology in the late twentieth
century—the mytho-poetic understanding of truth and its companion, “useful
fictions” in literature. On some levels, she says, this alternative view of truth
suits us well, though ultimately Ritchie rejects it:
The more knowledge increases, the more do we recognize . . . the essential

truth, of a great work of the creative imagination. . . . [Yet] rigorous
skepticism if applied, let us say, to the most sacred of all the New Testament
narratives, . . . will be for us not the less, but the more, “true,” when we have
learnt to distinguish what in it was merely accidental and unhistorical. “We
live by admiration, hope and love” we repeat, but these must be founded,
not on dreams or fancies, but on the real, the vital, and the permanent.90
In the final pages of this article, Ritchie fully embraces a humanist understanding
of religion, both epistemologically and ethically:
If the world should cease to be regarded as the work of a supremely good

and great Person, . . . the more urgent would be the demand for human
strength, and knowledge, and sympathy. If there be no wisdom higher
than that of weak, fallible man, the greater must be the need for the best
efforts . . . to feed the little lamp of human reason, and to bring as many as
possible within the circle of its light.91
In closing, she insists that religious belief can and must be subjected to rigorous
examination. Otherwise, it is little more than superstition.
In “Morality and Belief in the Supernatural” (1897), Ritchie’s acquaintance
with early anthropology of religion is evident. She opens by making a
distinction between religion—as a body of creeds, a set of practices, and an
expression of culture—and belief. She then makes it clear that her aim is to
discuss belief, not religion as a whole, as related to morality.
Recognizing that religion can influence morality, Ritchie notes that it
does so in several ways: by dictating the content of moral codes, by enforcing
obedience to those codes, by linking emotion to morality, and by creating
aesthetic connections to morality. But the development of morality itself,
Ritchie maintains, takes place within a given community or culture. Morality
does not originate from within religion, but is imported, as such, into religious
traditions. “In no case is the origin of the moral distinctions to be found in a
supposed supernatural sphere.”92 Belief is able to give “vividness, strength, and
permanence to the moral ideal,” and in this sense “religious faith has doubtless
helped to raise humanity to a higher moral plane.”93 Even so, this is the result of
the influence of belief working in combination with social sanctions imposed
by religious bodies—not a product of religion itself.
Ritchie continues by looking at the central role rewards and punishments
can play in enforcing morality. She laments that belief in the wrathful god
of Christianity who demands assent to specific doctrines and creeds has led
to a “gloomy record of forced conversions, religious wars, persecutions, and
martyrdom” that have “darkened the pages of history.”94 Thankfully, she notes,
religious belief has also contributed to producing altruism and beneficence—

but, again, as an outgrowth of moral codes and mandates that coincide with
religious practice. “Those who regard the religious sanction as essential to
morality . . . fail to see that it is in truth an extra-moral sanction.”95
As she brings this discussion to a close, Ritchie acknowledges that
widespread recognition of the distinction between religion and morality
may be disruptive to the believing public. And this could result in a decline
in moral standards. Even so, she is convinced that if implemented gradually
(for the sake of our “weaker brethren” who need strong social sanctions to
guide them) the sacrifice would be worth it.96 There would be only a temporary
dip in morality, which would be followed by moral observance that is better
informed and more genuine.
Education and Community Development
Ethel Gordon Muir (1857–1940)

BL, Dalhousie University (1891)
ML, Dalhousie University (1893)
Dissertation: “The Ethical System of Adam Smith”
Career: Mount Holyoke College (1897–1900); Pennsylvania College for

Women, Pittsburgh (1900–03); Briarcliff School, New York (1903–1918);
Wilson College (1918–19); Lake Erie College (1919–37); volunteer at Grenfell
Mission, Labrador (summers, 1909–32)
Life and Career
Ethel Gordon Muir was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the second of seven
children born to William and Harriet (Wisdom) Muir.97 Her father was
a businessman who became prosperous in the shipping industry in the

Canadian maritimes in the mid-nineteenth century. He was well-known in
the community in Halifax and served as a volunteer firefighter much of his
life. Little is known about Muir’s mother; even her birth and death dates are
unknown to family genealogists. Both parents had more than a dozen siblings,
and Ethel maintained ties with many of her relatives, including those who
moved to Canada’s west coast, the United States, and Australia. She established
an educational trust to benefit her parents’ descendants after her death; a
fund that is still in existence. Muir and her sister Mary attended Nova Scotia’s
Provincial Normal School. Records are incomplete, but it appears that Ethel
earned a teaching certificate at the school sometime before 1885. Like so many
intellectual women in her era, she started her career as a K-12 teacher. In letters
to family in 1882, she made comments about teaching along with her sister at
“Mrs. Dashwood’s Establishment” at Cambridge House, which she playfully
referred to as “our aristocratic Halifax Boarding School.”98
By 1890, Muir had entered Dalhousie University, where she earned both
a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree. Two long-time faculty members,
James Ross and William Lyall, had retired and J. G. Schurman had accepted
a position at Cornell. James Seth was still at Dalhousie when she earned her
first degree in 1891. But by the time she had completed her master’s work
in 1893, Seth had departed and Walter C. Murray (1866–1945) had joined
the department. Murray later became the chair of Dalhousie’s philosophy
department, serving in that capacity until 1908 when he became president of
the University of Saskatchewan. At this point, no documents have surfaced
to provide more information about Muir’s studies while she was in Halifax.
From Dalhousie, she took the same path as fellow alumni, Eliza Ritchie and
James Creighton, heading to Cornell for doctoral study. She is an example
of a woman who crossed disciplinary boundaries in this period. When she
entered Cornell in 1893–4, she was listed in the philosophy department, with
metaphysics, ethics, and social science as her areas of study. The following two
years “history of philosophy” replaced “metaphysics” as one of these areas
of study.99 She wrote her dissertation on the political philosopher and early
economist, Adam Smith. The “definitive list” of women who earned doctorates
before 1900, compiled by Walter Crosby Eells in 1956 indicates that her degree
was in economics.100
The last year of her doctoral work, Muir began teaching at Mount
Holyoke College, a school for women in western Massachusetts. Mount
Holyoke generally hired philosophy faculty with expertise in ethics or
political theory at this stage in its history: Marietta Kies (1885–91), Caroline
Miles Hill (1892–3), and Vida Frank Moore (1893–6) were each appointed
to teach philosophy and political economy. Alice Hamlin is an exception.
In 1896–7, she was listed in the college catalog as teaching only philosophy,
and a historian named Anna Soule taught courses in both her own field
and political economy. When Muir was hired, the philosophy and political
theory pairing was back in force until the metaphysically minded Ellen Bliss
Talbot joined the faculty in 1900.101
Muir left Mount Holyoke for a position at Pennsylvania College for Women
(now Chatham University) near Pittsburgh, where she remained for three
years. She then accepted a position at a new institution, Briarcliff School,
later a women’s two-year college in the Hudson River valley near Ossining,
New York.102 Briarcliff was a school she devoted her time to for many years,
managing to weather the storm when the institution’s founders, Mary Elizabeth
Dow and Mary Alice Knox, parted ways around 1905. Muir wrote about the
schism to James Creighton:
Yes, Miss Dow and Miss Knox intend next year to have separate schools. . . .
I am going with Miss Dow and have never spoken of the proposed change
to Miss Knox. . . . I am enjoying my work here very much. . . . [T]he girls
seem more truly interested in both Psychology and Philosophy than any of
my previous classes.103
In 1918, Dow began preparations to retire from Briarcliff, so appointed an

assistant principal, Edith Cooper Hartman, who then took Dow’s place as
principal in 1920. Hartmann added domestic science programs to the Briarcliff

curriculum in 1919 and a two-year college degree in 1923. It may be that Muir
disagreed with those decisions or that she considered herself the rightful
successor to Dow after helping to establish the school fifteen years earlier,
because at this point she took a position at Wilson College where she taught
for only a year. In 1919, she began teaching at another school for women, Lake
Erie College in Painesville, Ohio, filling the vacancy left by Clara Hitchcock,
discussed in Chapter 5. Muir remained at Lake Erie until her retirement in the
1930s.
While teaching at both Briarcliff and Lake Erie, Muir spent her summers
as a volunteer at the Grenfell Mission in Labrador. Her first visit to the
mission was in 1909, and over the years, she contributed to many of its
community development projects within the fishing community there. She
assisted with gardening and building projects, helped villagers develop new
skills or retain long-held traditional practices, and—ever important in the
eyes of an academic—established schools. Muir delivered both liberal arts
instruction and “Sunday school” training to students of all ages at Grenfell and
was formally named its “superintendent” of education in 1920. Even before
being recognized in this way, however, she had been recruiting, training, and
supervising volunteers who accompanied her each summer—primarily her
students at Briarcliff and Lake Erie. For these young women, working with
Muir at Grenfell became an integral part of their educational experience.
Each year a cohort of up to fifteen students joined her and are sometimes
mentioned in the mission’s newsletter, Among the Deep Sea Fishers, to which
Muir often contributed updates or short reflections about her work. Leaders
at the mission expressed appreciation for Muir on many occasions, as in this
paean of sorts toward the end of her career: “The work of Miss Ethel Gordon
Muir at Black Duck Cove is beyond all praise. Here this indefatigable lady
built a splendid school and dwelling all in one, and for many years has given
her summer vacations to the great work of uplifting and improving minds” in
the community.104
Muir’s Philosophical Work
Muir’s only published academic work is her dissertation, “The Ethical System of
Adam Smith.” There has been no shortage of work about Adam Smith (1723–
1790) in intellectual history, broadly speaking. He is best known, of course, as
the author of The Wealth of Nations (1776), but he also received recognition for A
Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). Muir’s focus is on the earlier work, which sets
her apart from her contemporaries who were publishing in US academic journals
before the turn of the twentieth century. In the 1890s, we see just ten articles and
reviews of Adam Smith.105 Five focused on Smith’s economic theory; two of these
are comparative studies. One of the discussions of Smith as an economic theorist
was produced by another early woman academic, Hannah Robie Sewall (1861–
1926; Minnesota PhD, 1898).106 Among the remaining five, Langford L. Price
(1862–1950) discussed Smith’s role and influence in political history. Charles F.
Bastable (1855–1945) published a discussion of Smith’s jurisprudential thought.
Wilhelm Hasbach (1849–1920) looked at his views regarding justice, law, and the
use of force. The only thinkers in this group who focused on Smith’s moral theory
were August Oncken (1844–1911) and Muir herself.
Muir’s analysis of Smith grew out of her study of the history of philosophy
under James Creighton’s supervision at Cornell.107 The majority of her
discussion is devoted to analyzing the role of sympathy in Smith’s theory as
compared to Shaftesbury (1671–1713), Hutcheson (1694–1746), and Hume
(1711–1776).
She begins by noting that each of these thinkers strongly objected to
the hyper-individualism and egoism that Hobbes put forth in his political
philosophy. Shaftesbury in particular emphasized the deeply social nature
of human beings. In his view, isolated individualism is impossible, because
human beings are part of a social system. Hutcheson added that altruism is just
as natural to human beings as egoism; our moral and political theories need to
take both into account.108 Shaftesbury went further than Hutcheson in regard
to the value of other-regarding behavior, however. He asserted that human
beings derive pleasure from acts of benevolence and will sacrifice themselves
when others are in need. Hutcheson clarified that a benevolent act cannot be
performed primarily because it brings pleasure to the person performing such
an act—what today is called psychological egoism: “The wish to benefit others
is quite distinct from the desire for the pleasure arising from benevolence,”
he said.109 Muir approves of this distinction, but also charges that Hutcheson
tended to confuse emotions and ideas in his moral theory.
Hume tried to address this issue, but Muir has her doubts. Hume’s claim is
that we have a moral sense, and it is linked to sympathy. She approves of this
move. His “treatment of sympathy,” she says, “is one of the most interesting
features of his work.”110 Yet he too falls short in that he seems to say sympathy
is universal—a claim he cannot explain, given his overall framework. Muir
explores this further. Hume wants to claim that “other people closely resemble
ourselves, and this resemblance makes us easily enter into their sentiments.
The relations of contiguity and causation assist, and all, together, convey the
impression or consciousness of one person to the idea of the sentiments or
passions of others.”111 But Muir does not see how Hume can establish this
within his system of thought. “For a writer to whom the mind is nothing but a
series of separate impressions, and who holds that we can know only our own
feelings, to insist upon our knowledge of, and entrance into the feelings of
others, is most inconsistent.”112
Muir has serious reservations about Hume in this regard. To his credit,
he attempts to improve upon this aspect of his theory in the Enquiry; she
sees him as almost indistinguishable from Hutcheson in this sense. But,
like Hutcheson, Hume intertwines pleasure and pain into his discussion.
In this sense he lets sympathy become “so hopelessly mixed with
utility,” in Muir’s view “that, as the source of moral distinctions, it [is]
most unsatisfactory.”113
Muir sees Adam Smith’s ability to account for sympathy as the source of
both our moral distinctions and our moral judgments as a major strength.
Smith agrees with both Hutcheson and Hume that “sympathy is pleasing,
both to the person principally concerned, and to the spectator.”114 The

pleasure a person derives from helping another is natural to us as human
beings. This is our moral sense at work. But our reasons for acting when
we help those in need are also a function of our moral sense. And in this
regard Muir believes Smith succeeds in establishing the value of sympathy,
not only as a feeling but also as a form of judgment. The sympathy of the
spectator is
called forth by the utility of the consequences, or the merit of an

action. . . . An action is proper [or appropriate] when the impartial spectator
is able to sympathize with the [person in need]. It is meritorious when
[they] can sympathize also with [the] end or effect [of the action]. Propriety
demands that the feelings shall be suitable to their object; merit [demands],
that the consequences of an act shall be beneficial to others.115
In Smith’s characterization of sympathy, both the feelings of compassion that

motivate us to act and the sense of goodness and balance we derive from
seeing the outcome of our actions are fundamental to our moral sense. Both
arise from sympathy and both have moral status.
Muir discusses Smith’s view of conscience in relation to moral sentiment at
some length as well. She is especially interested in contrasting his views with
Hume on this point, largely because she is troubled by Hume’s relegation of
conscience to habit or social custom. She stresses aspects of Smith’s view of
conscience that border on what now is known as moral psychology. Although
Smith considered conscience to be an innate faculty of the mind, which was
instilled in us by God, he also identified conscience with reason. On this point,
Muir aligns his thought with Plato. Reason for Smith is the “judging faculty.”
We use it to make judgments about what is true and false and of what is proper
and improper in relation to other people—ideally as “impartial spectators.”
A person’s conscience comes into play when they make judgments about
their own actions. In this sense, a person must become their own impartial
spectator. Muir describes how this takes place:
I divide myself, as it were, into two persons. I, the examiner and the judge
. . . [and] I, the person whose conduct is examined . . . and judged. The
first is the spectator, whose sentiments with regard to my own conduct,
I endeavor to enter into, by placing myself into his situation, and by
considering how it would appear to me, when seen from that particular
point of view. The second is the agent, the person whom I properly call
myself, and of whose conduct, under the character of a spectator, I am
endeavoring to form some opinion. The first is the judge, the second the
person judged.116
Muir credits Smith with recognizing, “as few ethical writers have done, the
importance to morality of both reason and sense. . . . Ethics, all questions of
conduct, arise out of the fact of the duality of man’s nature, and an extreme
insistence upon either reason or sense, to the exclusion of the other, cannot
fail to produce a false view of morality.”117 She is critical of thinkers who
said Smith’s moral theory relied too heavily on “state of mind” (Richard B.
Haldane), emotion (Henry Sigdwick), or social rules (Johannes Schubert).
She also harshly criticizes her contemporary, August Oncken, a prominent
German thinker who claimed that Smith’s and Kant’s moral theories were
almost identical: “This complete similarity between the ethical systems
of Smith and Kant seems to me purely imaginary.” Smith, she said, places
immense importance on feeling and sympathy and opposes a “purely rational
and ascetic” system as well as a “purely non-rational system of morality.”118 In
her view, Smith’s moral theory is related to Kant’s only by way of opposition.
The only similarity to Kant that she can identify is the relation of sense to
reason:
To Smith, as to Kant, conception without perception is empty, and

perception without conception is blind. . . . Just as Kant found that neither
reason nor sense is, of itself, competent to form an object, . . . so Smith
argues that, in the moral sphere, it is by sympathy alone that the perceptions
can be collected, out of which reason forms the moral object, the moral
judgment. Smith thus recognizes the great fact, neglected by Kant in his
ethics, that man is by no means purely rational.119
Muir agrees with Smith that “our emotions are, as it were the raw material of
morality,” which can be understood and transformed by reflecting on them
through the use of reason.120
As much as Muir approves of Smith’s emphasis on sympathy and
benevolence, she also recognizes the significant role self-interest can play in
moral life. Self-interest is also an innate human faculty, and it can lead us to
delude ourselves when we act immorally. Yet “nature leads us to form insensibly,
by observations upon the conduct of others, general rules, concerning what is
fit and proper. . . . and we fix this general rule in our minds, in order to correct
the misrepresentations of selflove.”121
Toward the end of her discussion, Muir explains what could be considered
a schism between Smith’s moral and economic theories. While we must be
impartial spectators in judging our own moral behavior and while sympathy
must be a central feature of our moral decision-making, Smith accepts and
affirms self-interest in the economic realm. Why? Because “each [person]
is, naturally, better fitted to take care of [him or herself] than of any other
person. . . . [Each individual’s] chief business is to govern the affairs of [their]
own daily life.”122 Using the example of wealthy landowners who produce an
over-abundance of crops, Muir explains that their actions, though selfish, will
have a positive impact. Since individual landowners cannot reap or consume
the full yield of crops alone, they will hire workers to do the harvesting; they
will then sell the produce at low rates to people with limited means. In this
way, self-regarding behavior results in productivity and “selfishness . . . works
out the same beneficial results in society, that would have been promoted by
benevolence or sympathy.”123 Essentially, Muir was endorsing a version of
trickle-down economics—a view to compare to Marietta Kies, discussed in
Chapter 3, who proposed an altruistic approach to economic and political life
just a few years earlier.
An Academic Success Story
Ellen Bliss Talbot (1867–1968)

BA, Ohio State University (1890)
Dissertation: “The Fundamental Principle of Fichte’s Philosophy”
Career: Dresden, Ohio, teacher (1890–91); Troy, Ohio, teacher (1891–94);

Emma Willard’s School, teacher (1898–1900); Mount Holyoke (1900–36);
University of Chicago, post-doc (1901); APA charter member (1902); study in
Berlin (Fall 1904) and Heidelberg (Spring 1905)
Life and Career
Ellen “Nellie” Talbot was born in Iowa City, the second of four children in
a prominent family.124 Her father, Benjamin Talbot, was the principal, first
of Ohio Institution for the Deaf (1854–63), then of Iowa Institution for the
Deaf (1863–78). He had also studied theology at Yale and was ordained as a
Congregationalist minister, although he never served in a church. Her mother,
Harriett (Bliss) Talbot, did not formally hold positions at either school, but
is likely to have assisted her older sister, Mary (Bliss) Swan (1813–91), who
was the ‘matron’ of the institution in Iowa. In 1880, Benjamin returned to
Ohio Institution for the Deaf to serve as interim principal, and he finished
out his career as a teacher there (1880–99). Ellen and two siblings attended
Ohio State University, from which she graduated in 1890; shortly thereafter
she began using the name Ellen Bliss Talbot, a recognition of her maternal
heritage.125 Ellen’s sister, Mignon (1869–1950), was also a successful academic.
As the first woman to earn a PhD in geology in the United States (Yale 1904),
she taught alongside Ellen at Mount Holyoke College. Their brothers were
both businessmen who worked across a range of sectors. Benjamin was a
stenographer and bookkeeper who worked in the transportation sector early

in his career and in a state mental health institution after 1900. Toward the
end of his career, Herbert operated a poultry farm near his sisters’ home in
South Hadley, Massachusetts. He appears to have raised special breeds of the
birds, which were playfully referred to as “highbrow chickens” in an alumni
magazine.126 Both Ellen and Mignon remained unmarried, as was the case for
many professional women in their era.
The Talbot family lived on the campus of each of the schools Benjamin
served, which acquainted Ellen and her siblings with Deaf language and
culture. Until Ellen was at least ten years old, the family’s residence was
a dormitory that housed twenty students ranging in age from twelve to
twenty-two.127 No doubt, this childhood experience influenced her personal
development, thus it will be valuable to provide a brief sketch of her father’s
views.
Given the paternalistic attitudes about Deafness that were in force in the
last half of the nineteenth century, Benjamin Talbot held relatively progressive
ideas about Deaf education. To be clear, he did not meet our twenty-first-
century standards for Deaf self-determination and autonomy. Like so many
educators in this era, he believed there was value in incorporating the
“articulation” method into the school’s curriculum—that is, teaching Deaf
students how to vocalize and read lips. Yet in a report to the state legislature
as principal of the Iowa Institution for the Deaf in 1867, he insisted that Deaf
students should not be taught using only oral forms of communication. In a
school for the Deaf, he said, oral instruction alone “is of no practical value
whatever. It is trying and painful to the pupil, exhausting and discouraging
to the teacher, and above all wastes much valuable time that could be spent
to vastly greater profit in the acquisition of written language and of valuable
knowledge from books.”128 He hired Deaf teachers and at least two hearing
teachers who were familiar with “signs.” In addition, he defended the school’s
use of sign language, which many educators in this period considered merely
a signal-system. The example he used to advance his argument points toward
nascent linguistic and pedagogical theories that would be developed more

fully in the twentieth century:
Words, whether spoken, written, or printed, are only conventional signs for
ideas which people have agreed should mean certain things . . . [whether]
visible objects, qualities, actions, or states of being. For instance, the letters
h-a-t combined into the word hat no more represent in themselves the
thing which a man wears on his head than they do a covering for the foot or
anything else. . . . [O]ne might repeat the word hat a hundred or a thousand
times to a person [who does not speak] English without conveying the
slightest notion of its meaning. . . . [Yet] a hat or a picture of one may
be exhibited in connection with the word hat, written in full view, and
. . . a connection between them will soon be established in the mind of
the pupil. . . [T]he word will come to represent the object, just as it does to
hearing people when spoken.129
Benjamin Talbot further affirmed the value of sign language, saying it “will
continue to be the most natural, most convenient, and most effective form
of communication [for the Deaf] and will therefore probably always hold [a]
place in our institutions.”130
As was fairly common for women (and some men) in this era, Ellen Bliss
Talbot taught at high schools before entering Cornell University for graduate
study in philosophy. She benefited from Cornell’s egalitarian approach to higher
education, but the academic environment beyond the graduate programs of
universities like Cornell was not always friendly to women. Even after earning
a doctorate, she was not readily able to find a position at the college level.
Like many of her colleagues in this volume, Marietta Kies, Caroline Miles
Hill, Eliza Sunderland, Georgiana Simpson, and Eva Dykes, Talbot returned
to secondary school teaching after completing doctoral work. In her case, this
was Emma Willard’s school for girls in Troy, New York. It was during this time
that she also faced the painful task of attending her parents’ funeral after the
pair succumbed to tuberculosis within a two-day period in January 1899. In
1900, Talbot followed the most common career path for women academics in
this era, accepting a position at Mount Holyoke, a women’s college in western
Massachusetts, where she replaced Ethel Muir. Talbot would remain at the
college throughout her career.
After joining the faculty at Mount Holyoke, Talbot was on her way to
becoming one of Cornell’s most successful alumna to earn a doctoral degree
before 1900. She studied under John Dewey as a postdoctoral student in
Chicago in the summer of 1901. Three years later, she spent a year doing
postdoctoral work in Heidelberg and Berlin. During her stay, she wrote to
James Creighton to provide long and informative updates about her academic
experiences in Germany. She reported that she began her stay that summer
with daily language lessons while living with a German family. In the fall
semester, she planned to devote two hours each day to preparing her thesis
for publication, partly because she feared she would be barred from attending
lectures as a woman since she had not yet been officially conferred a degree
at Cornell. Talbot did a good deal of verbal handwringing over this issue in a
letter she sent in September before classes were due to start in early October.
According to her account, a new policy had been announced at Cornell
while she was writing her thesis, which required students to publish their
dissertations before being granted a doctoral degree.131 Louise Hannum wrote
to Creighton the following year to express her anxieties about the very same
problem.132 Later correspondence from Talbot demonstrates that Creighton
provided a statement to validate her academic success at Cornell and confirm
that she was qualified to study in German institutions.
In a letter to Creighton in January 1905, Talbot reported that she was in Berlin
and taking a class in German “for foreigners.” She had been attending lectures
on ethics by Georg Simmel (1858–1918), a neo-Kantian who would become
influential in early sociological theory.133 She also went to lectures by Max
Dessoir (1867–1947), a specialist in aesthetics and a pioneer in experimental
psychology who later developed interests in paranormal phenomenon.134She
lamented the fact that the idealist philosopher Friedrich Paulsen (1846–1908)
was teaching courses that did not interest her—one on pedagogy and another
on Spinoza’s ethics.135 So she sat in on lectures on Renaissance literature
instead. In this letter, she also penned colorful descriptions of her classroom
experiences. For instance, she enjoyed Simmel’s discussion of ethics in
relation to contemporary social problems, but said he could be a bit difficult
to follow at times: “He doesn’t speak distinctly in the first place. . . . Then he
has the unfortunate habit of lowering his voice almost to a whisper at the most
important places. . . . His theatrical manner of lecturing is very annoying. Why
a staid professor of philosophy should try to imitate an actor is more than I
can understand.”136 She also explained that she had given up on a course on
nineteenth-century philosophy offered by Paul Menzer (1873–1960), a recent
doctoral recipient who went on to become a Kant scholar at the University of
Halle.137 The material was interesting, but he spoke too rapidly for her to retain
the material while also taking notes. She complained that even in English
Menzer would have been difficult to understand.138
When she returned from Europe for the 1905–6 academic year, Talbot
became Mount Holyoke’s chair of the department of philosophy and
psychology and remained at the college until she retired in 1936. Active in the
APA throughout her career, she was acquainted with a number of prominent
contemporaries beyond Cornell or was in dialogue with them in print: James
E. Creighton, William James, E. E. C. Jones, Ralph Barton Perry, Arthur K.
Rogers, Josiah Royce, Andrew Seth, and Mary Whiton Calkins. She reviewed
several books, two of which were written by Calkins: Der DoppelteStandpunkt
in der Psychologie and The Persistent Problems of Philosophy.139
Like Anna Julia Cooper, discussed in Chapter 6, Talbot lived for just over
a century and remained active in community life in the college town of South
Hadley, Massachusetts, for many years after her retirement. Her longevity
provided me with a rare opportunity to learn about her as a citizen of the
college town she called home for more than fifty years. Former Mount Holyoke
philosophy professor, Richard Robin (1926–2010) related that Talbot often
attended town meetings where she spoke with conviction about local issues.
She was small in stature but had a commanding presence and was respected in
the community. In the last years of her life she moved to Spartanburg, South
Carolina, to live with a niece and her family.140
Talbot produced more published work than the majority of women in this
volume. Eliza Ritchie nearly matches her in that regard; only Mary Whiton
Calkins and Christine Ladd-Franklin surpassed her. Most of her work
focuses on Fichte, who sought to build a philosophical system to overcome
the dualism he saw in Kant—namely, the chasms between subject and object,
between the ideal and the real. These discussions appear in her dissertation,
“The nature of Fichte’s fundamental principle with special reference to its
relation to the individual consciousness” (1898) as well as several articles
that drew on her dissertation: “The Relation between Human Consciousness
and its Ideal as Conceived by Kant and Fichte” (1900), “The Relation of the
Two Periods of Fichte’s Philosophy” (1901), Fundamental Principles of Fichte’s
Philosophy (1906), “The Philosophy of Fichte in its Relation to Pragmatism”
(1907), and “Fichte’s Conception of God” (1913).141 She also explored notions
and philosophical quandaries that were prevalent at this time in a handful
of articles: “The Doctrine of Conscious Elements” (1895), “Individuality and
Freedom” (1909), and a more lengthy two-part discussion, “The Time-Process
and the Value of Human Life” (1914, 1915).
Ellen Bliss Talbot’s Philosophical Work
On Fichte
Talbot was, first and foremost, a student of Fichte’s work, and her discussions
of him provide today’s reader with context for both thinkers in their respective
historical settings. Decades before Talbot came of age, there had been a flurry
of interest in Fichte in the United States. A. E. Kroeger (1837–82) produced
translations of his work as well as a short article comparing Kant, Fichte, and
Hegel, in the country’s first philosophy periodical, The Journal of Speculative
Philosophy, in 1872. An active member of the St. Louis idealist movement

in philosophy, he was an associate of William Torrey Harris and would have
known several of the women discussed in volume one of this study. In 1878,
a comparison of Kant and Fichte by Robert C. Ware also appeared in JSP.
This paper was Ware’s bachelor’s degree thesis at Massachusetts Institute of
Technology while George Howison was chair of the philosophy department.
Howison was also associated with the St. Louis movement and appears to
have supported the professional development of Marietta Kies, discussed in
Chapter 3.142
Little evidence of interest in Fichte appears again in the United States
until the mid-1890s. Mary Whiton Calkins contributed a review of Fichte’s
Grundlage der Wissenschaftslehre to The Philosophical Review in 1894, although
it is clear that she had little tolerance for the abstruse nature of his work.143 No
doubt this is an early signal of the different philosophical orientations we see
in Calkins and Talbot. An article by James A. Leighton (1870–1954) about
Fichte’s concept of God was published in the Review the next year.144 Leighton
is likely to have known Calkins, Talbot, and other women in this volume. Just
prior to publishing this article, he had completed a doctorate at Cornell. This
was followed by a degree at Episcopal Theological Seminary, where he also
studied informally at Harvard with William James and Josiah Royce. Two
years after his article appeared in the Review, Leighton accepted a position
at Hobart College (1897–1910) and later became chair of philosophy at Ohio
State University (1910–41). The last person to produce work on Fichte in the
United States prior to 1900, Anna Boynton Thompson (1848–1923), is an
interesting figure.145 In 1877, she began teaching history at Thayer Academy,
a coeducational high school near Boston and was a central faculty member
there for nearly fifty years. Yet Thompson did not earn degrees from Radcliffe
until midlife—a bachelor’s degree in 1898 and a master’s in 1899. Prior to
this, she published a 250-page study of Fichte, The Unity of Fichte's Doctrine
of Knowledge (1896), which featured an introduction by Josiah Royce and was
published in the Radcliffe College Monograph Series. Thompson’s academic
focus remained in history, primarily of ancient Greece and Egypt, however.

After being awarded an honorary doctorate by Tufts in 1902, she did not
produce more published philosophical work.
Talbot became a central figure in Fichte studies in the United States
just before and after the turn of the twentieth century. She published her
dissertation as well as five of the first eight articles on Fichte after the turn
of the century in Philosophical Review, The Monist, and Kant-Studien.146 She
valued Fichte’s approach to epistemology and metaphysics, seeing his system
as a way to reconcile the subject-object divide that had developed in the
history of modern philosophy. In her view, Fichte helped address questions
left unanswered by Kant regarding the nature of human consciousness in
relation to the world of experience—questions that, in her era, were at the
intersection of philosophy of mind and psychology. In his early work, she says,
Fichte attempted to answer these questions by turning to the self or the Ego,
which he considered the ultimate organizing principle in the world. But as
his thought developed, he determined that the Ego failed to unify experience,
much as Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception failed to account fully for
the gulf between subject and object. In his later work, Fichte began using terms
like “knowing” or “absolute knowing” to refer to the Ego, ultimately making
Ego secondary to a greater reality, which he called the Absolute.
With the aim of finding a pathway out of what he saw as Kantian dualism,
Fichte established the Ego, which he sometimes called the Idea of the
Ego, as the ultimate principle that brings unity to all of reality. As Talbot
conceives of it, Ego in Fichte’s system is equivalent to Kant’s transcendental
unity of apperception.147 There are two critical differences between Kant’s
transcendental unity and Fichte’s view, however. While Kant may have
intended his distinctions between form and content, the activity of the mind
and the manifold that it grasps, to be merely formal, his system left a gap
between our mental processes and the material it encounters—at least this
was Talbot’s view. Kant’s transcendental unity cannot help but appear to be
a function of the mind. By contrast, Fichte insists that the faculties of the
mind and the manifold of experience are not distinct from each other. Fully
embracing an idealist ontology, Fichte conceived of consciousness as, not an
entity, but instead as both the ability to unite form and content and the act of
uniting the two in experience. In this sense, Fichte could be characterized as
an early phenomenologist, as argued in recent years.148 Each individual has a
consciousness, which is, of course, finite. Yet, Fichte also believed that these
finite instances of consciousness aggregate to form a unity of consciousness—
that is, the Ego—which transcends any given individual consciousness. In this
sense, Ego is the instantiation of unity in the form of consciousness. Further, in
Fichte’s view consciousness is “what is actual, what really exists,”149 both on the
individual level and in aggregate. Consciousness comprises all of reality, and is
dynamic and active, not static.
Talbot recognizes that in his early work, Fichte appeared to default to a
dualistic view—in which self and not-self were a central focus. This contributed
to the same divide between subject and object, the ideal and the real, which
he originally sought to overcome. Over time Fichte aimed to remedy this
problem, but Talbot maintains his understandings of metaphysics and ontology
remained consistent. He saw the subjective form as primary and the unified
form as secondary in both logical priority and theoretical importance. But the
central point for Fichte was that this dual character of Ego cannot be denied.
Ego is by nature a unity in duality. In her view, he shifted emphasis in his later
work, and this does have implications for the way his ideas were interpreted,
but his system as a whole did not change. In his later work Fichte held that the
Ego has two forms: as pure subject (form alone) and as the unity of subject and
object (form and matter together).
Fichte also established God or the Absolute as the highest principle in his
later period and made Ego dependent upon it. The Absolute, now Fichte’s
highest principle according to Talbot, subsumes the Ego, which is a unified
duality. She then explains that he sees the true Absolute not as an object
separate and distinct from ourselves, but as an activity, a knowing, or an active
being. The Absolute is that in which and through which we have our being.
Talbot expands on his view of God in an article published in The Monist in

1913. Here, she explains that for Fichte, all of human experience is essentially
a striving—intellectually in relation to knowledge acquisition, aesthetically in
regard to our creative efforts, and morally in our individual expressions of will.
In her understanding, Fichte’s God is “that ideal of unity which, through its
many wanderings and error, humanity is striving to reach. [God] is the goal . . .
toward which, through all the progress of the ages, the spirit of [humanity] has
been struggling. The perfect harmony of all individuals with one another.”150
She is quick to clarify that God is not merely an ideal that arises out of
superficial dissatisfactions, however. Instead, God is an “absolute standard”
for Fichte and in this sense has “absolute value” and “intrinsic worth” and is
“the indwelling force in the world-process.”151
Overall, however, Fichte’s focus was not on traditional notions of God, but
on the Absolute, which, as Talbot informs her readers, should be understood
“not as being, set over against knowing [or Ego], but as ‘the living Wir in sich,’ a
principle which lives in us and manifests itself through us.”152 Ultimately Fichte
articulated a pluralistic metaphysics—the cosmos is a plurality that is held in
unity in his system. The mature Fichte clarified that “the actual world is not a
single consciousness, but a number of consciousnesses, a multiplicity of finite
beings. . . . The sense-world is not an organic whole, but an aggregate; not a
universe, but a ‘multiverse.’”153
Talbot not only explains but also defends Fichte’s theory, because in her
view it does a better job than rival theories to explain how subject and object
can stand in opposition to each other, while at the same time being a unity.
Yet she recognizes that he was not able to fully reconcile some ongoing
philosophical debates—about plurality in/and unity, for instance. She was also
aware that some of her claims about Fichte’s thought were controversial. Her
more traditional idealist contemporaries might not have approved of the view
that a plurality of consciousnesses must be maintained in unity by a quasi-
transcendent Absolute. Yet, she maintained that Fichte’s system inevitably
leads to this conclusion.
Philosophy versus Psychology

Talbot’s first published article appeared in The Philosophical Review in 1895. In
“The Doctrine of Conscious Elements” she distinguishes between the methods
of inquiry used in philosophy and psychology as the latter was emerging as a
new and far more empirical discipline. Interestingly enough, she was among
the women in this volume who remained solidly within philosophy. She
conducted only one fledgling psychological study, “An Attempt to Train the
Visual Memory,” early in her career.154 Even so, she embarked on her critique,
charging that many thinkers err when they use old (philosophical) methods
of inquiry when they are trying to understand a foundational principle, or
“element” at the core of a concept—an “element” that simply is not there to be
found. Such thinkers fail “to see that we cannot go behind our elements” that
“ultimates have been reached [which] must be accepted.”155 She then outlines
the errors that old-school thinkers make because they have not yet adjusted
to new understandings and methods of inquiry. First, they seek to discover
fundamental “elements” of thought or experience that defy examination or
further explanation, such as “idea,” “sensation,” or “will.” Second, old-style
thinkers rely on metaphysical assumptions—outdated notions such as “soul,”
for instance, or “inherent powers.” Third—and this is a charge that May
Preston Slosson made as well: they attempt to explain what is unknown by
drawing on additional unknowns, inventing a term like “faculty” as a power or
capacity of the mind, for instance. Citing George Trumbull Ladd of Yale, Talbot
provides an example to illustrate this point. New methods of inquiry cannot
draw on a concept like “faculties as an explanation, because ‘the formation
and development of faculty is itself the chief thing which scientific psychology
has to explain.’”156 Finally, old-style thinkers fail to collect and analyze data,
resorting instead to theories that are vague and archaic.
Talbot sees a good deal of promise in psychology and its new scientific
approach. First it has no interest in the empty abstractions of metaphysics.
Second, it recognizes when its “ultimates” have been reached. Thus, it resists
trying to explain them further. The process of knowing, for instance, was
understood in philosophy as a capacity or a faculty of the mind. In Talbot’s
time, psychology had begun to understand knowing as a set of processes
that can be examined, such as sensation, affection, and conation. Talbot
claims that psychology is content with stopping at this level of analysis and
accepting this more narrowly described set of processes as “ultimates.” Related
to this is another strength of psychology’s methods of inquiry: it focuses on
observing and measuring its “elements” or “ultimates” rather than further
theorizing about their nature or substance. For instance, as a type of knowing,
sensation has certain characteristics that can be observed and measured. As
psychology advances, practitioners may be able to explain what is “behind”
different types of knowing—to find the “ultimates” that give rise to elements
like sensation. But until then, it will not build unverifiable theories about
sensation as an ontological or metaphysical entity. Psychology’s next strength
is its recognition that analysis comes first and—once an activity or process
has been fully examined—synthesis can follow. Finally, psychology focuses
solely on experience. It does not get bogged down with moral constructs
or metaphysical systems that import other factors into the examination of
individual human lives.157
Talbot cautions that new methods of inquiry in psychology may also have
shortcomings, however. Psychology can be too focused on data collection and
“never get beyond [mere] facts.”158 Thus, this new science could fail to take
account of the fullness of human experience. As psychology and its research
methods develop over time, it may not even care to do so.
Free Will versus Determinism

In the free will/determinism debate, like Eliza Ritchie, Talbot comes down
on the side of determinism. And while many of the claims she makes in
“Individuality and Freedom” (1909) are similar to Ritchie’s assertions, she
attempts to clarify how we can experience a sense of free choice within a
determinist framework. She begins by examining why it is common to resist

or reject determinism. We have a sense that genuine individuality consists in
having a unified sense of self, uniqueness, and self-sufficiency. Unity in the
qualitative, not simply the numerical sense, involves both internal complexity
and inner coherence. Uniqueness entails differentiating oneself from others, not
in the sense of “pass[ing] over into bizarrerie,” but by developing a distinctive
personality while also “speak[ing] the common language of humanity.”159 Self-
sufficiency could also be called completeness or self-direction. Self-sufficiency
consists in having the ability to direct one’s own life, although she recognizes
that human beings are interdependent, therefore as “part of a whole, [they] can
never attain to complete self-sufficiency.”160
In Talbot’s view, in order to live a truly moral life, human beings must make
choices. And, like Ritchie, she affirms that the choices we make will necessarily
be based on the particularities of a given individual’s circumstances. In a very
real sense, all of our choices could not be otherwise. The influence of family,
social relationships, personal history, and specific circumstances beyond our
control will determine the choices we make. Yet, our impulse is to cling to a
notion of free will—a belief that we have “real alternatives”—because the ability
to choose is linked to our understanding of an individual’s unity, uniqueness,
and self-sufficiency. In an effort to demonstrate that individuality will not be
damaged or lost, even within a solid determinist framework, Talbot examines
each of these elements in turn.
Briefly, the qualitative (not simply numerical) unity that a human being
possesses is central to identity. Even with a “lack of consistency in our opinions,
the variability of our feelings, and . . . the sense of inner discord”161 many of us
experience, the majority of individuals remain a unity within themselves, with
an understanding of their identity and a sense of self that persists through time.
Similarly, despite the fact that heredity, social influences, and our environment
shape who we are, generally, each person has a sense that their own history
and surroundings make them unique. Finally, our notion of self-sufficiency
is intertwined with a belief that we are able to establish our own goals and
priorities and take responsibility for attaining them. Each of these elements
of individuality is compatible with determinism, in Talbot’s view. Regarding
unity and uniqueness, what is more central to our sense of selfhood than
the ability to take stock of our situation and make a choice than by acting in
accordance with our own nature?
At the heart of the problem is the question of whether “real alternatives”
exist. Due to our understanding of human beings as unified, unique, and self-
sufficient selves, we want to believe we are able to make genuine and novel
choices. But Talbot assures us that, even within a determinist framework, we
are able to make truly meaningful choices at any given moment. We experience
our decisions as being freely made. At every moment, every thought and its
relation to the will, and every situation is unique to each of us. Further, the
experience and personality of each individual is also unique. We ourselves
cannot predict how we would act in a given situation, so how could others
do so? Each choice we make is an expression of the self, demonstrating the
continuity of the character of any one of us, because personal decisions are
forms of judgment, and judgment requires the use of both intellect and will.
When we face even a simple choice—whether to go to a movie to relax or to
stay at home to finish a paper, for instance—we are making a judgment. For
Talbot, this and more complex judgments require the individual involved to
use their intellect not only to assess the plusses and minuses of engaging in a
certain act but also to use their will to act in that way. When we decide to go
to the movies instead of writing, what we are doing is taking an inventory of
our personal nature, history, and circumstances in such a way as to determine
that recreation is more important than work at the moment. But for Talbot,
the moral philosophical backdrop is the same: a person knows him/herself
intimately and makes the decision based on this intimate—and perhaps
subconscious—knowledge of what the best act is, for that moment in time
at least. An individual could not have decided otherwise, because her/his
personal history and will to act could not have brought him/her to anything
other than that point in place and time.
Individuality through Time

“The Time-Process and the Value of Human Life” (1914–15) is a two-part article
in which Talbot examines the nature of human moral development and
interpretations of it—by outside observers as well as by the individual in
question. In part one of the article, she looks at the aesthetic, intellectual,
moral, and hedonic elements of human experience. Here she aims to establish
whether our understandings of a person’s character are shaped by time, and
if so to what degree this is the case. Her main claim is that experiences later
in life are generally understood to supersede a person’s earlier experiences. A
person who has had a successful and productive life in their youth is looked
upon with pity if their life ends in debility or tragedy. Conversely, a person
who struggles or stumbles to make their way in their early years but succeeds
at the end of their life is generally considered to be redeemed. There are
reasons for this in Talbot’s view, and her description makes it clear that they
are based on common understandings of the self, particularly as influenced by
philosophical idealism in her day.
A moral downfall in the latter part of a [person’s] history leads us to suspect

that the earlier goodness was not genuine. The weakness that made possible
this breakdown must have been present, we say, from the first. . . . [When a
person] begins to order his life aright only in its later years . . . [we say] there
is really much of good in him from the beginning; but through the force of
circumstance it was prevented from manifesting itself during the earlier
years. . . . The later stages are more important for the estimation of its worth,
mainly because they reveal that worth more clearly.162
This assessment is held more firmly when it relates to an individual’s moral

and hedonic experiences than to intellectual or aesthetic achievements. A
person whose moral development (in a broad sense of the term “moral”) has
gone awry is thought to deserve pity or condemnation. Generally, this person
would also experience a good deal of pain or anguish at their failures. Talbot
conjectures that this is due to the fact that our moral selves and our own
experiences of pleasure and pain are seen to be deeply connected to our true
identities: “Morality is primarily a matter of the personal life, and to consider it
simply in its effect upon others is to neglect its fundamental aspect.”163 Failures
or shortcomings in developing intellectually or aesthetically (specifically the
products of each) are judged less harshly, both because they are at a remove
from the individual him/herself and because the products of our intellectual
and aesthetic selves have an existence and a permanence apart from the
person who created them. According to Talbot, “Truth and beauty . . . are
protected from the vicissitudes of time in a way in which neither pleasure nor
moral excellence is.” Therefore, “intellectual and aesthetic achievement . . .
seem to [be] more objective and impersonal than either moral attainment or
happiness.”164 We cannot fault a person who does not create a great work of
art. They may not have experienced the needed moments of inspiration or had
access to adequate time or resources to do so. If a person’s moral character is
good and they have lived with a sense of contentment (a harmonious family
life, for instance), their life is judged to be good in and of itself.
As this part of the discussion comes to a close, Talbot asks whether the
assessment by outside observers of an individual’s development—intellectual,
aesthetic, and moral—is similar to the experience of the person him/herself.
It seems clear that this cannot be the case, since an observer can never
understand the quality of another’s experiences or know their moral worth.
She puts forth another proposal, however. We can consider the assessment of
a person’s experiences in two ways: an individual may begin as a complete self
when they enter the world. On this view, the course of their life then involves
an unfolding of an individual self. Alternatively, an individual may develop
step by step, until they arrive at a completion or fullness of the self at the end
of their life. Talbot favors the latter view, and she discusses it at some length in
the second installment of this article.
In “Time-Process,” part two, Talbot looks at individual moral development
by taking up two central questions: (a) whether time is truly continuous,
leading each of us toward a period of fruition, as such, in our lives; (b) whether
the changes we experience are a genuine process of transformation, or simply
a disconnected series of events. Both views have serious implications, because
if time is not continuous and change is not genuine, then our experiences or
questions about them do not have reality, ontological worth, or moral value.
A central problem in this discussion is time and our relationship to it. We
experience our lives through time, which is irreversible. The present seems
to build on the experiences of the past and in a sense to supersede them. The
future will have the same effect on the present moments we now embrace.
Through this progression of time, we will also experience change and growth.
But philosophical idealists and early phenomenologists in this era wanted to
establish how continuity through time and genuine change occurs. Are both
simply a matter of perception? And how do the two relate to each other? In
Talbot’s view we have a sense of building on the past and moving toward a
future that brings genuine and meaningful change. And we can rely on this
understanding of both time and change if we do the following:
a) accept the order and the irreversibility of time;
b) accept idea of the dependence of one event on the next;
c) accept the reality of change/transformation;
d) “suppose that the later [events] include the earlier and thus in a sense
keep them in existence.”165
In her discussion of time, it becomes clear that Talbot leans toward what is now
seen as an existential brand of phenomenology, although branches of this field
within philosophy had not quite emerged in this early period. She recognizes
that as time passes, each moment or stage of life “passes into non-existence.”
As time progresses, “the past has no power to alter the value of the present
[although] the present seems in a certain sense able to affect . . . the past. The
present, since it alone is real, is all in all.” The only thing any given individual
can assert as time progresses: “I am only that which I am now.”166
Critics could charge that Talbot has sketched out only the bare outline of
individuality that is void of content. Yet she maintains that each human being
is a unity, “not merely when you take it in cross-section, but also when you
take it longitudinally. Each of its successive stages includes within itself all
the preceding ones, and includes them in such fashion that they are at once
preserved and transformed.”167
It would be simple, and some would say reasonable, to conclude from this
that Talbot’s understanding of the unity of an individual through time and
its many experiences can be explained in terms of memory. After all, it is
common to assume that a person’s identity is based on memories that accrue
over time. Philosophers might add that whatever we remember is still present
in our lives, in a sense. But Talbot rejects this claim. “The appeal to the fact of
memory is far from giving us a solution. . . . In the first place, if no more of my
past is preserved for me than my memory can illuminate, it is probable that
the larger part of it is gone forever.”168 Second, Talbot charges that memory
alone cannot account for the ways in which more recent experiences seem to
overcome and supersede those that are in our more distant past.
At this juncture, Talbot returns to a point she made briefly in the first half
of the article: “We could say that the very first stage of an individual history is
virtually the whole life. . . . Everything is there, folded up in that earliest stage.”
The development of the self through time is like the “unrolling of a scroll upon
which all the characters are already inscribed.” Conversely, we could say that
“the later [individual] contains the earlier. . . . The whole life would thus be the
sum total of these stages.” As previously noted, however, Talbot embraces the
second view:
My present is my whole life, so far as that life has yet been lived; . . . [it]
will be taken up and preserved . . . not merely in so far as it is preserved in
memory, not merely by virtue of the subtle influence of past thoughts and
deeds upon present character and conduct, but also because the later state
is the earlier, the earlier enlarged, enriched, transformed.169
Talbot makes it clear that this is not to say an individual is a “timeless unity.”
In her understanding it is nonsensical to suggest that a person could exist as
a whole, a self-contained entity. Instead, an individual develops and becomes
realized as a person in and through time. In Talbot’s words, an individual is “a
unity that has its very being in time.”170
In order for Talbot’s theory to work, however, she has to establish the
nature of experiences and events in an individual’s life as well. Any given
experience in the present, she says, must involve “not only their preservation,
but also their transformation.”171 The changes we experience through time
do not simply march along in a series, with the content of one experience
replacing the other. Instead, each event or experience transforms from one
into another. The illustration Talbot provides here is helpful. If we have a
series of experiences—a, b, c, etc.,—these experiences are not simply singular
events without a relationship to the event that precedes or follows it. Rather,
each experience provides the conditions under which the next experience
can take place. Each experience thereby becomes interconnected while also
being transformed. When an individual reaches experience g, for instance,
due to the transformative nature of change, that event may more closely
resemble experience n than it will experience b. In Talbot’s view, this is not
simply a matter of sequence, but a function of the dependence of one event or
experience upon another and its relationship to the next.
Talbot recognizes that her concept of transformation through time could
be construed as simply a signal that an individual comes nearer to completion
over the course of their lives. But she distinguishes this view from her own,
casting her claims in moral terms, and it is worth quoting her at some length
on this point:
What I am trying to bring out is the difference . . . between an existing whole

and a whole that comes to be. An existing whole cannot be completely good
unless each of its simultaneously existing parts is good. But a whole that comes
to be, might be completely good in spite of the fact that some of its (serial)
parts were bad. It will always be true . . . that certain of the earlier stages were
evil. But when they have grown into the final stage, they have become good.172
Again, she rejects the claim that an individual’s character is fixed and
unchanging. “The true self,” she says, “is manifested in different degrees of
adequacy in the various stages of life, but more fully in the later stages. . . The
quality of the later stages is the more important because these reveal more fully
what the life essentially is.” She adds that “belief in the supreme importance of
the later stages can be defended only if we conceive the temporal character of
human life in the way that we have suggested.”173
Toward the end of this article, the last of Talbot’s academic work to appear
in print, she ends on a note of humility: “I do not profess to have proved that
my conception of the relation of the individual life to the time-process is
correct. But it seems to me that I have shown that . . . we must either accept
it or repudiate all those evaluations of life that give it its deepest significance
for us.” Those who wish to reject her claims must ask these questions about
their own moral theory: Is progress possible? Is progress actual? Is progress
“significant, desirable, valuable. Is it any better than retrogression?”174
The third question is her main concern: any theory of individuality must
account for growth and change over time. She tells her readers that she is not
interested in demonstrating that progress actually does take place in human
lives. Rather, she wants to argue “that as progress it can have no value” unless
the later stages of human experience supersede those that preceded it. She
closes by saying that if “we accept the reality of change and . . . the temporal
aspect of human life in the way that I have proposed, we have a theory that
implies the desirability of progress and thus furnishes an adequate basis for
our most fundamental judgments as to the value of life.”175
In this two-part article, Talbot clearly demonstrated that she believes
an individual’s self-development is progressive, which is certainly not the
consensus view—although the promise of progress may have been more readily
embraced in her own time than today. Even so, her discussion is an interesting
one, particularly as an example of academic work at the intersections of idealist

philosophy, psychological theories about the self, and the emerging field of
phenomenology at this time.
On Fichte and Pragmatism

Talbot sought to establish the relevance of idealism in her age, as is evident in
“The Philosophy of Fichte in its Relation to Pragmatism,” published in 1907.
This was an odd move on her part. It is hard to imagine two more disparate
approaches to philosophical inquiry than Fichte’s brand of idealism and
American pragmatism. Certainly, a discussion of Fichte in relation to the newly
emerging discourse known as phenomenology would have been a better fit.
Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) is credited with establishing phenomenology
as a school of thought, although an argument can be made for identifying
it with earlier thinkers, like Fichte. Husserl developed his understanding of
phenomenology as an outgrowth of his studies on the border of philosophy
and psychology just after 1900, but it is not clear if Talbot crossed paths with
him at this stage in her career.176 When Talbot studied at Heidelberg and
Berlin in 1904–5, Husserl was a faculty member at Gottingen. He went to
Berlin in March 1905 to for a discussion with Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911),
and it was in part this exchange that prompted Husserl to begin his work as
a phenomenologist. Although the men’s meeting appears to have taken place
over a semester break, there is evidence that Dilthey incorporated new ideas
into his lectures after Husserl’s visit. Yet, as noted before, Talbot does not seem
to have studied with Dilthey while in Berlin. At least there is no mention of
her doing so in her letters to James Creighton while she was studying abroad.
By 1912, Husserl was at Freiberg and began publishing the Jahrbuchfür
Philosophie und Phänomenologische Forschung (“Yearbook for Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research”). Talbot appears to have either been unaware of
him and his work or not interested in pursuing a new approach. As noted
earlier, her last published work appeared in print in 1915.
Talbot’s aim in “The Philosophy of Fichte in its Relation to Pragmatism”

(1907) is to address some key components of Fichte’s thought that align well
with—and (she believes) improve upon—pragmatism, particularly in relation
to its understanding of the value of ideas/knowledge. Pragmatism famously
makes the claim that the value of an idea is in its ability to be put to use in a real-
world context. Talbot agrees and also asserts that Fichte would share this view.
Fichte, she says, eschewed the idea that a transcendent reality exists apart from
lived experience. He also embraced a pluralistic worldview. The world we
experience is not monistic, according to Fichte, but pluralistic; we live not in
a universe, but a multiverse. On both accounts, Fichte and pragmatists would
agree, although his work has a heavy metaphysical bent that does not factor
into the work of pragmatism, except perhaps in John Dewey’s “instrumental
logic.” William James had begun discussing “pure experience” in 1904–05, but
this work would not appear as a collection until the posthumous publication
of Essays in Radical Empiricism in 1912.
Talbot sees Fichte’s idealism and American pragmatism as having a common
interest in putting knowledge to practical use. For Fichte, humanity is constantly
striving for unity, and this is a driving force in our quest for knowledge. Both
Fichte and Talbot’s contemporaries in pragmatism believed that knowledge
acquisition entails more than intellectual efforts alone, although they do so
in different ways. A strength of pragmatism is its recognition that knowledge
acquisition is active, according to Talbot. We often “put questions to nature,
set traps” for it, or force nature “to surrender [its] secrets.”177 Pragmatists were
also aware that we face external constraints in our attempt to gain knowledge,
but Fichte addressed this challenge in ways that could be valuable to them.
He recognized that “in every intellectual process, . . . we come . . . face to
face with a ‘not-ourselves’ which constrains and to which we must conform
if we would know.” Once we encounter these constraints and understand the
information they provide, “we are no longer free to think what we will.”178We
can try to ignore or reject the facts we have gathered, but we are faced with
a reality we simply cannot deny. Citing William James, F. C. Schiller, and
A. K. Rogers, Talbot then makes the charge that, while pragmatists recognize
the challenges external constraints present to us as we aim to acquire
knowledge, Fichte’s concept of Ego provides the unity that pragmatism lacks.
Ego, Talbot explains, provides us with a common idea, a common purpose,
and a common directive force that will bring harmony and meaning to our
search for knowledge.
Pragmatists try to overcome the theory/practice divide simply by making
the claim that “'theory is an outgrowth of practice and incapable of truly
independent existence.” Quoting Schiller, she continues: “‘Properly speaking,’
they tell us, ‘such a thing as pure or mere intellection cannot occur.’”179 From
Talbot’s perspective, however, Fichte improves upon this view. “His insistence
that human life is throughout activity, and that all activity is purposive, is a
distinctive feature of his philosophy.”180
For Fichte there are two senses of the practical in regard to thought. We can
engage in thinking solely for the sake of effecting change in the world, or we
can engage in thinking in order to fulfilling the desire to know. In Talbot’s view,
pragmatists focus solely on attempting to effect change in the world. But one of
Fichte’s strengths is his emphasis on the practical value of pursuing knowledge
for its own sake. And here’s why: strictly speaking, there is no “thought which
is not also will and no will which is not also thought” in Talbot’s interpretation
of Fichte. “All real thinking is aiming toward an aim or purpose and in this
sense is initiated and, to some extent, directed by will.”181 In this way, Fichte’s
understanding of thought and knowledge has a moral component: first, “all
judgment implies reference to a norm” or a standard of truth, and we use our
powers of judgment when we measure information we have gathered against
that norm.182 This in turn involves an act of will—the will to make distinctions
between what is true or false, accurate or inaccurate. The decision to act must
accompany the discovery of truth, and this “involves, at least theoretically,
an element of constraint on the will. I do not judge what I would [or simply
wish]” to be the case, Talbot tells her readers, “I judge what I can [i.e., am
able to] and must” make judgments about, based on the evidence at hand.183
Pragmatists fail to adequately take account of this aspect of the knowledge

acquisition process, in her view. In the end, for Talbot there is a moral element
in play. “One thing which I cannot—nay, if you like, which I will not—doubt
is that this is a moral universe, that we have duties and the ability to perform
them.” This is “not so much a theoretical as practical attitude . . . a will, more
or less steadfast, to conform one’s life to the requirements of the moral ideal.”184
From College to Convent
Grace Neal Dolson (1874–1961)

BA, Cornell (1896)
MA, Philosophy, Cornell (1897)
Thesis: “The Ethical System of Henry More”
Dissertation: “The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche”
Career: Study in Leipzig and Jena (1897–98); Wells College (1900–11); Smith
College (1911–15); Community of St. Mary convents, Sewanee, TN and
Peekskill, NY (1915–61); APA charter member (1902)
Life and Career
Grace Neal Dolson was born in Andover, New York, the oldest of two
daughters. Her father, Charles Augustus Dolson, was a lawyer. Little
information is available about her mother, Alice, or about her early life and
education. Her family was comfortable enough to allow her to travel to Europe
on at least two occasions—once as a student in 1897 and again with her
mother in 1907. At Cornell, Dolson was active in the Kappa Kappa Gamma
fraternity, along with Ellen Bliss Talbot, and her sister, Mignon Talbot.185
After earning a bachelor’s degree at Cornell, she travelled to Europe to study
in Leipzig and Jena and considered continuing her studies in Zurich. Instead
she returned to Cornell, quite likely because she was granted a fellowship.
Since she was still travelling, her father responded to the award letter on her
behalf: “Grace will be notified at once and I am very sure she will be very
much pleased, as the opportunities . . . for certain kinds of re-search . . . in
the German University where she now is does not seem to be open to women
at this time.”186 Correspondence shows that she was considered for a “dean of
women” position at Cornell, but was deemed inappropriate for some reason.
According to J. G. Schurman, “Everybody’s impression is the same as mine
that, while Miss Dolson is a beautiful character and an extraordinarily able
student, there would be serious doubt of her qualifications on the social side. . . .
if we laid the emphasis on the forms and practices of polite society.”187 Both J.
G. Schurman and James Creighton sought to place her at a women’s school,
and she was offered a position at Wells College, where she was generally the
only faculty member in philosophy for just over a decade. She then taught
for a few years at Smith with Anna Alice Cutler, a Yale doctoral alumna who
served as chair.
In 1915, Dolson resigned from her faculty position to enter a religious
order, the Community of St. Mary in Peekskill, New York, leaving academic
life behind. The first Anglican religious community for women in the United
States, it was modeled on Benedictine practices and provided a number
of social welfare and educational services in the area. In 1919, Dolson
was accepted as a full member of the Community and adopted the name
Sister Hilary.188 She served as an assistant superior at St. Mary's in Peekskill,
New York (1921–26), as Mother Superior at a branch of the Community
in Sewanee, Tennessee (1926–29), and as Mother Superior of St. Mary’s
Hospital for Children in New York City (1929–52). She also produced an
unpublished manuscript about the life and work of the founder of St. Mary’s,
Harriet Starr Cannon. Dolson died in Peekskill in 1961 and was buried in
an unmarked grave on the grounds of the convent, in accordance with the
Community’s custom.189
Dolson’s Philosophical Work
On Henry More
The first of Dolson’s two published works, “The Ethical System of Henry More,”
was a revision of her master’s thesis at Cornell and appeared in The Philosophical
Review in 1897. In this article, she situates Henry More historically, noting that
both he and Ralph Cudworth wrote in reaction against the moral skepticism
they believed was an outgrowth of Hobbes’s political philosophy. While both
were Platonists, Dolson characterizes Cudworth as the intellect and More
as the mystic in their circle of thinkers in Cambridge in the middle of the
seventeenth century. In a rather wry recognition that More was not the most
systematic of thinkers, she warns that he displays the “most reckless disregard
for consistency.” Further, Dolson muses “that there should be any logical
connection between a and b seems not at all necessary” to More. Yet, if his
readers simply keep in mind his overall goal, which is to establish that our aim
as human beings must be to “live well and happily,” More’s approach to ethics
does indeed become coherent.190
Comparing More to Descartes, Dolson notes that in More’s view, the human
mind is not limited to intellect alone. In fact, there are two main aspects of
human experience: perceptions and passions. In addition, More embraced the
passions, believing they are good in and of themselves. He had no need to flee
them, epistemologically or morally. Yet, it is at this point that Dolson’s early
observation rings true: More’s “system” fell short of being truly systematic.
While it is true that human passions are good and worthwhile, they must be
guided by “right reason.” And the source of “right reason,” for More, is God.
Dolson’s criticisms are well-founded on this point and others related
to it. More invokes the term “boniform faculty,” which helps provide each
individual with moral clarity. But as Dolson observes, this boniform faculty
is really nothing other than conscience. Questions remain, she says, about
how right reason and boniform faculty relate to each other. She charges that
inconsistencies abound in More’s theory in this regard. At times he appears to

assert that right reason and boniform faculty are one and the same entity. At
other times he claims that right reason replaces or recaptures boniform faculty
when this faculty is lost or misguided. And at still others, More’s right reason
can be used to correct or nurture boniform faculty when it is deficient—in
essence affirming that virtue can be taught. Given the complexity of his thought
and the competing values he was trying to address in his time, a degree of
inconsistency in his theory is not surprising. He was, after all, more of a mystic
than a philosopher. Even so, More’s free-wheeling approach had lost its charm
for Dolson: “That he would explicitly state within twenty pages three different
theories of the same thing is too much to suppose, even of More.”191
In her view, “A reconciliation of More’s three [approaches] is difficult, but
not impossible” to manage for the patient and dedicated reader.192 The key to
fully understanding him is to recognize that, ultimately, he was a subjectivist.
The idea of “the good” does not apply in his system, because an action or
outcome is always “good for something or somebody.”193 A person “can never
get outside [one]self to judge virtue,” yet we each must act in accordance with
virtue—as perceived by right reason.194 Again, Dolson recognizes that More’s
reasoning becomes circular, but this is because he sees the unity of virtue and
happiness as perfection itself. For More, “to separate them is an abstraction.”195
In closing, Dolson makes some well-placed criticisms of More. Throughout
his work, “he assumes what he is trying to prove.”196 That is, he seems to accept the
notion of an external morality that has an “objective existence of its own in the
intelligible world,” but unlike his more disciplined contemporary, Cudworth,
he fails to prove it.197 Dolson sees a solution. Given More’s mystical bent, the
“love of God” could serve as a unifying force to resolve his inconsistencies. Yet,
he will continue to puzzle the modern reader, and questions will persist—“Was
he an intuitionist? Did he believe in hedonism? Could he be counted among
the utilitarians?” Dolson again sees a solution: remember the “old familiar
Biblical maxim, ‘not to put old wine in new bottles’”—that is, accept More’s
ideas on their own terms and in his historical context.198
On Nietzsche
In the march of philosophical history, few thinkers seem more distant from
each other in focus or approach than Henry More and Friedrich Nietzsche.
Yet, Nietzsche is another thinker Dolson discussed in her published work.
Her article, “The Influence of Schopenhauer upon Friedrich Nietzsche,”
appeared in The Philosophical Review in 1901, and was the fourth of just seven
discussions of Nietzsche in US academic journals before 1905; the only one
by a woman.199 This article was a version of a chapter in her dissertation,
The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, published the same year, which H. L.
Mencken called a “pioneer handbook . . . describing the Nietzschean ethics,
Nietzschean aesthetics, and superman” for an English reading public.200
Dolson’s work on Nietzsche demonstrates deep familiarity with his life and
work, and it helped lay a foundation for Nietzsche studies in the early twentieth
century.201 Identifying three phases of Nietzsche’s thought, which she labels the
aesthetic, the ethical, and the intellectual periods, she cautions her readers that
each period does not neatly relate to the other. It is wise to consider the three
phases of Nietzsche’s thought independently, which is indeed how Dolson
proceeds. As one of the first Nietzsche analysts in the twentieth century, little
about her discussion will appear novel to today’s reader. Therefore, my focus
here will be on the surprising intersections of her examinations of Nietzsche
and Henry More.
In Dolson’s view, there are three central features that Nietzsche shares with
More: a resistance to “system,” mystical leanings, and subjectivism. First, she
characterizes both thinkers as lacking “system” on two levels—the rhetorical
and the metaphysical. Henry More proved to be better suited for poetry
than argument. Thus, he fell short of establishing a complete and convincing
metaphysical theory. Similarly, Nietzsche chose aphorism to express his
ideas—a genre that aligns with early Greek thought and its more expansive
understanding of the love of wisdom, rather than with modern systematic
philosophy.202 The similarities become more nuanced at this point, however.
More assumed the existence of a transcendent realm and embraced it. Even so,
he was more adept at engaging in spiritual than metaphysical discussions of it.
Nietzsche, on the other hand, was hostile to speculative thought. He believed
that philosophers should “discard . . . metaphysics as far as possible.” As Dolson
phrases it, if outmoded metaphysical discussions “will not step aside of [their]
own will, [they] must be pushed out of the way.”203
At the same time, both More and Nietzsche have been described as mystics,
and Dolson entertains this aspect of Nietzsche’s thought, much as she did in
her discussion of More. Similar to More, Nietzsche placed a high value on
feeling, and this is an aspect of his thought that she linked with his mystical
leanings. He saw emotion as superior to reason, because it is more central to a
person’s understanding of self. Feeling, as he understood it, impels individuals
to action, and thus is responsible for “furnish[ing] the motive of the will.”204
In this sense, feeling is central to morality. Making a stronger case for this
claim, Dolson asserts that for Nietzsche, “the will affirms everything and gives
assurance of permanence,” most notably in art, morality, and religion.205
The centrality of the will in Nietzsche’s thought leads to the final feature that
he and More shared in common—subjectivism. In Dolson’s understanding,
neither More nor Nietzsche believed that external, objective standards of
morality (and truth) exist. In More’s case, this is simply because we each
have our own understandings and experiences, which it is impossible for
another person to have. Nietzsche holds a similar view, but—again—he takes
it a step further, affirming subjectivism, both epistemologically and morally.
As Dolson characterizes it, epistemically, “truth is always my truth and your
truth . . . it cannot exist apart from us.”206 Much later in the discussion, she
notes that this applied for Nietzsche morally as well: “Individualism makes
an objective standard an impossibility . . . a [person] should be too proud
. . . to accept [a] neighbor’s truth or even to share [their] own with someone
else.”207 His moral subjectivism, then, provides a direct path to his egoism,
which Dolson both qualifies and defends. The self or Ego in Dolson’s parlance
had both psychological status and ethical value for Nietzsche. In focusing
on the Ego, “what he attempted . . . was not the destruction of all moral
standards, but merely of those dominant in modern civilization.” Nietzsche’s
Übermensch—“Over-man” as translated by Dolson—was simply his ideal
and archetype, which provided “an aim and standard for conduct.”208Dolson
cautioned her readers that many points of discussion in Nietzsche’s work
are not to be taken too literally, and it appears that the “Over-man” is one of
them.209 Even so, she is aware of the dangers of the moral theory designed
for this “Over-man”—“a morality that applies only to a favored few.” And
ultimately, this flaw makes Nietzsche’s ethics “inadequate, arbitrary, and
therefore unconvincing.”210
At one point in her discussion, Dolson provides a quick overview of
the thinkers that influenced Nietzsche. She begins with the observation
that “a [thinker’s] position often owes as much to whom [s/he] opposes as
to those with whom [s/he] agrees.”211 Most notably, Schopenhauer’s view of
the relationship between will and idea and his pessimism made a profound
impact on Nietzsche; the former’s acceptance of Kant’s distinction between the
phenomenal and the noumenal worlds, however, was flatly rejected. He found
the move away from speculative thought in philosophy not only refreshing
but also imperative. Thus, Neo-Kantians and the materialism they introduced
into philosophical discussion was something he welcomed. Dolson notes that,
although Kantianism itself and Hegelian thought were repugnant to him,
Nietzsche had a tendency to volley opposing ideas throughout his discussions,
which may belie a deep-seeded Hegelian influence that he might have been
unwilling to admit.212 Finally, she considers Nietzsche’s similarity to literary
thinkers in his era—Max Stirner, Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Maurice
Maeterlinck, and Henrik Ibsen—who “all breathed the same intellectual
air” and who “at bottom . . . [were] all of one faith,” despite the fact that they
were unlikely to have met in person. She makes this observation, in part to
recognize similar comparisons by contemporaries, and in part, to again make
it clear that Nietzsche’s ideas were “not peculiar to him, though he gave [them]
philosophic form.”213
A Career Cut Short
Vida Frank Moore (1867–1915)

BA, Wesleyan (1893)
Dissertation: “The Ethical Aspects of Lotze’s Metaphysics”
Career: Mount Holyoke College (1893–97); Elmira College (1901–15); APA

charter member (1902)
Life and Career
Vida Frank Moore was the youngest of seven children, the daughter of Henry
D. Moore and his second wife, Susan Elvira Kingsley. She was born and raised
in Steuben, Maine, a fishing village roughly twenty-five miles “as the crow flies”
from the resort town of Bar Harbor. Her father was a successful sea captain,
and the family became prominent over time. Vida’s older brother, Henry, was a
medical doctor. The oldest son in the family, their half-brother John G. Moore,
was an influential businessman who played a major role in the establishment
of Western Union Telegraph, Manhattan Trust Company, and Chase National
Bank. After the turn of the twentieth century, the family donated large tracts
of their coastal property in Maine to the National Park Service and had a hand
in selecting the name of Acadia National Park.214 Vida herself was well-to-do at
the end of her life and bequeathed generous gifts to family and to religious and
community organizations in the village of Steuben and in the town of Elmira,
New York, where she lived and taught after 1900.215 She is among the many
career women who were unmarried. Sadly, her life was cut short when she was
unable to recover from a bout with pneumonia.216
Moore published only one monograph, her dissertation, The Ethical Aspects
of Lotze’s Metaphysics, in 1901. Hermann Lotze (1817–81) was overshadowed
by the thinkers who came before him, namely Kant and Hegel, but his work
was taken seriously at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He
influenced prominent thinkers, like Josiah Royce, Franz Brentano, and Edmund
Husserl. The women in this study were certainly exposed to Lotze’s ideas. Several
courses at Cornell focused on his contributions to metaphysics, epistemology,
and ethics, and Yale’s department chair, George Trumbull Ladd, translated two of
his books. Moore herself read several critical discussions of him by Eduard von
Hartmann, Otto Pfleiderer, Johann Eduard Erdmann, George Santayana, and
another early woman in philosophy, the British thinker, E. E. C. Jones. Lotze’s
attempts to reconcile empiricism and idealism make him an interesting thinker
to explore—if primarily as a transitional figure in the history of philosophy.
Moore’s Philosophical Work
In her discussion of Lotze, Moore provided an overview of his metaphysics,

cosmology, and ontology—all with the aim of bringing his ethical theory to
light. Making reference to a number of his works—Logic (1841), Metaphysics
(1843), Microcosm (in three volumes, 1856–1864), System of Philosophy (1874),
Outlines of Metaphysics (posthumously published in English, 1884), Practical
Philosophy (posthumously published in English, 1885), and Outlines of a
Philosophy of Religion (posthumously published in English, 1892)—she begins
with a sketch of Lotze’s view of the Good. Throughout all of reality, there is
evidence of feeling, in Lotze’s view—even at the atomic level. The processes
of separation, combination, and division are evidence of “feeling,” of pleasure
and pain in the form of attraction and repulsion. And feelings (of pleasure
and pain) are imbued with value, not simply for humans but for all creatures
and entities in the world. She then turns to Lotze’s conception of the World.
With early training in the sciences, medicine in particular, Lotze was well-
versed in the theories of mechanism and materialism that were current at the
time. Moore recognizes that science “seeks to explain, not to interpret . . . [it]
asks not questions as to the origin of things, it simply accepts them as it finds
them . . . [and] seeks only the laws in accordance with which things act.”217As
a scientist, Lotze understood this. But as a philosopher, he sought to unify
the world of matter and mechanism with the realm of ideas and values. In his
understanding, a scientific “view of nature leave[s] room for [a] teleological
view, . . . it implies [an] ulterior explanation. Order implies purpose, law
implies end.”218 His next move is to posit a theory of reality that is spiritual. In
arguments that are initially familiar, Lotze holds that the reality of an object
is not in the materials of which it is made nor in the qualities it possesses (or
displays). Instead the reality of any entity, material or otherwise, is in its activity.
The activity of maintaining its own unity, its identity through change, is central
to individuality (beyond the anthropomorphic sense) and is at the very core of
being. Lotze then moves from this assertion to affirming that activity in/and
unity entails spirituality—a claim of which Moore is critical—and assigns this
trait to the Absolute.219 Moore’s criticism on this point is well placed: drawing
on Hartmann, she charges, “The step by which he passes from the necessary
unity of things to their spirituality is quite unwarrantable. By what right do we
make the anthropomorphic assumption, that the reality outside us can exist
only in the same form as that which we have learned through inner experience
to know as the peculiarity of our own conscious spiritual nature?”220
Lotze’s body of work is significant, and Moore succeeded in distilling it by
focusing on his thought in relation to ethics. For our purposes, her discussion
of his objections to idealism is of interest. Lotze was troubled by both Kant’s
ethics and his epistemology. “The purely formal character of Kantian ethics
is revolting” to Lotze. “An unconditioned ought is unthinkable,” in his view.
“Only a conditioned ought . . . which attaches advantages and disadvantages”
for a given course of action is possible.221 In addition, Kant’s epistemology, his
“world of things-in-themselves [is] alien and impenetrable to the perceiving
mind.”222According to Moore, Lotze sees this Kantian world as one in which
some entities are subjects (active knowers), others are objects (passive and
known). Yet Lotze was not satisfied with subjective idealism, which he believed
made knowledge of reality completely dependent on and limited to the ability

of an individual mind to know an object or objects at a given moment in time.
His solution was to argue that each entity in existence is a self-conscious,
intersubjective, and active unity. It is self-conscious in that it experiences
degrees of pleasure and pain, or attraction and aversion, as noted earlier. It is
intersubjective in that it is able to perceive or interact with other entities. It is
an active unity in that it is able both to experience its own states of being and
to maintain those states of being through time.223
Lotze had stronger objections to Hegel’s thought, and it is worth quoting
Moore at some length on this point:
First, any attempt at an a priori deduction of the world from one supreme
principle, he deems futile and certain to lead to false conclusions. The
empiricist in him, . . . revolts against . . . ignoring concrete facts. [Lotze’s]
second objection is very closely allied to this, namely, that Hegel’s
identification of logic with metaphysics, of thought with reality, ignores the
concrete content of reality.224
In addition, in Lotze’s view, Hegel was guilty of conceiving of thought as

only cognition, though it is far richer than that—involving feeling and will
and passion. He also often noted that “experience is richer than thought”—
therefore, Hegel’s attempt to maintain a pure idealism was ill-fated from the
start.
Taken as a pair, Hegel and Fichte also fell short in their attempts to identify
the nature of the Absolute. Both avoided a “crude anthropomorphism,” and in
Lotze’s view this was a wise move. Fichte’s concept of the Absolute is flawed,
however, in that he “sought to dissolve the notion of God in that of a moral
World-Order.”225 In doing so Fichte cast God as a being that stands over and
above the world, imposing order from without. Lotze would have preferred
to see Fichte posit a panentheistic understanding of God—the Absolute
as wholly within the world, not separate from it. “Our search is for a Real
Being—the ground of all reality—not [merely] a relation.” Similarly, Hegel’s
Absolute was devoid of personhood, or in Moore’s parlance, “personality,” and

here we see an affinity for the Personalist school that would develop more
fully in Boston in the early decades of the twentieth century. “To make an Idea
supreme seemed to Lotze to deify thought and to ignore value. . . . An Idea ‘is
and remains nothing more than the statement of a thought-formula’. . . . That
is, it signifies a relation, merely, it does not give us Reality.”226
Conclusion
The women discussed in this chapter earned degrees at Cornell during a time
of immense growth and change over a course of twenty years, and the wide
range of areas of philosophy they covered reflect these realities. From May
Preston Slosson as the first woman at any institution to earn a doctorate in
philosophy in the United States to Ellen Bliss Talbot who became a significant
contributor to philosophy journals until the 1910s, Cornell set the pace for
women’s entrance into philosophy as a profession. Slosson, Ethel Muir, and
Grace Dolson produced work that is diverse in form, content, and approach.
Yet while each spent a good number of years teaching, their career paths
strongly suggest that their passions lay elsewhere. Slosson devoted herself
to raising a family and contributing to community work, including women’s
rights activism. Dolson took vows as a nun and committed herself to charitable
concerns. Muir spent every summer volunteering in a fishing village to
assist with education and community development. As was common among
academics before our current “publish or perish” policies were in place, the
only academic writings these women produced were their theses. The same is
true of Vida Frank Moore whose life was cut short by illness.
Eliza Ritchie and Ellen Bliss Talbot stand out in publication output,
and Talbot exceeds each of her peers in the level of professional status
she achieved. Both women produced over a dozen publications; Ritchie’s
academic work appeared in print before 1905, Talbot’s before 1915. We also
see some common themes and approaches in their discussions. Both thinkers
embraced philosophical idealism, although it would have been nearly
impossible not to do so, given the heavy emphasis on German idealism at
Cornell and other universities in this era. In addition, each of them engaged
in the free will/determinism debate—and were eager to place themselves
in the determinist column. There are differences between the two as well,
of course. Ritchie had more interests within the philosophy of religion, for
instance. After her early exploration of the self within psychology in her
thesis, Ritchie basically abandoned that line of inquiry in her published
writings. Talbot continued to consider questions related to self and soul
until the second of her “Time-Process” articles were published in 1915. As
noted at points throughout this volume, Ritchie and Talbot were among
the women whose work helped delineate the boundaries of philosophy and
psychology. In this sense, their work has value for philosophy, psychology,
women’s history, and the history of ideas.
After 1900, Cornell continued to provide more opportunity to women in
philosophy than any other university in the United States. By 1921, nine more
women completed doctorates in philosophy there, some of whom are now
getting the recognition and critical readings that their work merits: Georgia
Benedict (1904), Grace Andrus deLaguna (1906), Elsie Murray (1907),
Katherine Everett Gilbert (1912), Nann Clark Barr (1914), Alma Rose Thorne
(1914), Marion D. Crane (1916), Marie Collins Swabey (1919), and Marjorie
Silliman Harris (1921).
Georgia Benedict (1877–1957) earned a bachelor’s degree at Wells College
in 1899 before studying at Cornell. Her only publications were several book
reviews and her dissertation, La Nouvelle Monadologie, a discussion of Kant’s
epistemology as understood by Charles Renouvier (1815–1903). Like many
women in this early stage of professional academic life, Benedict did not
secure a faculty position. In 1912 she earned a library science degree and spent
her career at the state library in Albany, first in acquisitions, then in special
collections, retiring in 1946.227
Grace Mead (Andrus) deLaguna (1878–1978) was immensely successful

as a career academic. After completing a bachelor’s degree at Cornell in
1903, she continued to doctoral study, writing a dissertation entitled, “The
Mechanical Theory in Pre-Kantian Rationalism.” She appears to have put
her career on hold for a time after her marriage to fellow Cornell student,
Theodore deLaguna with whom she had two children. In 1912 she accepted
a position at Bryn Mawr, where she taught alongside her husband, then
served as chair of the department of philosophy after his death in 1930. She
remained at the college until her retirement in 1944. DeLaguna became
the second woman to serve as president of the American Philosophical
Association (eastern division) in 1941–2—over twenty years after Mary
Whiton Calkins had broken that gender barrier. She published numerous
articles exploring the philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, personal
and social ontology, and philosophy of language. She published three books,
the last of which appeared in print nearly twenty years after she had become
professor emerita at Bryn Mawr: Dogmatism and Evolution (1910), Speech:
Its Function and Evolution (1927), and On Existence and the Human World
(1963).228
Elsie Murray (1878–1965) completed undergraduate work at Cornell in
1904 and, like deLaguna, continued with graduate studies there. Her dissertation,
“Organic Sensation,” reflects her interest in experimental psychology, and she
worked at the intersections of philosophy and psychology throughout her career.
Murray held teaching positions at Vassar (1907–9), Wilson (1909–19), Sweet
Briar (1919–22), and Wells (1922–3), but left the women’s college network to
work as a researcher, first at the University of Illinois (1924–5) then at Cornell
(1927–ca. 1950). She is sometimes credited with the work of her mother, Louise
Welles Murray (1854–1931), who conducted research on the eighteenth-century
French Azilum refugee settlement in Bradford County, Pennsylvania. Elsie
Murray edited some of her mother’s work after her death, but her own research
focused on psychology and the study of color perception. She collaborated on
occasion with E. B. Titchener (1867–1927) and G. Stanley Hall (1846–1924)
and published articles in the Journal of Applied Psychology and the Journal of
Educational Research. A collection of Murray’s letters and papers is housed in the
Cornell University archives.229
Katherine Everett Gilbert (1886–1952) studied at Pembroke College, the
former women’s division of Brown University, earning a bachelor’s degree in
1908 and a master’s in 1910. After completing the doctorate at Cornell with a
dissertation on the history of aesthetics, she became the first woman to serve as
assistant editor of The Philosophical Review. Following Mary Whiton Calkins
(1918–19) and Grace deLaguna (1941–2) she was the third woman to serve
as president of the American Philosophical Association (eastern division)
in 1946–7. Gilbert was one of the first women to become fully established
outside the women’s college network, holding full-time faculty positions at
the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (1922–9), and Duke University
(1930–51). At Duke, she attained the rank of full professor and served as the
university’s founding chair of the department of art and aesthetics (1940–51).
She published a good deal of work, including A History of Esthetics (1900),
Studies in Recent Aesthetics (1927), and Aesthetic Studies: Architecture and
Poetry (1952).230
Nann Clark Barr (1892–1959) earned her undergraduate degree at Western
College for Women (now part of Case Western Reserve University) and studied
an additional year at Wellesley before earning graduate degrees at Cornell. Her
master’s thesis in 1913 looked at dualism in the philosophy of Bergson, and her
dissertation in 1914 examined John Stuart Mill’s political thought. She taught
for a short time at Connecticut College (1915–17) before starting a family with
Arthur Benton Mavity, who worked for the Holt publishing company. In the
1920s, she began writing editorials and travel articles for the San Francisco
Chronicle and the Oakland Tribune. Shortly thereafter, she turned to writing
fiction and published nearly a dozen books, primarily mysteries and coming
of age stories, under her married name. She produced only a few works related
to her philosophical interests over the years: “The Conditions of Tolerance”
(1917); “Responsible Citizenship,” coauthored with her husband (1923); and
“Mill and Comte” in Philosophical Essays in Honor of James Edwin Creighton,

edited by George Holland Sabine (1925).231
Alma Rose Thorne (1883–1978) taught high school after completing a
bachelor’s degree at Cornell in 1907, returning to the university to earn a
doctorate in 1914. She published only two works, her dissertation, “The
conception of idée force in the philosophy of Alfred Fouillée,” and a follow-
up discussion, “The intellectualistic voluntarism of Alfred Fouillée” (1925).
The latter was a contribution to the same collection edited by Sabine in
honor of James Edwin Creighton, to which Nann Clark Barr contributed.
Despite low publication output, Thorne was one of the first women to be
appointed as an instructor at Cornell, with the title “assistant in education
and philosophy.” She taught pedagogy at Smith College (1915–16) the year
before she was married to Mark Embury Penney (1880–1937), a fellow
philosophy student at Cornell. Her husband held faculty positions at
Syracuse, Cornell, and Ohio State before becoming president of Millikin
College in Illinois (1924–30); in some cases Alma also taught part-time at
these institutions.232
Marion Delia Crane (1885–1959) completed both a bachelor’s and a
master’s degree at Bryn Mawr (1911, 1914) and held a position as a “reader”
at the college while a graduate student. At Cornell, she was one of the first
women to serve as an editorial assistant for The Philosophical Review, in
the summer of 1915. The following year, she was a teaching assistant in
philosophy and the advisor to women at the university. Her only published
work was her dissertation, “The Principles of Absolutism in the Metaphysics
of Bernard Bosanquet.” In 1917, Crane married Charles Antonius Carroll,
a 1910 graduate of Cornell and an instructor in the English department.
Charles published a book on the drama of Swinburne and translated a study
of the Bolshevik revolution by Étienne Antonelli. After Charles served in the
First World War, the couple was living in Oceanside, Long Island, with their
two young sons. Little additional information is available about their lives,
personally or professionally.233
Marie Collins Swabey (1890–1966) graduated from Wellesley in 1913,

where she was a student of Mary Whiton Calkins. She completed her master’s
degree the following year in her home state at the University of Kansas. Her
dissertation at Cornell was entitled “Some Modern Conceptions of Natural
Law,” which she completed the same year as her future husband, William Curtis
Swabey (1894–1979), whose thesis focused on Malebranche. She spent a year
at Wells College but left that institution after her marriage in 1920 to teach
alongside her husband at New York University. The couple led an academic life,
publishing a considerable amount of independent work and collaborating on a
translation of Ernst Cassirer’s, Substance and Function and Einstein’s Theory of
Relativity (1953). They both retired from New York University in 1956. Collins
Swabey had a range of philosophical interests, publishing her dissertation as
well as four books: Logic and Nature (1930), Theory of the Democratic State
(1937), The Judgement of History (1954), and Comic Laughter (1961). She also
published a number of articles and reviews in the Journal of Philosophy, The
Monist, and Ethics.234
Marjorie Silliman Harris (1890–1976) completed her undergraduate
studies at Mount Holyoke College in 1913, where she was a student of Ellen
Bliss Talbot. She wrote her dissertation on the “Positive Philosophy of August
Comte” and continued to discuss his work later in life, while also exploring
the work of Henri Bergson and Francisco Romero. She taught one year at
the University of Colorado (1921–2) before establishing herself in a career
at Randolph-Macon Women’s College (1922–58), where she chaired the
department of philosophy. She appears to have been unmarried; the middle
name Silliman was her mother’s maiden name. Harris had a passion for the
value of philosophy as a guide for life, addressing questions related to beauty,
goodness, freedom, and transcendence in her writings. She published three
books—The Function of Philosophy (1927), Sub Specie Aeternitatis (1937), and
Francisco Romero on Problems of Philosophy (1960)—and a number of articles
in professional venues, including the Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical
Review, and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.235
As of this writing, colleagues in the discipline are engaged in projects

to recover and discuss the work of several of the women in this chapter,
among them Joel Katzav, Krist Vaesen, Anthony Fisher, Frederique Janssen-
Lauret, Marguerite La Caze, Brigitte Nerlich, Trevor Pearce, and Peter Olen.
Assuming we can break the habit of turning first to masculine voices in the
tradition as the word of authority, we can look forward to seeing these
women in a more inclusive and dynamic philosophical canon in the future.
98
3
A Window of Opportunity
Women at Michigan
Introduction
Three women completed doctoral degrees in philosophy at the University

of Michigan at Ann Arbor in the 1890s: Marietta Kies, Caroline Miles Hill,
and Eliza Sunderland. Kies was the first of the three to complete degree
requirements, in 1891, writing a dissertation on altruism as a public, political
principle for policy making, rather than as a private, individual moral
prerogative. She had a successful academic career, holding full-time positions
as a college professor and publishing three books before her life was cut short
by illness in 1899. Miles Hill and Sunderland completed their doctorates
the following year. Miles Hill’s dissertation, “Kant’s Kingdom of Ends,” is no
longer extant, but her master’s thesis on the philosophical foundations of
transcendentalism remains intact in online venues. She also published articles
and book reviews that point to developments and transitional moments in
intellectual life in the United States toward the end of the nineteenth century.
Miles Hill followed a career path that was relatively common among early
academic women: she held academic positions immediately after earning a
doctoral degree, but after marriage made her own career interests secondary
to her husband’s. Like Miles Hill, Eliza Sunderland faced career challenges.
Already married with three children when she began graduate study, she was
unable to obtain an academic position once she had earned the degree. By
the late 1890s, Sunderland abandoned the academic job search and simply
continued the work she had done before earning a doctoral degree: teaching
and lecturing, serving in leadership within religious circles, and contributing
to the struggle for women’s political rights.
Faculty and Academic Climate
When Kies, Miles Hill, and Sunderland began their studies in the late
1880s, Michigan’s philosophy department was headed by George Sylvester
Morris (1840–89), an expert in German idealism. His only colleague in the
department was John Dewey (1859–1952), an assistant professor who had
not yet risen to prominence in academic philosophy. A professor in a related
area of study, Henry Carter Adams (1851–1921), one of Kies’s advisors, was a
political economist with intellectual and political commitments to socialism.
James Hayden Tufts (1862–1942), George Herbert Mead (1863–1931), and
Alfred Henry Lloyd (1864–1927) joined the department just as Kies, Miles
Hill, and Sunderland were completing their degree work.1
George Sylvester Morris studied at Dartmouth and Union Theological
Seminary and spent several years in Germany before launching his academic
career in the United States. In the 1870s, he taught modern languages and
literature at the University of Michigan while also serving as a guest lecturer at
Johns Hopkins University when Dewey was a graduate student there. In 1881,
Morris was appointed chair of the department of philosophy at Michigan,
but continued to lecture at Johns Hopkins. He published frequently in the
Journal of Speculative Philosophy, the first periodical in the English language
devoted solely to philosophy. Morris also presented papers at sessions of the
Concord Summer School of Philosophy in Massachusetts (1879–88), one of
the attendees who helped bring academic prestige to this experimental adult
A WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY 101
education program. In addition, before his early death following a bout with
pneumonia in 1889 he produced books, primarily on British and German
thought: British Thought and Thinkers (1880), Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason:
A critical exposition (1882), Philosophy and Christianity (1883), and Hegel’s
Philosophy of the State and of History (1887).
John Dewey began his academic career at the University of Michigan in
1884 after earning degrees at the universities of Vermont and Johns Hopkins
but was lured away by an offer to head the philosophy department at the
University of Minnesota in 1888. After the death of George Sylvester Morris
in 1889, he was urged to return to Ann Arbor and accepted the call, serving
as chair of the department there. Prior to joining the faculty at Michigan, he
had published articles on epistemology and metaphysics in the Journal of
Speculative Philosophy. During the time he taught in Ann Arbor, his work
included articles entitled, “The New Psychology” (1884), “Psychology as
Philosophic Method” (1886), and two books: Psychology (1887) and Outlines
of a Critical Theory of Ethics (1891).2 In 1894, Dewey again was lured away from
Michigan—this time to become chair of philosophy (and education) at the
University of Chicago. The women in this chapter studied with Dewey in the
decade before he developed his version of American pragmatism. Interestingly,
Kies began using a nascent pragmatist terminology in her dissertation and in
the book she published in 1894.
Henry Carter Adams studied at Iowa College (now Grinnell), Andover
Theological Seminary, and Johns Hopkins University, where he earned a
doctorate in 1878. He began his academic career as a lecturer at Johns Hopkins
before accepting a position at Cornell University in 1880, during which time
he periodically served as a visiting lecturer at the University of Michigan.
His publications at this point in his career included Outline of Lectures upon
Political Economy (1881), Public Debts: An Essay in the Science of Finance
(1887), and Relations of the State to Industrial Action (1887). In 1887, he
publicly supported a labor strike in the railroad industry, which resulted in his
dismissal from Cornell, despite the university’s claims to the contrary. Adams’s
vocal support of this radical new movement and Cornell’s reaction to it was
so touchy that Michigan’s president, James B. Angell, was fearful of keeping
him on the faculty at all, let alone give him a full-time appointment. It was
only after Adams wrote a long letter making a plea for academic freedom—
along with partially retracting his pro-labor article—that Angell took the
chance of keeping him at the university.3 For many years, Adams concurrently
taught at Michigan, while also serving as a statistician and economist to the
US Interstate Commerce Commission (1887–1911).4 In the late 1890s, Adams
hosted a program called the Plymouth Summer School of Ethics in eastern
Massachusetts, which Marietta Kies and the pacifist Lucia Ames Mead,
discussed in Volume I, attended.
Kies, Miles Hill, and Sunderland found themselves in a lively and
intellectually stimulating environment in the small department of philosophy
in Ann Arbor. Between 1885 and 1900, just seven students earned doctoral
degrees in philosophy at Michigan—the three women currently under
discussion and four men: Charles Emmet Lowrey (1885), Elmer Manville
Taylor (1888), George Rebec (1898), and Lewis Clinton Carson (1899). Among
the seven, two of them wrote theses on Kant, one on Kant and Hegel, two on
political philosophy, one on philosophy of religion, and one on “philosophic
discourse.” Philosophy faculty—which included Alfred Lloyd and George
Rebec (at first as a fellow) after 1891—also served on the committees of six
doctoral students doing academic work that bordered on philosophy; three
women and two men wrote dissertations on philosophy and/in literature,
and one man wrote on economics. During this period, philosophy faculty
also advised eighteen master’s students: in philosophy (two women, four
men); philosophy of literature/rhetoric (six women, one man); literature (four
women); and legal theory (one man).5
Morris, Dewey, and Adams were egalitarian-minded advisors, and each
was involved in student life, holding classes at their homes and leading various
clubs and discussion groups. Morris founded the university’s Philosophical
Society, which was open to both male and female students from the moment
it was established. Dewey lectured often to the Unity Club, which was hosted
by Eliza Sunderland and her husband, Jabez, at the Unitarian church, where
they were essentially co-ministers. Dewey drew a crowd of 200 or more to
Unity Club meetings on some occasions, discussing the newly emerging field
of psychology, the philosophical concept of the state, and other topics of
interest.6 Henry Carter Adams led a political economy club and was a popular
lecturer. As noted, his socialist sympathies were well known, and on at least
one occasion he led a discussion of Marx’s thought.7
Philosophy in Public Life
Marietta Kies (1853-99)

BA, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts (1881)
PhD, Philosophy, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1891)
Dissertation: “The Ethical Principle and Its Application in State Relations”
Career: Colorado College (1882–5); Mount Holyoke College (1885–91); Mills

College (1891–2); study in Zurich and Leipzig (1892–3); Plymouth, MA high
school (1893–6); Butler University (1896–9)
Life and Career
Marietta Kies was born in Killingly, Connecticut, the second of five

daughters raised by William Knight and Miranda (Young) Kies in a small
farming community. She was educated in local public schools, intermittently
working in nearby textile mills at a young age to help support the family.
At the age of fourteen she was deemed old enough to begin teaching in the
local schools near her hometown.8 This was fairly common among poor
and working-class families. Children began working in factories and farms
by the time they were ten years old; it was also not uncommon for young
teenage girls to begin working as teachers. It also set a pattern in motion

for Kies that continues to be familiar for working-class students in the
United States today: paid employment alternating with periods of study. She
attended Hillsdale College in Michigan for a short time in 1871 or 1872 but
had to return home after contracting malaria. Determined to resume her
studies, she enrolled in a school closer to home, Mount Holyoke College for
women in Hadley, Massachusetts, where she completed a bachelor’s degree
in 1881. She published three books—the edited volume, Introduction to
the Study of Philosophy (1889), as well as two original works about public
altruism, The Ethical Principle (1892) and Institutional Ethics (1894). Like
many professional women in her day, Kies was unmarried. After contracting
tuberculosis, she died at the age of forty-five at the home of a relative in
Pueblo, Colorado.
Kies was among the younger members of the early idealist movement in
philosophy in the United States, which flourished in St. Louis, Missouri, in the
1860s and 1870s, then spread to other parts of the country when she entered
academic life in the 1880s and 1890s. She grew up next to the hometown of
the recognized founder of the idealist movement, William Torrey Harris. A
generation older than Kies, Harris had younger sisters her age whom she is
very likely to have taught alongside in the local public schools. In the 1880s,
she studied with Harris at the Concord Summer School of Philosophy and
Literature, and he wrote a letter of recommendation for her admission to the
University of Michigan.
Shortly after graduating from Mount Holyoke, Kies was offered positions
at two new institutions: assistant principal at Putnam High School near her
hometown and a faculty position at Colorado College. She had accepted
the position at the high school before receiving the Colorado College offer,
but was able to negotiate her way out of the agreement and accept the offer
in Colorado, where she taught until 1884 or 1885.9 Perhaps due to homing
instincts, she returned to Mount Holyoke in 1885, teaching ethics and mental
and moral philosophy there until 1891.10
With her recently earned doctoral degree in hand, Kies was offered a
position at Mills College, a women’s institution in Oakland, California.11 The
college’s president, Susan Tolman Mills, recruited Kies to teach mental and
moral philosophy and to eventually succeed Mills as chair of the department.
After just one year at the college, however, her relationship with Mills had
soured, and she was dismissed “completely without cause.”12 After consulting
with an older contemporary, Ednah Dow Cheney, who was well known in
intellectual circles in Boston and Concord, Kies wrote to a well-established
senior colleague at the University of California in Berkeley, George Holmes
Howison (1834–1916), for help in finding a new position. Howison’s response
is no longer extant, but as a friend of William Torrey Harris, it appears that he
did his best to assist Kies, because she travelled to Leipzig and Zurich to study
the following year, as had some of Howison’s most successful male graduate
students.13 Other women in this volume studied in Leipzig the same year—Eliza
Ritchie, Julia Gulliver, and Emma Rauschenbusch—but no correspondence
has surfaced to determine if they crossed paths there or knew each other well.
When she returned to the United States, Kies published her dissertation,
The Ethical Principle, then served as the principal of a high school in Plymouth,
Massachusetts. In 1896, she re-entered the world of higher education,
accepting a faculty position at Butler College in Indianapolis where she
taught rhetoric until her life was cut short by illness in the summer of 1899.14
Despite the support she received from Howison and Harris, however, Kies
was one of the many women who faced gender bias. Records show that she
was paid less than men, as was common at the time. In addition, when the
department chair’s position opened up at Butler in 1897–8, Kies was not
appointed, even though she had served in this capacity during the previous
chair’s illness and did so without additional compensation. The position was
offered instead to William D. Howe, who had earned a bachelor’s degree just
four years earlier and had not yet completed his doctoral degree at Harvard.
As noted in previous discussions, this was a cycle that was difficult for women
to escape. The combination of limited educational opportunities and sexist
employment practices left them at a disadvantage when hiring decisions

were made.15 As will be evident later in this chapter, Eliza Sunderland had
similar experiences after she earned her degree.
Kies’s Philosophical Work
Marietta Kies published two original works of political philosophy, The Ethical
Principle and Institutional Ethics, in which she contrasts “justice” with “grace,”
or altruism, in public/political life. The first book, The Ethical Principle, was
submitted for her PhD thesis at the University of Michigan in 1891. The
second, published in 1894, was essentially a rewrite of the first, but with some
extremely important additions: on the school, the family, the administration
of law, and the role of the church in society. In many ways, Kies’s notion of
“grace” matches current feminist “ethics of care” or other theories that try
to reconcile individualism and communitarianism. This volume provides
an alternative to the picture of political life as drawn by the classical liberal
tradition: a society of relative equals in which “justice” reigns supreme.
Drawing on Hegel (an unlikely candidate from the perspective of many
contemporary feminists),16 Kies presents society as an organic whole in which
each individual is responsible for the care of others and the state is obligated
to ensure equitable use of resources. In doing so, she offers an alternative to
the individualist view of society, and thus of social and political progress. She
insists that “grace,” in which altruism takes precedence over self-interest, is
a valid principle of political action. Better still from a feminist point of view,
Kies does not attempt to debunk justice completely, but instead is comfortable
asserting two truths simultaneously; justice and grace are not competing but
rather are complementary principles in Kies’s understanding.
The justice of which Kies speaks is an idea familiar enough within modern
political thought. It is the principle via which each individual obtains his or her
due and is “the fundamental principle of individuality.”17 It is the responsibility
of each person to assert rights and render unto others what is rightfully theirs.
In the realm of justice, the individual “thinks, feels and acts, and receives
the like in kind, nothing better, nothing worse.”18 Society is by and large an
aggregate of individuals in the system that holds justice as primary, and social
happiness is roughly equal to the sum of the happiness of all individuals within
society. This is a mistaken notion in Kies’s understanding, and one that she
believes can be repaired by infusing grace into political theory.
“Grace” is a term commonly used in theology, but both as a term and as
a concept is unfamiliar to the contemporary reader of political philosophy.
It may even be that the use of this term in political discourse was unusual to
Kies’s readers in her own day, because she outlines what she means by “grace”
early in the work.
Whereas the process in justice excludes the yielding of one’s own for the
sake of another, the process of self-sacrifice, of grace, is in its very nature
the yielding of one’s own immediate thoughts for self for those of, and in
reference to, another.19
To be clear, Kies was not among the many thinkers in her time who endorsed
total and continual self-sacrificial thinking (particularly by women); this is not
the case at all. In fact later in the work, Kies carefully distinguishes between the
altruism that she espouses and self-sacrifice for self-sacrifice’s sake.20 Attempts
at martyrdom are self-centered in Kies’s view, because true altruism takes
others as its object; it does not merely seek self-denial as an end in itself, which
is the case with purely self-sacrificial thinking. Furthermore, Kies does not
even hint toward a gender dichotomy in her analysis of justice and grace. At no
point in her discussion does she suggest that altruism is more readily sought,
achieved, or understood by women than by men.21 Instead, the grace of which
Kies speaks is a principle applicable to men and women alike, and it is not
limited to the private sphere, but is to be implemented in the public realm.
Yet for Kies both justice and grace have their places in an ethical hierarchy.
She even seems to have anticipated twentieth-century theories of moral
development, listing a number of stages that are passed through on the way
to realizing the ethical principle. While Kies provides no citations to indicate
the source(s) she draws from in outlining this typology of moral/intellectual
development, it certainly runs parallel to descriptions of individual growth,
a la Karl Rosenkranz (1805–79), a disciple of Hegel, and thus to ideas also
conveyed by her older contemporaries, the neo-Hegelians William Torrey
Harris (1835–1909), Susan Blow (1843–1916), and Anna Brackett (1839–
1911).22 First there are passions, such as jealousy, lust, and revenge, that are
below even the child-grade of ethical behavior. But despite the fact that these
are lowly states of mind, they do have a place on the ethical continuum, “for
so long as human beings associate together, there is a phase of the ethical” in
all human activity.23 Second is the child-grade of ethical behavior in which an
individual relies on external authority for guidance. This is followed by the
third level, an individualism that is characterized simply by differentiation
of self from other. This can easily develop into the fourth level—that is, pure
individualism, otherwise known as egoism. Egoism, of course, is the most
selfish sort of individualism, in which one’s needs are singularly pursued and
sometimes callously attained. The fifth stage constitutes a more enlightened
form of individualism—the quest for individual happiness. This is the ethical
ideal sought by utilitarianism and is generally considered quite benign. Harm
to others is avoided, of course, but individual fulfillment is supreme within
this stage. Sixth, the utilitarian ideal is extended to the society as a whole, and
an aggregate of happiness is thought to be the highest good to be achieved.
Finally, we come to the highest stage, which for Kies is altruism. Altruistic
individuals keep others as the center of interest and seek their own good only
in the “reflected good” that arises as a result of their assistance to others. When
individuals seek not merely that which will bring them pleasure, but rather are
content with the reflected good that their altruistic behavior brings, then the
good for all of society is possible.
Kies recognizes that the “ethical principle”—that is, altruism—is an ideal
which may be unattainable. Yet it is an ideal that one should pursue, because
although humans are finite creatures, their thoughts and ideals are infinite and
therefore of a divine nature. In fact, ultimately Kies will say that the reason
altruism is the highest stage in her ethical hierarchy is because it is most closely
modeled after the Christian religion and, as such, links the human and the
divine. Since human understandings of the ethical and ideals of social good
evolve over time, humanity stumbles through the previously listed ethical
stages in its quest for perfection, often falling far short of the altruistic ideal.
Having made the distinction between justice and grace clear, Kies
now traverses terrain that was familiar to her as a Hegelian to outline her
understanding of the nature of the state. Since the essence of the individual is
freedom, and the foundation of a nation is also freedom, the state’s role is to
facilitate individual freedom, but within its organic social structures. Drawing
on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Kies believes that the state cannot concern
itself with abstract duty nor with intention. In the first case, duty apart from a
concrete set of circumstances is empty; in the second, an individual’s intentions
cannot be read from the outside, nor guessed at by any arm of the state. In the
ideal world the act and the intention behind it would correspond, but this
is impossible for the state to determine and therefore is beyond its concern.
Instead, the state must use justice as its guide and use it to measure the external
act performed by the individual in a particular instance. While justice is the
fundamental principle of the state, grace too has a role to play in state affairs.
Reform movements, for example, have used service and self-sacrifice rather
than self-interest as their guide. Reform leaders both within government and
outside it have practiced altruism themselves and encouraged it among their
followers. Furthermore, by calling for the suffering of some, these reformers
helped effect changes that resulted in the betterment of all.24
“True Socialism, or Helpfulness”

As a preface to her assertion that it is within the province of the state to
enforce altruism as a policy, Kies outlines three “attitudes that society presents
to the individual” as models for behavior: (1) the principle of individualism,

that is, justice; (2) an extreme socialism, in which individual rights “intersect
at too many points” and obliterate individuality; and (3) true socialism, or
helpfulness, in which individuals recognize that assisting the weak will
benefit the whole.25 The last of these is clearly Kies’s preferred social “attitude,”
although she notes that ideally this would be a voluntary self-sacrifice by the
strong on behalf of the weak.
At this point, it is important to recall that Henry C. Adams was one of
Kies’s mentors and the uproar over his purported socialism took place in
1886–7, the year just prior to Kies’s first year of attendance at the University
of Michigan. It is likely that she was aware of his political views before
becoming one of his students. We may safely assume that Kies was at least
a progressive and perhaps had socialist leanings herself. She was in fact
referred to as a proponent of “Christian Socialism,” the “prevalence [of
which] on earth she earnestly looked and ever prayed [for].”26 In any case,
the “attitude” she hoped society would encourage individuals to take, along
with the following distinction she makes between the two “classes” of laws
and their application, both point to Kies’s socialist sympathies—albeit, a
qualified socialism.
Kies identifies two types of law, calling the first set of laws “protective,”
and she recognizes that they guard freedom in the negative sense. That is,
protective legislation ensures noninterference by other individuals and/or by
the state in the pursuit of individual happiness. But there is also a class of
“constructive” laws which are not only protective in the negative sense but
“also positively helpful to one or more classes of society.” These laws go beyond
preventing one individual or group from harming another, but instead assert
state power to promote the goals of members of a particular class, individually
or collectively.27 This distinction by itself is neither new, nor particularly
significant; the distinction between positive and negative laws was made well
before Kies’s time and has continued to be a helpful political philosophical
tool since. But since Kies gives these terms a different meaning than the words
themselves imply, it will be helpful to quote one of her own even more clear
definitions of them:
Laws that specify punishment for infringement of rights of possession and

transfer are protective laws, and illustrate justice only, but laws specifying
and regulating the kinds of tenure and the changes therein are constructive
and indicate the advance of social unity (i.e., grace).28
The way in which Kies uses this distinction to advance her theory as a whole is
our point of interest in this study.
Protective versus Constructive Legislation
Kies’s protective legislation parallels Hegel’s “abstract right.”29 Such legislation

provides only the thinnest layer of security from outside interference for each
individual as an equal among equals. It does nothing to nurture individual
human potential nor the growth of an entire class of people. Examples of
protective legislation include laws against trespass, theft, and assault as well as
those requiring payment of taxes. In the first case, individuals are prohibited
from harming each other, thus advancing self-interest in the Hobbesian
sense: each individual, in being guarded against the too-aggressive actions of
another, is able to pursue his/her own egoistic goals. In the second, each person
is required to fulfill his or her obligation to the government; a promotion of
self-interest in the utilitarian sense: the sacrifice of a relatively small amount
by each results in a wealth of resources for the whole, allowing the whole (the
state) to continue to provide a veil of protection for each individual. Protective
legislation not only supports but also promotes the pursuit of self-interest, and
therefore is based on the principle of justice, in Kies’s view.
The second set of protective laws might be thought to be a constructive
provision in that by paying taxes each individual is contributing to the betterment
of all. These protective laws correspond to Hegel’s “police power,” or more
accurately, public authority.30 And in some sense, these public provisions for
the good of the community might be seen as akin to the constructive laws Kies
is advocating. Yet in her system, the level of self-sacrifice that public authorities
demand, such as tax contributions and obedience to laws for public order, is
not the same as that which is mandated by constructive laws. Constructive laws
are more pro-active than this. Examples of such laws are those that establish
a progressive income tax and those that prohibit monopolies. In contrast to
merely being required to pay taxes, and thus each contributing to the betterment
of the whole on a minimal level, a progressive income tax recognizes economic
inequities in society and places the burden of contributing to the financial
well-being of the state on the wealthy. It actually requires that a certain level of
altruism be enforced so that the state can “provide to a reasonable extent for the
needs of its poor and unfortunate classes.”31 And Kies’s rationale is prototypically
Hegelian: society is an organic unity, and suffering by any of its members harms
society as an entity. Similarly, in Kies’s view the existence of monopolies is to
be curbed by constructive legislation. Yet, she doesn’t go into the details of how
these constructive laws are to be enacted. This may be due to the fact that at the
time she was writing, the labor and antitrust movements were beginning to gain
force, and she assumed knowledge on the part of her readers. The Baltimore and
Ohio railroad strike of 1877 initiated a series of labor strikes, culminating with
the Pullman strikes in 1896. Similarly, the outcry against trusts and monopolies
had gained strength in this country at this time and was being debated as the
Sherman Bill in Congress during the 1889–90 session, the year before Kies wrote
her first monograph. Kies’s readers would certainly have been familiar with the
social unrest she was referring to, even if they did not agree with her assessment
of the situation: “[T]he excessive greed and monopolies in ownership of the
present time can be successfully replaced by a system more nearly justice to all
only by changing the thought of the nation on this question.”32
Once public opinion had been changed, “just and lasting laws” would
follow, and society would have attained “the higher plane of thought” in which
the principle of grace will have primacy.33
Altruism, Civil Society, and State Action

For Kies grace functions on two levels. In one sense it is an ideal to be aspired
to in private life. We are all better people, in Kies’s view, when we keep the
needs of others primary and relinquish our own selfish interests. By putting
others first, we receive “reflected good.” Although Kies doesn’t define this
term, it seems safe to assume that “reflected good” is a sort of vicarious
pleasure, the benefit of seeing our own altruistic act result in someone else’s joy
or success. But as is clear from her rather strong statements about the nature
of constructive laws, it is equally obvious that for Kies grace is necessary as
a public ethic as well. In fact, she cites several examples beyond those given
earlier in which government can—even must—enact altruistic policies. In
the railroad industry, sanitation policy, education and labor law, and penal
reform, government has been called upon to enact not merely protective, but
constructive legislation. And state leaders’ willingness to do so
indicates that the intimate connection and relation of all members of society
is more clearly understood than in preceding centuries; it [also] indicates
that the public has an interest in classes in society that are suffering injustice
for others, and in those who are weak, poor, and unfortunate.34
As was common for thinkers in her era, it is clear from this statement that
Kies believed that societal development is progressive, that her era was
more advanced than those previous, and that (hopefully) following eras
would advance even further. She also asserts that constructive legislation
demonstrates an advancement in society’s “ethical education” and that
ultimately coercion will become unnecessary as a means to realizing the
principle of grace in the world.
Furthermore, Kies quite consciously limits her discussion to the “so-
called field of competitive industrial activity,” precisely because it is usually
considered the domain of self-interest.35 Regarding the extent to which Kies
remains true to Hegel’s thought, this is an especially important point. After all,
in The Philosophy of Right, Hegel makes it clear that civil society was indeed
characterized by individualism and self-interest, recast as a system of needs.36
And in The Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel indicates that a formal and abstract
“virtue” that tries to subvert individuality within civil society is bound to
fail, even to contradict itself, because it is the very nature of individuality to
assert itself in this realm.37 Are we to conclude then that Kies was an under-
educated Hegelian, unaware of the more nuanced points of his argument?
This is highly unlikely. Kies went to study in Europe the year after publishing
this book. During her time there, she studied in Leipzig, which suggests that
she was proficient enough in German to have already been able to read Hegel
herself by this time. In addition, George S. Morris had published a book that
outlines The Philosophy of Right thoroughly. In fact, Morris’s biggest fault in
Hegel’s Philosophy of the State and of History is that he was so true to Hegel
that he virtually paraphrased him. So Kies was well-acquainted with Hegel’s
argument in its entirety, whether she read it herself or read Morris’s faithful
account of it.
Key concepts in Hegel’s understanding of civil society remained intact
in Morris’s rendition of his theory of the state. Morris clearly outlined and
explained Hegel’s system of needs and of the estates. He also remained loyal to
Hegel’s view of civil society as the realm of individuation generally speaking.38
And as a student of Morris at the University of Michigan, Kies undoubtedly
would have been familiar with this book. So whence Kies’s reformulation of
the nature of industrial relations, which is a segment of civil society? First of
all, Kies is interested in taking seriously Hegel’s idea that society is an organic
whole. Second, she takes even more seriously his understanding that the state
unifies all members of society, and at all levels, reinforcing the “wholeness” of
this organic whole. Third, she introduces altruism as a possible cure for a social
ill that was also of great concern to Hegel: the potentially devastating effects
that industrialization can have on the poor. Or as one translator from this
period rendered it, Hegel was concerned about the “untrammeled activity” of
civic society.39
Hegel recognized that contingent factors are often the cause of poverty, and
this condition leaves them “with the needs of civil society . . . [which] at the
same time [has] taken from them the natural means of acquisition.”40 Yet Hegel
was perplexed about how exactly a “rabble” is to be dealt with, should such
a class arise. He noted that private charity alone could not adequately make
provisions for the poor, but must be supplemented with a system of public
assistance.41 At the same time, however, if a system for public welfare becomes
too effective, and the poor were to be sustained at an acceptable standard of
living, they “would be ensured [a livelihood] without the mediation of work
[which] would be contrary to the principle of civil society and the feeling of
self-sufficiency and honour among its individual members.”42
The only ways out of this tangle that Hegel can see are either to “leave the
poor to their fate” and force them into public begging, as was the practice
in England in Hegel’s day, or to expand the domestic economy by means
of foreign trade and colonialism.43 With the first option, begging provides
“the most direct means of dealing with poverty, and particularly with the
renunciation of shame and honour.” With the second, “the pursuit of gain”
motivates individuals to overcome the obstacles presented by traversing both
land and sea.44
In considering Kies’s discussion of industry then, it might help to take
literally the title of Adams’s book, The Relation of the State to Industrial Action
which she cites at points throughout both of her books and look at Kies as one
who is assessing the ways in which the state and industry interact—particularly
as this affects the working classes. Taking this title literally provides the
key, I believe, to Kies’s justice/grace system. She is proposing guidelines for
government intervention into civil society—a proposal that Hegel fell short
of making. The latter may indeed be the realm of free competition among
individuals, but the former is a unity into which all else is subsumed. Therefore,
when competition harms one or more of civil society’s members, “the state
should provide to a reasonable extent for the needs of its poor and unfortunate
classes.”45 According to Kies’s theory of altruism, as the manifestation of reason
in the ethical world the state must by its nature rectify the situation. For certain
spontaneous, competitive forces within civil society to damage and possibly
even to destroy the organism as a whole would be irrational, after all. Looked
at this way then, Kies is taking Hegel’s acknowledgement of the problem of
the welfare of the poor one step further. She is playing out what it means for
the state to be rational in regard to the industrial powers that dominated in
her day; and this is to enforce altruism. A quote from Kies herself supports
my interpretation:
The voice of the organic whole, speaking through representatives who see
the needs and correct relations of the different individual groups, demands
that one class in society who will not voluntarily give up privileges which
their position in society enables them to get, must be compelled to act as if
they saw the good of others and the true interests of all classes.46
At the same time, Kies recognizes that there are legitimate limits to state action.
She declares that “in many relations of society, assistance from the state other
than protective laws is unnecessary, [and] when equilibrium can be preserved
without it, [state action] only corrupts and destroys the individuality of the
assisted class.”47 Based on this statement, then, it is clear that Kies does agree with
Hegel’s understanding of civil society operating spontaneously as the realm of
individualism. When a corporate body, such as the cotton or woolen industry,
amasses so much power as to obliterate the autonomy of those beholden to it—
whether for goods, services, or employment—then the state must intervene, check
the industry’s power, and provide safeguards against it on behalf of weaker forces.
At the same time, the state must not completely orchestrate relations between
entities in society. Since “the will of man is essentially freedom,” state power
should not infringe upon that freedom. In fact, in Kies’s view when the state
take[s] away from any individual or class rights that are inherent in the
personality of man, just then the state begins a process of the destruction of
its members, and so begins a process of [its own] dissolution and death.48
Again, the state, as reason made manifest must act in a rational manner. It would
be as irrational for the state to overstep its bounds and thereby undermine
individual freedom as it would to fail to act and allow individual freedom to
be annihilated.
It is significant that Kies is committed to altruistic action by the state.
Like Margaret Mercer in Volume One, she rejects outright the common
conservative suggestion that natural altruistic impulse will become manifest
as private charitable organizations and that this can adequately address the
ills of society. The problem with “spontaneous private charity,” Kies insists,
is that it is not “definite and systematized.”49 Therefore, it will not ensure that
the weaker members of society are provided for. Instead altruism is to be
promoted through the enactment of rational laws:
Since the true aim of a nation is . . . to secure a harmonious development

of all its members, any legislation which wilfully violates or ignores the
rights of any class or group of producers, or forgets to secure the good of
an oppressed class, cannot in the long run prove to be correct legislation.50
“Correct legislation” by a rational state requires exactly the kind of monitoring

described earlier. It must ensure that one force does not acquire so much
power that it undermines the free development of individuals. In this way the
state protects the natural and continuous development of the whole. At the
same time, the state mustn’t overreact to what are simply the normal workings
of society by restricting freedoms of any one individual (even when that
individual is a corporation) or group. The state must pass just, rational laws
that will avoid both extremes. But in Kies’s view, time has shown that the “laws
that time has proved to be most beneficial to society have place[d] the good
of society before private immediate good to the individual.”51 Therefore, in her
view it is better to err on the side of grace rather than of justice.
In actual practice, however, justice and grace complement each other rather
than compete. In fact, there are three ways to approach industrial relations: (1)
from the point of view of self-interest (justice); (2) from the point of view of
altruism (grace); or (3) from the point of view of economy and environment
(pragmatism). Kies goes through a number of examples of how a decision-
maker would address real-life problems, depending on the perspective he or
she takes. In all cases, the “economic man” would act according to self-interest,
the “ethical man” would base his decision on altruism, and the “practical man”
would do his best to strike a balance between egoistic/economic interests and
altruistic considerations. The commentary Kies laces within this extensive list
of examples demonstrates that her own position is more moderate than much
of her earlier discussion has suggested. For instance, she points out that, given
a chance to purchase a large tract of farmland, the standard altruistic approach
might in fact not be the best route to take. Certainly, it isn’t ethical for the
“economic man” to buy up all he can in order to exploit them as “bonanza
farms.” Yet neither is it as noble as it might seem for the “ethical man” who
“realizes that it is necessary . . . that an opportunity be given for [individuals]
. . . to exercise [their] own energy upon [their] own material environment”52
to sell the land in small parcels at reasonable prices or to lease it long-term for
cooperative farming. More beneficial overall is the “practical man’s” decision to
aim for the mean between these two extremes in Kies’s view. He realizes that it
would be a waste of capital and of resources to divide the land up among several
owners. This is because he understands that a large farm is more efficient and
will yield more opportunities for labor for working people. A “concentration
of means is necessary” in this case, so the “practical man” would carry on
large-scale farming, but would hire workers at reasonable wages and carry on
business dealings in an ethical manner.53 This last move is interesting, because
although Kies tried to resist endorsing self-interest, she seems to concede that
it can be “practical” in certain cases. The similarity to the views of Ethel Muir
(Cornell, 1896) on this point is to be noted.
Kies uses this dialectic of ethics to firmly establish her point: “the ethical
principle”—that is, grace or altruism—is in fact operative, even in business
and industry. Furthermore, altruism needn’t have harmful effects, but can
support enhanced productivity in many instances. Finally, altruism may even
come to be relied on more fully in the future. In the closing paragraph of The
Ethical Principle, Kies rhetorically asks whether it is not true that
the “economic man” of Mill’s conception has become the “practical man”
of present writers through the recognition of the fact that men in business
relations are moved by motives other than that of self-interest . . . and the
“practical man” of future generations will . . . resemble the ethical man of
the present.54
From Philosophy to Social Work
Caroline Miles Hill (1866–1951)

AB, Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana (1887)
MA, Philosophy, University of Michigan (1891)
Thesis: “New England Transcendentalism as a Philosophy”
PhD, Philosophy, University of Michigan (1892)
Dissertation: “Kant’s Kingdom of Ends as a Social Philosophy”
Career: Bloomingdale Academy (1887–9); Bryn Mawr (1891–2); Mount

Holyoke (1892–3); Wellesley (1893–5); Hull House (1897–1900); University
of Chicago, research librarian (1900–05); Prairie Weir Farm Summer School
(1905–7); Bloomingdale Academy, principal (1910–12); Bethany College
(1912–13); Hull House (1913–14)
Life and Career
Caroline Miles Hill was born in 1863 near Dayton, Ohio, the oldest child of
Israel and Keturah Miles.55 After her father’s death when she was seven years
old, the family moved to Indiana, where her paternal aunt, Anna Miles, enrolled
her in the preparatory program at Earlham College, an institution founded by
Quakers. She later completed a bachelor’s degree at Earlham, then went directly
into graduate study at the University of Michigan. She is one of the few women
in this volume whose graduate work was not delayed by personal circumstances
or social barriers. She is also among the minority of women in this volume who
were married. Caroline Miles and William Hill, a political economics professor
and labor historian at the University of Chicago, married in 1895. She described
her husband as “so wonderfully liberal in his ideas of what women should do
. . . [with] no double standards about anything, although he has made some
rather innocent blunders.”56 Like May Preston Slosson, however, Miles Hill’s
career path was shaped by her husband’s professional choices.
Miles Hill accepted a research fellowship at Bryn Mawr, beginning her work
there in the winter of 1892, before her doctorate was officially conferred at
Michigan. She corresponded with Eliza Sunderland during this time, sharing
her reflections about how empowering she found it to study at a women’s
institution, about the rigorous levels of study there, and about the excellent
mentoring she was receiving—mentioning Bryn Mawr economics professor
Frank H. Giddings by name.57 Here, she studied alongside other women across
academic disciplines, including Lucy Maynard Salmon, a historian; Elizabeth
Laird, a physicist; and Agnes M. Wergeland, an artist and modern languages
professor.58 She also began exploring both economics and psychology, two
newly emerging fields of study at the time.
Following the Bryn Mawr fellowship, Miles Hill taught at Mount Holyoke
College (1892–3), helping to fill the vacancy left by Marietta Kies the previous
year. She then accepted a position at Wellesley College, where she taught from
1893 to 1895, filling the gap left by Mary Whiton Calkins who was studying at
Harvard. While there, she was able to conduct research in psychology under
the direction of Edmund Sanford, a psychology professor at Clark University
35 miles to the west, and Hugo Münsterberg, who gave her permission to use
his psychology laboratory at Harvard just over twelve miles to the northeast.59
She later published articles about her research in the American Journal of
Psychology.
As noted before, Miles Hill’s career trajectory shifted after her marriage,
even though her husband William supported her interest in having an active
professional life. She followed her husband to Illinois, where he held a position
in political economics at the University of Chicago. About 1910, she accepted
his decision to leave academic life and try his hand at farming, first in Indiana,
then in West Virginia.60 Neither of these endeavors were successful, and
William developed an interest in another woman, which ultimately led to
their separation and divorce. Yet throughout this time, Miles Hill made efforts
to maintain a public/professional presence, even though she was not able to
secure career stability. While her husband was teaching in Chicago, she worked
alongside Jane Addams at Hull House, where she helped establish a summer
program for urban youth. For a time, she also held a position in the University
of Chicago library. During their short stints in Indiana and West Virginia, she
taught alongside William at Bloomingdale Academy and Bethany College.
When she returned to Chicago after the couple’s divorce, she returned to Hull
House and also joined the Chicago Women’s Club, where she worked with
other intellectually minded women and periodically gave lectures.
The eighth woman to earn a PhD in philosophy in the United States (tied
with Eliza Sunderland), Miles Hill’s doctoral thesis is no longer extant. Her
master’s thesis remains intact, however, and provides a valuable account of the
foundations of pre-academic philosophy in the United States. She published
articles and reviews in the American Journal of Psychology and Journal of
Political Economy; a number of pieces in two prominent religious periodicals
in her day, Unity Magazine and American Friends Magazine; a well-respected
edited volume, The World’s Great Religious Poetry (1923); an additional
collection of poems, Twentieth Century Love Poetry (1929); and an edited
collection of essays on the theory and practice of social work, Mary McDowell
and Municipal Housekeeping: A Symposium (1938). She corresponded with
her peers from graduate study at Michigan, Marietta Kies and Eliza Jane
Sunderland, although only a handful of letters to Sunderland remain. She was
also close to a number of public intellectuals and social reformers: Jane Addams
(1860–1935), who is now also recognized as a philosopher; Cornelia de Bey

(1865–1948), Julia Lathrop (1858–1932), and Mary McDowell (1854–1936).
Caroline Miles Hill’s Philosophical Work
Caroline Miles Hill entered the academic world at a time of transition in

philosophy, and both her career path and her written work reflect this historical
reality. Philosophy was moving away from the parlor discussions and public
lectures that were common prior to the twentieth century, to formal academic
study in the college or university classroom. Miles Hill was well-schooled in
philosophy as it was understood in the United States at the time. And she
had thoroughly studied two of the nation’s most influential early philosophical
movements: New England transcendentalism and St. Louis idealism. In her
master’s thesis, she provided a valuable discussion of the origins of the first
movement and examined its relation to the second. In this sense, she was able
to examine and contextualize the two traditions, without being a devotee of
either. Like many women in philosophy at this time, however, she moved into
the study of psychology—which among her colleagues in that era included
epistemology, philosophy of mind, cognitive development, and moral
reasoning. As a postdoctoral fellow and young professor, she administered
surveys and evaluated the results, publishing her findings in the American
Journal of Psychology. Yet, whether by choice or by necessity, Miles Hill set
aside her purely academic ambitions and turned to social welfare theory and
practice later in life, as reflected in her last published work, Mary McDowell
and Municipal Housekeeping.
On Transcendentalism
In 1889, Caroline Miles Hill completed her master’s thesis on New England
transcendentalism, as developed by one of its most prominent proponents,
Ralph Waldo Emerson. He and his circle of progressive thinkers in New

England in the middle of the nineteenth century had a significant impact on
the generation that followed, particularly the early, pre-academic idealists in
the United States. As noted in my previous work, William Torrey Harris, the
recognized leader of the idealist movement in St. Louis, Missouri, revered
Emerson and the less prolific Amos Bronson Alcott, and had invited both of
them to lecture on a number of occasions. Harris saw himself as inheriting the
transcendentalist legacy but improving on and surpassing it. Yet a criticism
directed at both movements—transcendentalism and St. Louis idealism—was
that each suffered from a lack of academic rigor. Although Harris and his
followers saw themselves as bringing a systematic approach to the study of
philosophy that was missing in the writings of Emerson and company, some
contemporaries, like William James and John Dewey, made some of the same
criticisms of Harris and his colleagues. Idealism as the St. Louis group had
developed it was often too infused with a vague, quasi-spiritual sensibility. In
her discussion of transcendentalism, Miles Hill makes it clear how and why
this early pre-academic philosophy fell short in this way.
In this relatively short but dense document, Miles Hill credits Emerson
with helping to establish a school of thought that brought a sense of unity
to our understanding of the universe and a sense of optimism about human
virtue. Drawing on the ideas of Plato, Plotinus, and Kant, transcendentalism
was the first philosophy on “American” soil in Miles Hill’s view, and it laid the
foundation for philosophical idealism to emerge a generation later. Emerson’s
starting point was “absolute unity in diversity.” He saw “one universal
soul” in both nature and any given individual.61 But Miles Hill believes he
distinguished his view of universal unity from pantheism by drawing on Kant
and thus transitioning from a discussion of metaphysics/cosmology into
epistemology.62 For Emerson, Reason is distinct from Understanding in that
Reason is the higher faculty and is linked to divinity. “Reason is identical in all
[people, therefore], different minds can know the same universals. We partake
of Reason, rather than possess it.”63 It will be instructive to note here that, in
this sense, Emerson agreed with Margaret Mercer, discussed in Volume I, who
made the claim that mind or our spiritual nature emerges from God’s nature
and thus participates in an aspect of divinity.64 Understanding, by contrast, is
a tool of Reason. The Understanding can be developed, according to Emerson,
when education is used to “furnish suitable conditions for the exercise of
Reason.”65 Miles Hill continues on to explain that for Emerson, Reason is like
an “empty tube” through which an individual mind can view the world. We
can also use Will to discipline our senses, thus opening the “tube” more fully
to the materials that are present before us. But the faculty of Will is otherwise
limited.66 Miles Hill attributes Emerson’s ideas about education and the
training of the will to the influence of Plato’s theory of the transmigration of
souls. Only by accepting this element in Plato’s thought—that each soul exists
prior to a given individual’s birth and perhaps also after death—does it make
sense for Emerson to claim that there is one universal Mind and that we can
use education to train our understanding. She also underscores the fact that,
since the universe is a unity in Emerson’s view, he agrees with idealism that the
physical and spiritual aspects of the world—Mind and Matter—are one. In her
words, he “believes the world is an organic whole, as opposed to an aggregate of
unconscious activities.”67 In this sense, the metaphysics of transcendentalism
aligns with its ethics, which in Miles Hill’s view yields optimism:
[Transcendentalism] grounds its belief upon conscious law, as opposed

to blind unconscious will. It believes the curative forces of nature and the
instincts of animals are based upon a conscious plan, as opposed to a chance,
neither benevolent nor malevolent . . . It believes culture tends to prepare
the way for the showing forth of reason in [human beings], as opposed to
the theory that culture only gives greater consciousness of misery . . . It
believes pleasure is the natural state of [humanity] . . . and pain is only a
warning.68
The three sources that Miles Hill identifies as having the greatest influence
on Emerson—and thus transcendentalism—are Plato, Plotinus, and Kant.
But she points out that in many ways, his appropriation of these philosophers
was only partial, and therefore his philosophy was incomplete. From Plato,
Emerson borrowed an understanding of the world as a unity and, as noted
earlier, the idea that the soul can exist apart from the body. He also made
good use, in Miles Hill’s view, of Kant’s epistemology. According to her very
capable discussion of this aspect of Kant’s thought, he laid the groundwork
for a theory of both knowledge and moral freedom that was accepted by
transcendentalism, although no one in Emerson’s circle worked out a detailed
epistemological theory of their own: “His system is a union of idealism and
realism; mind and the object are said to cooperate in knowledge,” she said.”69
Emerson altered a notion derived from Plotinus, however. The ancient
thinker spoke of knowledge of the infinite as a kind of ecstasy. But Emerson
used the term ecstasy in reference to an emotional response to the divine.
Thus, he introduced both affect and a heightened sense of spirituality into
his discussions. Miles Hill responds critically to both approaches, saying
that ultimately, “both of them, from lack of analysis, have mistaken aesthetic
emotion for some mysterious state which it is not. . . . Feeling was not used
for its legitimate purpose, but [simply] to imagine more feeling.”70 She adds
to this a criticism, one that has been made by many others since: very few
of the transcendentalists read the original works of the philosophers who
influenced them—Kant and Fichte she mentions by name. Rather, they relied
on interpretations by Goethe and Coleridge. Goethe, she says, objected to
Kant’s ideas, because he believed they denied the spiritual nature of human
beings.71 Coleridge shared this concern. In regard to Kant’s epistemology,
Miles Hill charges that Coleridge tried to address “what perhaps was not
intentionally put into it. He saw a need to find a proof that an uneducated
mind could apprehend spiritual truth.”72 And the transcendentalists “received
his theological bias.”
Coleridge’s use of the term “intuition” was another shortcoming the
transcendentalists inherited. He used the term in the ordinary sense—as an
inclination, feeling, or spiritual understanding—rather than accepting Kant’s
specialized philosophical use. In regard to ethics, then, Coleridge urged

readers to “trust your intuitions” in the sense of resisting external systems
of thought or social/political authorities. Instead, according to Miles Hill,
Coleridge believed we must all “trust in something universal and necessary”—
with the strong implication being that he had in mind a timeless principle,
or perhaps a transcendent being. Emerson and other transcendentalists
followed Coleridge’s lead, placing far more emphasis on both individuality
and spirituality.73 As developed by Emerson and his colleagues, however,
Coleridge’s mandate to trust your intuitions came to mean simply, “think for
yourself.” And, Miles Hill noted, there was “more emphasis . . . on the ‘think’
than upon the ‘yourself.’”74 Emerson was eager for individuals to attend to their
ideas and intuitions, examine them, anticipate their implications. Yet he failed
to say what, exactly, intuitions are. In sum, Miles Hill notes that “Coleridge
had emphasized one side of Kant . . . [and the transcendentalists] emphasized
one side of Coleridge—‘Revere your intuitions.’”75
Toward the end of her discussion, Miles Hill asserts that a deep and abiding
sense of optimism is one of transcendentalism’s most valuable contributions to
philosophy—not in the sense of “simply shutting the eyes to evil or assuming a
wise and benevolent mechanical creator, wherefore the whole of creation must
be good.” Instead, the positive outlook of Emerson and his circle “surpasses
Hegel’s Optimism in that it regards the universe as more than rational, as
actually moral.”76 Yet, transcendentalism did not fully become a philosophical
school of thought, she says, because its proponents “had only studied previous
systems as literature, not as Philosophy.” She continues: “At that time the
American mind was not sufficiently accustomed to philosophical thinking to
build upon the stronger elements [of transcendentalism], or even to recognize
them as such.”77 Although several of the women discussed in Volume I would
be likely to disagree, Miles Hill concludes that
The Journal of Speculative Philosophy is not a lineal descendant of

the Dial, nor the Concord School of Philosophy of the Transcendental
Club. . . . [Transcendentalism] was “a revival of spirit” in that it searched

below the letter of formalism; it was “philosophical dilettantism” because
many embraced it [to find] support for [their] own theory and not for
love of Philosophy itself. [It lacked] a close and searching analysis,
systematization, and unity. . . . As the etymology of the word indicates,
it was an attempt to pass beyond, to pass over fixed boundaries into the
realm of the ideal.78
Experimental Psychology
Her master’s thesis is the most standard philosophical work that Miles Hill
produced. Two articles that followed a few years later in the American Journal
of Psychology point to a relatively common trend among early academic
philosophers at this time—Miles Hill’s shift to research in experimental
psychology. These articles are based on two studies: one that focused on
women’s emotional and cognitive states under a range of circumstances and
one that looked at the factors that influence decision-making for both men
and women.
Miles Hill’s first round of research at Wellesley, “A Study of Individual
Psychology,” was published in 1895.79 It reported on a survey of one
hundred women at the college as they performed routine tasks or coped
with difficult situations. At the outset, she recognizes the challenges of
conducting an effective survey that will yield helpful information. She
noted that the prompts themselves must be written so as to be neutral, and
terms must be clarified, especially terms related to emotional states. She
acknowledges that self-reporting of cognitive and emotional states may
not be reliable. Some participants are less introspective than others, for
instance, and respondents may not feel free to express themselves fully
about strong or negative emotions. Finally, researchers need to keep their
own biases from creeping into the process of administering and analyzing
results of a survey.
Having addressed these concerns about methodology, Miles Hill marches

her readers through the survey questions and results. Many of the questions
were designed to cull information about cognitive abilities and processes:
how participants retain information, how well they recall early childhood
experiences, or how they develop preferences, such as a favorite color. She also
sought to collect information about cognitive development and moral will.
Questions appeared on the survey about strategies women used to concentrate
on a boring lecture, for instance, or to attend to a task or project they dread.
Another question was revived: women Miles Hill surveyed were asked to
relate a story that was frightening or creepy—in real life or in a familiar tale
or ghost story, and this part of her discussion was included in a recent book
on horror.80
Miles Hill shares the results of the Wellesley survey both quantitatively
and qualitatively. She reports on the number of women whose responses
fall into similar categories, but also reflects on responses to each question.
In doing so, she provides a few insights, but she does not deeply analyze the
results of her research. This study is perhaps most valuable as an example of
psychological research on women by a woman very early in the development
of the social sciences.
Miles Hill’s second study, “On Choice,” was discussed in an article three
years later, also in American Journal of Psychology.81 Here she discloses that
her original plan was to explore the role of self-interest when a difficult moral
decision must be made. Yet the challenges of conducting a survey to cull
useful information, especially considering the many variables in play, would
be daunting. So, she turned instead to a brief overview of common moral and
philosophical understandings of choice, before turning to a description of
the study. In the early pages of this article, she notes that our moral decisions
are shaped in part by our individual historical and social situations; that
“rationality” can’t always factor in, because outcomes cannot be known in
advance; and (citing Dewey) that personal experience will come into play. And
in the end, she asserts that temperament will ultimately shape a person’s moral
decisions. Miles Hill then provides a description of the laboratory study she
was able to conduct—a set of simple experiments devised in an attempt to
isolate the process of decision-making itself at a clear and definitive moment.
Participants were asked to choose between ordinary objects, specific letters, or
nonsense words. Initially, they were asked why they made that choice. Later in
the study, the variables were controlled, and participants were simply observed
as they made their choices. Miles Hill’s findings were not earth-shattering,
but she did succeed in distinguishing between choices made based on habit,
proximity, aesthetics, and individual/idiosyncratic preferences. For this study,
she collaborated with colleagues at Harvard again, but did additional work
with Helen Thompson (later Woolley) at the University of Chicago, who would
become a pioneer in the study of psychology and gender difference.
Feminist Writings
Unlike many women who entered the academic world before the twentieth
century, Miles Hill openly expressed feminist views. In 1904, she wrote an
essay length review of a book by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Home, Its
Work and Its Influence.82 More subtle evidence of her feminist leanings appears
in her well-received collection, The World’s Great Religious Poetry, published
many years later in 1923. In that work nearly 25 percent of the poets included
were women—including Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Brontë sisters, Emily
Dickinson, George Eliot, Amy Lowell, Christine Rosetti, and Harriet Beecher
Stowe.83 The final expression of Miles Hill’s feminism was an edited volume,
Mary McDowell and Municipal Housekeeping, which she produced in 1938,
as a tribute to McDowell, a social reformer who was known, along with Jane
Addams, Cornelia de Bey, Margaret Haley, and Julia Lathrop, as one of the
“Five Maiden Aunts” of Chicago.84
Miles Hill’s review of Gilman’s book appeared in the Journal of Political
Economy and in it, she praised her colleague’s social science methodology
as well as her feminist approach to ending the gender division of labor
in the household. But she also takes an opportunity to express many of

her own feminist views. She opens the article with an overview of the
feminist movement in the nineteenth century, recognizing the impact of
the voting rights movement, the education movement, and the women’s
club movement on women’s advancement. Observing that the struggle for
voting rights has been “the most abstract [but] least successful,” she also
recognizes that the backlash against women’s higher education is perhaps
the strongest evidence of its success. Men in authority—medical doctors,
ministers, educators, and scientists—had tried desperately to convince the
public that rigorous higher education would damage women. Yet women’s
experience and success had proven otherwise, and young women continued
to flock to colleges and universities. Furthermore, despite the insistence
of conservative female critics that women did not want equality, women
continue to struggle for full access to education, employment, and political
participation. In light of the many advancements taking place in her time,
Miles Hill maintains that social science makes it clear that gender roles
are malleable. And she argues along with Gilman that these roles can and
should be changed.
Miles Hill praises Gilman’s book for providing “a logical basis for
argument.” “We are not now invited to a consideration of brain weights or of
intrinsic differences between men and women,” she says, “but to a study of the
origin, growth, and present condition of an institution. The discussion [has
been moved] from a priori grounds [to] evolutionary grounds.”85 According
to her assessment of the book, there are many reasons to praise it. Perhaps
most commendable is Gilman’s dismantling of “Domestic Mythology,” which
is responsible for creating the “home-bound woman,” whose role—and very
existence—has been artificially “narrowed and superficialized.”86 Gilman’s
solution is one that resonates with ideas Jane Addams discussed in “A Belated
Industry,” published in the American Journal of Sociology in 1896. It is also a
solution with which Miles Hill heartily agrees: reconfigure home life so that
domestic work is exported as much as possible, as has been the trend over
time with the majority of men’s traditional work in the homestead. It is no

more “natural” for women to devote themselves to doing all the cooking,
cleaning, childcare, laundry, and shopping, for instance, than it is for men
to dedicate the majority of their time to “building the house, hunting and
killing the game, and making the furniture” for their families.87 Furthermore,
women’s seclusion in the home limits the scope of their involvement in
society. In the most “radical” chapter of the book, Miles Hill reports on
Gilman’s claim that the only two virtues exercised in the home are love and
self-sacrifice.88 She might have added that one of these virtues—love—comes
naturally. Furthermore, one could argue that love does not need a special
realm in which to develop. She appears to hint that the other—self-sacrifice—
has been notoriously imposed upon and expected of women for centuries,
and for the greater social good it needs to be converted into a broader sense
of service to others.
The written work that Miles Hill produced demonstrates a shift from
philosophical inquiry to social science research after 1895. As the twentieth
century approached, she came to value the ability of social science research
to address social and political problems. Her next step, therefore, was to
engage in social reform work herself, alongside women like Jane Addams and
Mary McDowell in Chicago. Her collection about the life and work of Mary
McDowell was a slight volume, but it spoke to four major themes that appear
frequently in the work of contemporaries, like Addams and to some degree
Lucia Ames Mead, both of whom are discussed in Volume I:
●● The modern city in all of its cultural and economic diversity is a

microcosm of the world.
●● Diversity within urban centers enriches life and should be a central
feature of political engagement on the local level.
●● Communities, both large and small, are not simply an aggregate of
individuals, but have a soul; the job of government officials, educators,
and social reformers is to nurture community at every opportunity.
●● A top-down leadership model is counter-productive. Effective

governance can take place only when all members of society are
included.
Like Addams, Miles Hill hoped to see urban centers become increasingly
dynamic and interactive as racial and cultural diversity increased. She even
went so far as to say that government officials, doctors, and educators (including
college professors) should be required to complete an internship at a place like
Hull House so they can better understand the needs of the community. It would
be easy to dismiss Miles Hill’s briefly sketched vision as a utopian one. Yet her
ideas were embraced within her network of intellectuals and activists. They
also contributed to putting theory into practice, which is one reason Miles Hill
and others like her found the academic world to be lacking—it was too far
removed from practical concerns to be personally and professionally fulfilling.
Excluded, but not Dissuaded
Eliza Read Sunderland (1839–1910)

BA, Mount Holyoke College (1865)
BA, University of Michigan (1889)
PhD, Philosophy, University of Michigan (1892)
Dissertation: “Man’s Relation to the Absolute according to the Philosophy of

Kant and of Hegel”
Career: Aurora, Illinois, high school principal (1866–71); Chicago, high

school teacher (1876–8); Ann Arbor, high school teacher (1878–83);
Unitarian Church, Ann Arbor, Michigan, congregational leader and lecturer
(1878–98); Women’s Western Unitarian Conference, president (1882–7);
National Society for the Advancement of Women, director (1885–95); World
Parliaments of Religion, lecturer (1893); India, missions and educational tour
(1895–1900); Hartford, Connecticut board of education (1907–10)
Life and Career
Eliza Jane Read Sunderland was born in 1839 in Huntsville, Illinois, to Amasa
and Jane (Henderson) Read, who were committed Quakers. Despite the fact that
her father died when she was young, she was able to receive a good education
for a woman in this period, attending a girls’ school in Abingdon, Illinois, until
the age of fifteen. She then taught in local schools until 1863 when she was
accepted into Mount Holyoke Seminary, which at the time was the college of
choice for women in the United States. Although she was offered a teaching
position at Mount Holyoke upon graduating, she was unable to accept it due
to family issues that today are unknown. So, in 1865, she returned to Illinois to
teach at a high school in Aurora. In two years, she was promoted to principal
of the high school, joining Ella Flagg Young, discussed in Chapter 4, and Anna
Brackett and Fanny Jackson Coppin, both of whom are discussed in volume
one, as the first women in the country known to head a secondary school.
The arc of Sunderland’s professional development was unusual in that she
was married and had a career as an educator and religious leader before she
began doctoral work. She maintained a surprisingly steady career path for a
married woman in this era. She and her husband, Jabez T. Sunderland, had
three children (Gertrude, 1873; Edson, 1875; Florence, 1877), when he was
offered a pastorate on the University of Michigan campus. Eliza essentially
served has her husband’s co-pastor, but also resumed teaching at the high
school level in Ann Arbor. By the mid-1880s, she began taking classes at the
university, earning a second bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1889. She then
went on to earn the doctorate in philosophy at Michigan.
Throughout her career, Sunderland was an accomplished public speaker
and leader of women’s organizations. She was a founder and president of the
Women’s Western Unitarian Conference (1882–7) and vice president of the
Association for the Advancement of Women (1886–1991). She was also a
member of the Michigan Equal Suffrage Association (1887–92), the Michigan
State Federation of Women’s Clubs (1897–1900), and the National Alliance
of Unitarian and Other Liberal Christian Women. She corresponded with a

number of other prominent contemporaries in philosophy, religion, education,
and social/political reform movements: Octavia Bates, Anna Brackett, Augusta
Chapin, Lillian Freeman Clark, Caroline Dall, Rebecca Hazard, Ellen Mitchell,
Lucinda Hinsdale Stone, and her peer at the University of Michigan, Caroline
Miles Hill.
Sunderland was featured in three different venues at the Chicago World’s
Fair in 1893: the Congress of Representative Women, the Department
of Philosophy and Science, and the World’s Parliament of Religions. She
was among a number of women to speak at the women’s “congress” at the
World’s Fair, of course, discussing women’s distinctive contributions to
society and culture, largely as wives and mothers. She was only one of two
women to speak at the sessions on philosophy and science (the other was
Julia Ward Howe). She also gave a presentation on “The Importance of the
Study of Comparative Religion” at the World’s Parliament of Religions.
The philosophy and religion lectures won her a great deal of respect and
recognition beyond the women’s circles in which she was already well
known. She published just one book, a volume coauthored with her husband,
James Martineau and His Greatest Book (1905), a work that focuses on
Martineau’s Study of Religion and speaks to the Sunderlands’ commitment
to their Unitarian religious beliefs. She produced a considerable number
of introductory lectures on philosophy and religion while at the University
of Michigan, which were left unpublished. These writings, along with her
published lectures and speeches demonstrate that she was well versed in the
history of European philosophy, Eastern philosophy and religion, and early
discussions of psychology.
Sunderland remained active as a public intellectual long after earning her
doctoral degree (though, as discussed later in the chapter, this was not by
choice). She lectured widely, travelled to India in the late 1890s, lobbied for
women’s voting rights after the turn of the century, and served on the local
school board in Connecticut just prior to her death in 1910.
As one of only three women to earn a doctorate in philosophy at the

University of Michigan, and the eighth woman in the United States to do so
(tied with Caroline Miles Hill), Eliza Jane Read Sunderland was among a select
group. Yet achieving this level of academic distinction did not translate into
professional advancement in academia. In the 1890s, two campaigns were
launched, complete with letters of support and petitions, to urge University of
Michigan administrators to appoint Sunderland to vacant philosophy faculty
positions. In the first campaign, Lucinda Hinsdale Stone wrote:
Dear Sir: Mr. Tufts is going to vacate his place in Michigan University. . . . [in
the words of a former student] “I have studied and recited two terms with
Mrs. Sunderland in the department in which Mr. Tufts has been a teacher,
and I know that Mrs. Sunderland is second only to Dr. Dewey, the head of
the department. Why should she not be an instructor in that department?
Could anything be brought to bear as to bring this thing about?”89
A second campaign took place three years later to appoint Sunderland to a faculty
position John Dewey left vacant at Michigan. Dewey himself recommended
her this time, but he did not mention the specific position for which she was
qualified—perhaps a signal that he was lukewarm about her candidacy:
It is simple justice to Mrs. Sunderland to state that she more than earned
her degree. Whether one considers the range of ground covered, the mass
of facts acquired, the grasp and assimilation of those facts, the power of
stating them in well-arranged and clear terms, the power of bringing out
their moral and practical bearing, Mrs. Sunderland’s work appears equally
admirable.
In case Mrs. Sunderland should care ever to take up the work of
instruction in philosophy, I feel sure that she would succeed thoroughly
in it. For such work, I can recommend her with the utmost confidence.”90
The university stood by its policy against hiring women in both cases. In
1891, George H. Mead and Albert H. Lloyd were hired, neither of whom held
the PhD at the time of appointment. In 1894, George Rebec was offered the
position—though again he had not yet earned a doctoral degree. Sunderland
was passed over both times, forcing her to continue working as a high school
educator, activist, and public intellectual.
Sunderland’s Philosophical Work
Sunderland produced a doctoral dissertation that demonstrated a real grasp of

the two most influential German philosophers in the eighteenth and nineteenth
century: “Man’s Relation to the Absolute according to the Philosophy of
Kant and of Hegel.” Her dissertation represents a bridge between St. Louis
Hegelianism and the broader forms of idealism that developed at Concord in
Massachusetts, at Glenmore in upstate New York, and in New York City. In this
work, she reviewed the arguments in Kant’s three Critiques, and, consistent with
earlier discussions of idealism in the United States—in St. Louis in particular—
she criticizes his hyper-individualism. Also consistent with early American
idealist thought, Sunderland displayed an emerging personalism when she
focused on Hegel’s claim that God is “the absolute Person” and that “personality
is universality.” Focusing on God as Person is an inclination also present in
the writings of Susan Blow, discussed in volume one, and it grew into a full-
blown school of thought in Boston in the early twentieth century.91 A strength
of Sunderland’s dissertation, and what makes her stand apart from her St.
Louis idealist colleagues, however, is the way in which it simply pointed to the
strengths and weaknesses in both Kant and Hegel. She did not take sides, as the
St. Louis group had tended to do, championing Hegel over Kant or vice versa.
Instead, she maintained that their two systems of thought are complementary:
Each thinker bases his theory of things upon the utterance of human reason,
each gives to the reason both on its theoretical and practical side a creative
power, each looks for the absolute unity in an absolute reason; hence each is
rationalistic and spiritualistic. And their differences which seem on the face
of them so great, prove on closer scrutiny to be only differences of degree.92
After she was passed over for faculty positions at the University of Michigan,
Sunderland began offering a series of noncredit introductory philosophy
lectures at the Unitarian church for University of Michigan students. She
called the series “The Religious Thought of the Great Thinkers and Writers of
the Nineteenth Century,” and it featured the canonical figures in philosophy
and religion at the time: Kant, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Schopenhauer, Lotze,
von Hartmann, Comte, Mill, Spencer, and Martineau. Each of the lectures
provided at least a bit of the biography of each thinker, then discussed his work
within his philosophical and religious context. As a body of work, this series
demonstrates how well-versed Sunderland was in the academic philosophy of
her day and time. These lectures were not published in her lifetime, appearing
in print for the first time in 2003.93
As noted, Sunderland gave three lectures at the 1893 World’s Fair, a major,
months-long event. She lectured at the “Women’s Department,” the Philosophy
and Science Department, and the Parliament of World Religions. The last of
these two lectures won her a great deal of recognition as a public intellectual,
among men as well as women. In “The Importance of the Study of Comparative
Religions,” Sunderland focused more on the similarities among religions than
on what makes them valuable and distinctive in their own right. Her insights
were largely anthropological. Religion in all of its forms is (1) one of the
highest expressions of culture, (2) based in morality, (3) grounded in a sense of
personal and communal duty, (4) a relation between the human and the divine,
and (5) a natural attribute of humanity. Studying other religions is valuable in
her view because it helps us to understand and appreciate our own religion
more thoroughly. Sunderland tried to avoid placing Christianity at the top of
a hierarchy of religions, as was so common in this era. In fact, she questioned
why so many people were amused by a Muslim group’s announcement that
it planned to evangelize in the Chicago area. Was it because they saw Islam
as inherently inferior to the Christian religion that dominates in the United

States? If so, she asked her audience to consider Christianity’s failure to curb
any number of social ills, such as crime, infidelity, and intemperance, and to
consider the possibility that Islam would be more successful in combating
these vices.
Less probing in her long discussion of Judaism, she falls into the common
Christian supercessionist assumption—that Christianity made a radical
departure from Judaism at the time of Jesus and is now a religion vastly
superior to it: “How long the journey from the early tribal sacrificial, magical,
unmoral, fetish, holy place, human sacrifice worship of the early Semites,
including the Hebrews, to the universal fatherhood and brotherhood religion
of the Sermon on the Mount and the golden rule.”94 Though familiar with the
anthropological research on Semitic tribes and culture in the ancient world in
her discussion of Judaism, Sunderland clearly had not yet encountered early
work on the historical Jesus and Jewish theological developments in the era just
prior to the advent of Christianity, though a rich body of literature in this area
of Christian theology existed in her day. She would have benefited greatly from
an understanding of the long-standing balance between law and love, justice
and compassion represented in the figures of Moses and Aaron, respectively.
Her ability to provide a more fair comparison between Christianity and
Judaism also would have been heightened if she had known more about the
Pharasaic/rabbinic tradition of which Jesus and his predecessor Hillel the
Elder were almost certainly a part.95
Sunderland’s inability to see beyond the typical Christian supercessionist
view that was prevalent in this era is predictable, because she was relatively
conservative theologically. In a debate over the religious identity of
Unitarianism, she and her husband took the traditionalist view. The
denomination had been known for its liberalism since its founding in the
United States during the American Revolution. By the mid-1880s, it had
become so open to theological skepticism and dissent that Sunderland and
others began to fear that it was becoming a vacuous belief system. She and her
husband disagreed strongly with other denominational leaders, like Jenkin

Lloyd Jones, who embraced this radical and growing liberalism—so much
so that they founded their own periodical, Unitarian Monthly, to combat
the influence of Jones’s Unity magazine. Eliza and Jabez Sunderland used
the Monthly as a venue to express their view that their liberal denomination
needed to return to its Christian and theistic roots. In the end, the Sunderlands
lost the debate. In the name of religious freedom, the denomination refused
to make the sort of statement of faith that Eliza and her husband favored.
The denomination also chose not to embrace the conservative claim that its
Christian roots were central to its contemporary belief system.96
A large portion of Sunderland’s written work—about half of it—focused on
the history and philosophy of religion. She spent relatively little time writing on
women’s role and rights. In fact, just under 10 percent of her writings focused
on women at all. Yet her support for the achievement of women is as central to
understanding her life and work as it is for understanding Anna Brackett and
Grace Bibb, both of whom are discussed in volume one.
Sunderland’s social and political work on behalf of women consumed a
great deal of her time and energy, and she was a valuable teacher and mentor
to scores of women at the University of Michigan during the twenty years
she and her husband spent there. Furthermore, she did discuss some of her
ideas about women’s role and rights in writing, starting with an early essay on
higher education for women (circa 1875) and ending with lengthy testimony
on women’s voting rights before the Connecticut state legislature late in life
(1909). In contrast to Brackett and Bibb, however, Sunderland leaned toward
a maternalistic view of women and their role in society, then used that view
to argue for their increased participation in public life. In an undated essay
“What Agencies Should Employ Women for the Uplift of Society?” for
instance, Sunderland argued that, aside from their vitally important work as
wives and mothers, women are especially well suited to work in what are now
referred to as the helping professions: as religious reformers, as educators,
and as social welfare advocates. In “Vocations and Avocations for Women”
and “Woman as an Economic Factor in American Life,” she expanded this

argument. While never proposing that women should be relegated solely to
the home, Sunderland nevertheless insisted that their maternal, caretaking
work has inherent value, deserves recognition, and makes real contributions
to public and economic life.
Sunderland refined her maternalism in 1893 with her lecture at the Chicago
World’s Fair, “Higher Education and the Home.” Education does, to some degree
make women unfit for domestic life, Sunderland said, but this simply means
that some adjustments had to be made to the educational and social structure
as it then stood. Since the home is the foundation of society, public schools,
colleges, and universities need to begin to play a different role for both males
and females. Elementary schools need to provide better moral and physical
education, so as to develop good, responsible citizens. Secondary schools
and colleges need to reshape their curriculum, so that there is a more direct
relationship between courses in the sciences, economics, and psychology and
“the practical laboratory of the home and of society.”97 Like Catharine Beecher,
Sunderland asserted that the home could and should rise in importance and
public esteem. Women’s more efficient housekeeping, as a result of having
been well educated, will allow them more time for volunteer work, writing,
or pursuit of a profession. Sunderland further projected that men’s relation to
the home and to society would also be enhanced by improving the connection
between education and domestic and social life. But in this address, she is
concerned only with establishing how women’s education will inform their
life and work. She offered no concrete examples of how this would take place
for men.
Sunderland’s final—and lengthy—published discussion of women’s rights
comes in the form of her testimony before the Connecticut legislature in 1909,
in which she argued for women’s suffrage. First, Sunderland noted, voting is “a
right guaranteed to all citizens of a Republic . . . a government ‘of the people,
by the people, and for the people.’” Next, women worked alongside men in
the nation’s greatest conflicts—the American Revolution and Civil War—thus
helping to win freedom and unity as a people. In addition, women needed

the vote to protect themselves from unjust laws enacted by men for whom
women’s needs and interests were not a priority. She gave several examples:
the ban on women jurors; unjust laws regarding property, inheritance, and
child custody; and sex-based wage laws. Finally, voting rights would heighten
women’s moral and intellectual stature, both as individuals and within society.
In this essay, Sunderland tempered her maternalistic leanings considerably.
She focused not on the good that women can do in the home as wives and
mothers, but instead on an enhanced public role for them. Unfortunately, there
are no hints from Sunderland’s other writings to shed light on how and why
she shifted away from her maternal feminist stance to the more egalitarian/
liberal feminism we see in her Connecticut legislature address. Her work on
comparative religions and women’s role in them may have been one factor. The
intensified struggle for women’s voting rights at the time she gave this address
may well have been another.
Conclusion
Marietta Kies, Caroline Miles Hill, and Eliza Sunderland earned doctoral degrees
at Michigan in philosophy during a very short window of time. Therefore,
we see somewhat more similarity in their work than we do among women
at other institutions, although each was certainly an independent thinker.
Each produced theses that reflect the influence of the early philosophical
idealist movement in the United States. This is not a surprise, given that
George Sylvester Morris and John Dewey at Michigan were both associated
with this movement and both contributed to its publication, the Journal of
Speculative Philosophy in the 1870s and 1880s. Kies drew on neo-Hegelian
ideals for her work in political philosophy. Miles Hill explored the transition
from pre-academic transcendentalist thought to the idealism she was steeped
in at Michigan. Sunderland examined idealist thought and religious thought in
ways that were more historical and analytical (in the general, not philosophical,
sense of the term “analytical”). The three produced few publications, however.
Kies’s introductory philosophy text and her two works on political altruism
were the only works of philosophy proper to appear in print during their
lifetimes. The philosophical work of Miles Hill and Sunderland did not see the
light of day until the dawn of the twenty-first century.
We see stark contrasts among the three in regard to career advancement.
Kies was academically successful, but her peers at Michigan were not as
fortunate. Miles Hill followed her husband’s meandering professional path,
which presented personal hardships and almost insurmountable career
challenges. Sunderland was barred from academic positions, due to biases
against women, married women in particular, and quite possibly because she
was in her fifties when she completed the doctorate. All three women had ties
to nonacademic intellectual networks, which is likely to have helped mitigate
the obstacles Miles Hill and Sunderland encountered. Miles Hill worked at
Chicago University’s library and volunteered at Jane Addams’s Hull House in
Chicago. Sunderland returned to the work she had already been doing in the
women’s rights movement and in Unitarianism’s liberal religious circles.
Between 1893 and 1920, no women completed doctoral degrees in
philosophy at Michigan. Several women did earn degrees in related fields,
however. Four women earned doctorates in the classics, Mary G. Williams
(1897), Arletta Warren (1898), Elisabeth S. Holderman (1912), and Agnes
Vaughan (1917). Williams’s work consisted of a study of the life and influence
of the empress and thinker, Julia Domna. It is largely a historical work, but has
promise for feminist analysis. Holderman produced a thesis on the function of
the priestess in ancient Greece. It catalogs references to priestess figures and is
heavy on textual analysis of historical and religious texts. Warren conducted a
study of the ethics of Seneca, another work that has promise for future analysis.
Vaughan wrote a thesis on madness in Greek thought.
Five women completed degrees in rhetoric at Michigan: Gertrude Buck
(1898), Esther Shaw (1916), Ada Fonda Snell (1916), Mary Yost (1917), and
Helen Ogden Mahin (1920). Gertrude Buck’s work on metaphor intersected

with psychology as it was understood at her time, and it has been a subject
of feminist analysis in recent decades. Shaw wrote a thesis on the influence of
“imaginal factors” on verbal expression. Snell examined rhythm in Milton’s
blank verse. Yost analyzed the nature of argument in business letters, and
Mahin’s thesis focused on the function of the newspaper headline.
Two of Michigan’s women received doctorates in literature: Alice D. Snyder
in English (1915) and Margaretha Ascher in German (1917). Snyder produced
a thesis that looked at Coleridge’s aesthetic and literary theory, and Ascher
examined discourse in Lessing’s prose.
Language, literature, and the classics had been fairly common fields of study
for women in the late nineteenth century. After 1900, rhetoric and philology
(now linguistics) were added to that list. A number of women at Michigan took
the opportunities offered to them in these fields and succeeded professionally.
This was sometimes the case at other institutions as well, as noted elsewhere
in this volume.
144
4
Beyond Philosophy
Women at Chicago
Introduction
Although it is the youngest institution under discussion in this study, ten women
earned doctorates in philosophy and related disciplines at the University of
Chicago by 1910, four of whom are featured in this chapter. Two other women
who entered doctoral study in the next decade are also discussed here.1 The
hybrid identity of the university’s Department of Philosophy, Psychology, and
Education is reflected in their work and careers, of course: Ella Flagg Young
(1900, education), Clara Millerd (1901, ancient Greek thought), Anna Louise
Strong (1903, philosophy of religion), Matilde Castro (1907, psychology and
logic), Rachel Caroline Eaton (1919, Native American history and politics),
and Georgiana Simpson (1921, German philology).
As was the case at Cornell, some women who studied philosophy at the
graduate level in these early years actually established careers in psychology.
For instance, Amy Elizabeth Tanner (1896, “association” in psychology),
Helen Bradford Thompson (1900, psychological norms), Kate Gordon Moore
(1903, psychology and aesthetics), and Elizabeth Kemper Adams (1903,
psychology and aesthetics) held fellowships or assistantships in philosophy.2
Yet their dissertations placed them squarely within psychology as it became a
new discipline.
Tanner’s dissertation was entitled, “Imagery, with Special Reference

to Association of Ideas.” She published little, but established herself
professionally, teaching first at Wilson College (1903–7), then at Clark
University (1907–18), a coeducational college where she worked alongside the
experimental psychologist, G. S. Hall.3 Thompson (later Woolley) published
considerably and taught at Mount Holyoke College, (1902–5), the University
of Cincinnati (1910–12), the Merrill-Palmer School (1921–5); and Teachers
College at Columbia University (1925–30). Thompson wrote a dissertation on
“Psychological Norms in Men and Women.” She worked outside of academia
for several years, serving as director of the Bureau for the Investigation of
Working Children (1911–21). She is one of the first researchers to study gender
differences in psychology and ranks with Margaret Floy Washburn and Eliza
Gamble (both of Cornell) in importance in the development of psychology as
an emerging independent discipline during this time.4
Kate Gordon Moore’s dissertation looked at “The Psychology of Meaning,”
and the majority of her works focused on psychology and education.5 She
taught for a short time at Mount Holyoke College and Teachers College at
Columbia University, then spent several years at Bryn Mawr (1908–16) and
Carnegie Institute of Technology (1916–21) before accepting a position at
the University of California (1922–48), where she remained until retirement.
Like Tanner and Thompson, she also worked outside the academy, serving
at the Children’s Department of the state of California while teaching at the
university.6 Since the career paths of all three of these women were dominated
by psychology’s themes and methods, I do not discuss them at length in this
volume.
Elizabeth Kemper Adams poses a bit of a challenge as a boundary-
crossing thinker. Her dissertation was entitled “Aesthetic Experience: Its
Meaning in Functional Psychology,” and she spent the majority of her career
at the intersection of psychology and education. Her writings examined the
educational and vocational development of girls and women, and they reflect
an orientation toward the social sciences. As a professor at Smith (1905–16)
BEYOND PHILOSOPHY 147
she focused on pedagogy and educational history, and she became the chair of
the college’s department of education in 1911.7
The women discussed at some length in this chapter have been recognized
as philosophical thinkers in recent decades or produced work that provides
us with opportunities for philosophical inquiry today. Although she is now
regarded as a pragmatist philosopher, Ella Flagg Young’s doctoral degree
was in education. She held a position at the University of Chicago for a time,
but spent most of her career in public education. Yet on both the practical
and theoretical levels, she maintained ties with the University of Chicago
throughout her career. She also published a considerable amount of work.
Clara Millerd crossed disciplinary boundaries. Millerd was listed in university
catalogues as a student of comparative philology and was awarded a doctorate
in Greek. Yet, she held fellowships in philosophy and wrote her dissertation
on Aristotle. Millerd established herself in an academic career, teaching both
the ancient languages and philosophy, although she published little. Matilde
Castro earned a degree in philosophy and had a successful interdisciplinary
career in academia, primarily at Bryn Mawr, crossing the boundaries between
philosophy and education. Like many women in this volume, she did not
produce published work after completing her dissertation. Anna Louise Strong
wrote her dissertation and a few articles on the psychology of religion. She
soon recognized that she did not have a long-term interest in philosophy and
chose to become a journalist. Rachel Caroline Eaton and Georgiana Simpson
completed their degrees just over a decade after Castro and Strong. Eaton’s
degree was in history, and her dissertation examined injustices committed
against the Cherokee tribe before and after the “Indian Removals” in the
nineteenth century. As is the case for Anna Julia Cooper in Chapter 6, her work
has important implications for philosophy. Georgiana Simpson completed her
degree in German philology, but in many ways her work resembles similar
discussions of German thought within philosophy at this time. She had a
successful teaching career, initially at the well-respected Dunbar High School,
then at Howard University, both in Washington, DC.
Faculty and Academic Climate in Chicago
The University of Chicago was a young institution at the close of the nineteenth
century. It was founded in 1892, and by 1894 administrators had convinced
John Dewey to leave Michigan to establish a philosophy department that
would set a new standard for academic engagement in a growing urban
center. He was immensely successful in doing so, naming this new academic
unit the Department of Philosophy, Psychology, and Education, and quickly
developing it as a center of research that was responsive to community
concerns. In the years leading up to this group’s study at Chicago, Dewey
was writing articles on education and aesthetics; he published two books
shortly before he left the university, The School and Society (1899) and Studies
in Logical Theory (1903).8 The second of these two works influenced Matilde
Castro a great deal.
Dewey’s approach to philosophy matched well with both academic and
social/educational needs in Chicago at the time. Psychology was a new field
of study, so it was not yet fully distinct from philosophy. In the department
as led by John Dewey, both psychology and education were included as
philosophical fields of inquiry. These are fields that can readily be put to use in
an applied setting to address community needs, and they greatly appealed to
women at the time. The same is true today. As noted, some of Chicago’s early
women PhD recipients established themselves solidly within the new field of
psychology and were very successful there.
In addition, interdisciplinary study was not only encouraged but also
enforced at many institutions in this period (and this continues to be the
case in some places in Europe today). At both Cornell and Chicago, doctoral
students were required to declare a minor area of study in addition to their
central discipline. Chicago required students in philosophy to enroll in at least
three courses in psychology, and psychology doctoral degree candidates to
enroll in at least two courses in philosophy.9 This was the case even after Dewey
had left the institution in 1904 and the former multidisciplinary department
still shared faculty as well as an educational mission. The primary goal of the
philosophy department was “to give training in the methods of philosophic
inquiry, reflection, and statement, and thus to equip competent teachers and
investigators in the various branches.” The new department of psychology
had similar goals. Its aims were to allow students “to employ Psychology as a
basis for higher work in philosophy, education, and the social sciences [and]
to furnish a sound and symmetrical training for teachers, investigators, and
specialists in the various branches of psychological science.”10
Therefore, we see some interesting intersections across disciplines among
the women who completed advanced degrees during this time. As noted,
some women at Chicago held fellowships in philosophy or pedagogy but were
listed as having completed their degrees in one of the department’s related
fields. Although none of the women in this volume were listed with a degree
in psychology, their career paths led some of them into this new field, which is
where they remained all their lives.
In addition, Chicago was established with a mission to serve the needs of
the local community. And with the strong commitments to education and
community discourse that members of the department were developing at
this time, public education and community engagement were a perfect fit.
The philosophy department was deeply involved in pedagogical theory and
practice through the university’s Laboratory Schools. It also had ties to Jane
Addams’s Hull House, which led to engagement with nonacademics as well
as academically credentialed women.11 As noted in Chapter 3, James Hayden
Tufts had already joined the Chicago faculty in 1892, and Dewey brought
along George Herbert Mead when he arrived in 1894. All three shared a vision
for an expansive understanding of philosophy and academic involvement
in community life. The department grew to include Addison W. Moore and
Edward Scribner Ames in philosophy; Nathaniel Butler and George H. Locke
in education; and Willard Clark Gore and James R. Angell in psychology by
the time Dewey was lured away by Columbia University in 1904. Faculty who
served as advisors to two women featured in this chapter also had ties to the
department: Paul Shorey, a specialist in ancient Greek thought, and Martin

Schütze, a specialist in German romanticism.12
As noted in Chapter 3 when John Dewey was at the University of Michigan
female students saw him as someone who respected women and who fostered
their intellectual growth. The same was true in Chicago. As documented
by a number of today’s philosophers and historians, John Dewey’s years in
Chicago were filled with community engagement and collaboration with
women—not only in academia but also in public education and in social
work. He was a friend and colleague of Jane Addams, Ellen Starr Gates, and
Ella Flagg Young, discussed later in the chapter. Both historical accounts
and their correspondence indicate that Dewey’s colleagues at the university,
James Hayden Tufts and George Herbert Mead in particular, were also gender
egalitarians who were progressively minded. Both men were deeply involved
in campus and community life. And their interest in the application of ideas
to practical concerns was appealing to female students; it also signaled their
openness to alternative points of view and a willingness to experiment with
ideas.
One feature that Chicago shared with Cornell: its open and empowering
approach to the education of women. The institution was established with a
gender-neutral admissions policy, and several women were on the staff the
year the university opened.13 But at Chicago, an additional variable comes
into play: Marion Talbot (1858–1948) as a prominent and vocal dean of
women who maintained careful records to track women’s progress and career
success.14 Talbot had earned degrees from Boston University (AB, 1880, AM,
1882) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1888) and began her career
at Wellesley College as an instructor of “domestic science” (later called home
economics). She was one of the first women hired at the University of Chicago,
to teach in the Department of Social Science and Anthropology in 1892 and
was promoted to full professor and chair of the new Department of Household
Administration in 1902. With a good sense of humor about “wearing many
hats” in her work at the university, Talbot was responsible for overseeing
nearly every aspect of the lives of female undergraduates at Chicago in over

30 years as dean of women. She served as an advisor and mentor to graduate
students in some cases as well. For instance, she hired Chicago doctoral
recipient, Sophonisba Breckenridge (PhD, political science, 1901; JD, 1904), as
her assistant dean of women in 1905. Talbot was a founder and director of the
Association of Collegiate Alumnae (now American Association of University
Women) and she wrote a number of books on home economics and women’s
education. Perhaps Marion Talbot’s central role as an advocate for women at the
University of Chicago accounts for the ability of the early doctoral recipients
under discussion in this chapter to find rewarding positions and establish
careers, even with the slightly alternative approach to academic philosophy
that was in place at the institution. After all, the department of philosophy at
Chicago, as established by John Dewey, was intentionally engaged in cross-
disciplinary discourse at precisely the moment in academic history that
philosophy was aiming to more narrowly define itself. Despite this, women
who emerged with doctoral degrees from Chicago landed on their feet and
established themselves in productive and apparently rewarding careers.
When John Dewey accepted an offer at Columbia in 1904, the department
at Chicago was restructured. Philosophy and psychology became independent
units, chaired by James Hayden Tufts and James R. Angell, respectively. John
B. Watson would later join Angell in the new psychology department. The
fate of the education program was to be determined. Chicago appears to
be one of the first institutions to make sharp distinctions between these
three disciplines, although there would be interaction between them at the
university for a number of years. George Herbert Mead, Edward Ames,
and A. W. Moore remained in philosophy, but Mead would teach courses
in comparative psychology and Ames would offer courses in psychology of
religion.
This chapter looks at women who earned doctorates at the University of
Chicago in an era during which philosophy was still considered an expansive
area of inquiry, open to academics across disciplines and applicable to public
life. In a sense their work challenges what we mean by “philosophy” and

prompts us to consider why they and thinkers like them have been neglected.
Philosophy in/and Education
Ella Flagg Young (1845–1918)

BA, Chicago Normal School (1862)
PhD, Education, University of Chicago (1900)
Dissertation: “Isolation in the School”
Career: Chicago Normal School, principal of model school (1865–71);

Chicago public schools, principal (1871–7); Chicago public schools, assistant
superintendent (1887–99); University of Chicago (1900–5); Chicago Normal
School (1905–9); Chicago public schools, superintendent (1909–15); National
Education Association, president (1910)
Life and Career
Ella Flagg Young was born in Buffalo, New York, the daughter of Theodore
and Jane (Reed) Flagg. She had little formal education until she attended the
Chicago Normal School, graduating in 1862. She was married for a short time
to William Young, who succumbed to illness when Ella was in her late twenties.
The couple did not have children, and she did not remarry. Like some other
women in this volume—Rachel Caroline Eaton, Georgiana Simpson, and
Eliza Sunderland (Michigan)—Young was in her fifties when she completed
her doctoral studies. She, Eaton, and Simpson held college-level positions at
points in their careers, but all four women taught at the secondary school level
for longer periods of time than they were able to spend in academia.
With the high value placed on public education in the late nineteenth century,
especially among thinkers like John Dewey who was heavily influenced by the
idealist movement in St. Louis in which pedagogical theory was central, it is no

surprise that Ella Flagg Young was welcomed into the University of Chicago
to study philosophy. Several years older than the professors she studied under,
Flagg was already considered an expert in pedagogy in Chicago. Like Eliza
Sunderland, discussed in Chapter 3, Young was one of the first women to serve
as principal of a public secondary school—just after Anna Brackett of the St.
Louis normal school and Fanny Jackson Coppin, of the Institute for Colored
Youth (now Cheyney University) in Philadelphia (both of whom are discussed
in volume one). She had also been serving as the assistant superintendent of
schools in Chicago for nearly a decade—another “first” for a woman educator—
when she began studying informally with Dewey in 1895. As the nineteenth
century came to a close, Young formally entered doctoral study, was appointed
as a lecturer when she was writing her dissertation in 1899–1900 and was
promoted to full professor at Chicago by 1905.
Although she seems to have been successful as a professor at the university,
it is likely that Dewey’s departure in 1904 and the subsequent restructuring
of the former Department of Philosophy, Psychology, and Education was a
factor in her decision to return to public school work, despite having been
promoted. In 1905, she accepted the offer to become superintendent of the
Chicago public school system—the first woman to hold this position in a
large city in the United States. No doubt, her absence from philosophy in a
college/university setting contributed to the neglect of her as a thinker within
(masculine) discourse in the discipline until recently. Today, however, she is
recognized as a pragmatist in philosophy circles and has received some much-
deserved attention.
Ella Flagg Young’s Philosophical Work
Young published a number of works: Isolation in the School (1900), Ethics in the
School (1902), Scientific Method in Education (1902), Some Types of Modern
Educational Theory (1903), and a six-volume set of school textbooks, edited

with William Field, The Young and Field Literary Readers (1914–16). For the
purposes of this discussion, her first two works are of interest.
Isolation in the School at first appears to be a discussion of educational
administration and school management. But it is actually much more than that.
In this work, Young questions why education so often relies on a competitive
model to encourage student participation and achievement. In doing so,
educators create an artificial environment and one that fosters rivalry, jealousy,
and petty resentments—among both students and teachers. A school system
that operates on this worn-out model demonstrates that “the highest ranking
officer is a person in power rather than a person of power.”15 Operating in
this way is misguided because there are “possibilities of a solidarity among
the members of the corps or faculty, which does not exist in any other calling.
Love of knowledge and faith in the future of humanity are in varying degrees
peculiar to the minds that elect to teach the young.”16 Her goal in this book is
not only to present an alternative to the competitive model in education but
also to validate education as a force in society, affirm the ability of education to
nurture independent and creative thought, and establish the role of education
as a microcosm of society.
One of Young’s major concerns is the tendency of both public schools and
universities in the United States to retreat from the life of the communities
in which they are housed, to focus on their own educational pursuits and
the internal life that has developed within them. This is a mistake in that it
removes individuals from meaningful engaged dialogue and isolates schools
and universities from “the concrete life of the race . . . which would [otherwise]
guarantee to all within their walls . . . the inherent right to initiative in thought
and action.”17 It is worth quoting her at some length on this point:
There appear for the school two aims which are in apparent conflict. Its
avowed object is the training of the individuals intrusted to its care and
direction. The higher, the more nearly perfect that training, the deeper
the recognition of the right and the more pronounced the effort to make
valid the right of each soul to a development of the inborn power of self-
determination. On the other hand as an institution of society, it must
have for its object the direct contribution of elements of strength to that
organization [i.e., the community] of which it is a component part. . . .
These two aims are not in opposition; they are the two phases of the same
unity. Neither can be seen in its entirety without a recognition of the other
parts.18
But the push for educators and the institutions that house them to distinguish
themselves drives a parallel push toward specialization—and ultimately
toward an emphasis on vocational education in preference to the liberal arts.
This, in turn, leads to a view that education is simply a means to an end. Thus
both students and teachers treat the majority of their time in school as a form
of drudgery, valuable only as a means of getting from point A to point B.
Related to this is the question of how best to nurture student learning. In
Young’s day, the old method of rote instruction and memorization had long
ago passed by the wayside. But teachers too often defaulted to a related model,
in which imitation and emulation were central. There seems to be a dichotomy
between imitation and originality—in Young’s view a false dichotomy. “There
is no antithesis between originality and imitation,” she says because “invention
is an outgrowth of imitation. Three elements are involved in the development
of the original out of the imitative; the new ways in which one imitates the
combinations he hits upon when imitating freely [and] the growth of self
through the consciousness of power discovered in varying the copy”19 At this
point, Young discusses emerging iterations of the psychology of learning, and
even nascent neuropsychology, that were under development at this time.20
Young’s greater concern, however, is the role of education in a democracy.
While individual students must certainly be provided with instruction and
nurturing so they can achieve their full potential, education does not end there.
From “the first year in the kindergarten till the close of . . . student life, if the
school functions as an intrinsic part of this democracy, the child, the youth,
and the teacher will each be an organic factor in an organization where rights
and duties will be inseparable.”21 The school, then, is an incubator, providing
an environment in which democratic ideals and practices can flourish. In the
nation’s public schools, students must be equipped with content knowledge
about the formal structures of governance. But they also need to see democratic
practices modeled by teachers and administrative leaders22 Given the increase
in diversity in the United States at this time, Young was optimistic about the
prospects of expanding children’s understanding of democracy and inclusion.
Through public education, “in childhood millions of America’s citizens have
learned something of the fundamentals in the unity of the human race. The
comradeship in experience [which is] developed by the democratic spirit
pervading the methods in instruction and discipline is a more positive factor in
the sympathetic appreciation existing between members of different religious
and social organizations than the association in private or denominational
schools can ever be”23 While the intermingling of diverse cultural groups
leads naturally (Young believed) to assimilation, she takes pains to distinguish
“unification” from “uniformity.” Unification, she believes, provides a sense
of common experience and social unity within diversity. Uniformity, on the
other hand, undermines difference and negates what is unique about distinct
cultural identities. Young places value on unification but dreads the bland
compliance implied by educational structures that demand uniformity.
Young takes a few pages to criticize a common feature of education in
her day: the tendency to emphasize social discord and military conflicts
throughout history. In this sense, she adds to the chorus of women intellectuals
who condemned nearly all forms of violence and hoped to eradicate organized
warfare—among them, Jane Addams, Lucia Ames Mead, and Ida B. Wells-
Barnett, all of whom were discussed in volume one. Schools should focus, she
said, not on “the ethics of war, but the ethics of peace.”24
Young’s central focus in Ethics in the School is in one sense the traditional
project of “training the ethical nature” of children and youth. But she adds a
twist that belies her progressive ideals: “through free expression [which] is
understood in diverse ways.”25 She is critical of teaching methods that rely on
rivalry and competition to motivate students, saying they are shortsighted
and inhibit genuine learning.26 She also warns that education has developed
a culture of its own—one that often does not match the expectations we have
of each other outside school hallways. In this regard, she cites first-hand
accounts: a teacher who recognized her reprimands would not be acceptable
outside a classroom, and another instructor who said she would not want
to act like a schoolmarm in day-to-day life.27 In the last analysis, she says
“the ethical life is the same in the school as it is in all other divisions of
society. . . . The ethical life cannot be separated or differentiated from the
intellectual life.”28
Built into Young’s claim about the unity of ethical and intellectual life is
her understanding that cognition, emotion, and will work in tandem to direct
the processes of both learning and moral decision making. Drawing on the
early theories of learning psychology of William James and other thinkers, she
asserts that
the development of the will is the growth of power in the individual to make
his acts express more and more truly [his or her] feeling and thinking . . . it
aims to keep the child-self a unit in what the psychologist calls his feeling,
thinking, and willing.29
Young concludes by saying that the school should be a
world in which the children find life. This will not be a world determined
by one being; it will be the product of the cooperation of many workers.
Activity in such a school-world will develop habits of doing with and for
others; will develop conceptions of truth, sincerity, goodness, and loveliness
as outgrowths of the daily experience; will develop a will that identifies itself
with the longings, the aspirations, the weaknesses, and the strength of the
mind which it makes known to its fellow beings.30
A Focus on the Ancients
Clara Millerd (1873–1935)

BA, Grinnell College (1893)
PhD, Greek Philology, University of Chicago (1901)
Dissertation: “Aristotle’s Conception of Pre-Socratic Philosophy”
Career: Grinnell College (1893–6; 1901–20); Columbia (1920–2); Skidmore

(1923–5); University of Oregon in Eugene (1927–35)
Clara Millerd was born in Benton Harbor on Lake Michigan, the youngest
of three girls in a family of eight children. Millerd’s father, Norman Alling
Millerd, was a lawyer who later became a Congregational minister. Her
mother, Clara (Church) Millerd appears to have been a homemaker, as was
common at the time. Little information is available about Millerd’s childhood
and early education, but she studied at Grinnell College, graduating in 1893,
before pursuing doctoral study at the University of Chicago.31
Clara Millerd held graduate fellowships in philosophy at Chicago, but
university records list her at one point with a degree in Greek and at another
with a degree in comparative philology (“linguistics” in today’s parlance).
She wrote a dissertation on Aristotle’s understanding of the pre-Socratics,
which is no longer extant. She stands as another example of a woman who
was professionally successful but did not publish significantly after producing
a doctoral thesis. Her career started at her alma mater, Grinnell College,
where she taught Greek and Latin, before and after she earned the doctorate
at Chicago. Incidentally, at Grinnell she taught alongside a fellow graduate
student, Laetitia Moon Conard (1871–1946), who also earned a doctorate at
Chicago, but in religion. Her dissertation was an early anthropological study of
Algonquin spiritual beliefs.32 Conard moved to Iowa when her husband, Henry
Shoemaker Conard, was offered a position in botany at Grinnell College. She
later introduced sociology into the curriculum there.33 Laetitia Conard was a
political progressive who was devoted to both feminism and peace activism. In
the 1910s and 1920s, she was active in the Women’s Peace Union; in the 1930s
she ran as a socialist in state and national elections in Iowa.34
Clara Millerd taught for many years at Grinnell before she married Johan
Smertenko, a journalism professor there, in 1919. Smertenko was a political
progressive who taught courses that focused on “the main theories for social
reform . . . socialism, communism, and communistic experiments” or that
considered “the newspaper and the magazine as texts in the study of current
social problems.”35 An immigrant who had escaped persecution against Jews
in Russia, Smertenko later established himself as a journalist and outspoken
critic of racial and ethnic bias, and anti-Semitism in particular. His article,
“Hitlerism Comes to America” appeared in Harper’s Monthly in 1933.36
Although Millerd is likely to have shared Smertenko’s progressive leanings,
the couple separated sometime after 1925. They were both teaching in New
York in the early 1920s—Millerd first in the university extension program
at Columbia, then at Skidmore; Smertenko at Hunter College. But by 1927,
Millerd had taken a position as an associate professor on the other side of the
country, at the University of Oregon in Eugene, and Smertenko is not listed
in her household in the 1930 census.37 She taught Greek, Latin, and classical
literature there until her tragic death while en route to Asia with other Oregon
faculty in the summer of 1935.38
Academic journals announced that Millerd’s dissertation, “Aristotle’s
Conception of Pre-Socratic Philosophy,” was soon to appear in print, but there
is no evidence that it was ever published in full. Yet, she was recognized for
her sound scholarship in a study of Empedocles, shortly after its publication in
1908 and as late as 1965. This work was discussed by her former advisor, Paul
Shorey, a Greek scholar who maintained ties to the philosophy department at
Chicago even after Dewey’s departure in 1904. Millerd’s work was also reviewed
by the philosopher, Arthur O. Lovejoy and two international scholars.39 Like
many women in this era, Millerd reviewed a number of others’ books but did
not publish any more independent work.
On Psychology and Logic
Matilde Castro (1879–1958)

BA, University of Chicago (1900)
PhD, Philosophy (1907)
Dissertation: “The Respective Standpoints of Psychology and Logic”
Career: Morris High School, teacher (1901–3); Mount Holyoke College

(1904–5); Vassar College (1905–10); Rockford College, department chair
(1910–12); Bryn Mawr, associate/director of education and the Thorne model
school (1913–23)
Life and Career
Matilde Castro was born in Chicago, Illinois, the youngest of four children in
the family of Daniel and Louisa (Hogan or Kogan) Castro.40 Quite likely the first
woman with Latin American heritage to earn a doctoral degree in philosophy
in the United States, she was the daughter of immigrants. Both of her parents
arrived in the country as young adults in the 1860s—her father came from
Colombia, her mother from Austria. Daniel Castro was a cigar manufacturer, as
was the oldest son in the family when he reached adulthood. It appears that her
mother was a homemaker. As was common in this era, Castro remained single
most of her career. She did not marry until she was in her mid-forties. After her
marriage, she does not appear to have held another full-time position.
Little information is available about Castro’s early life and education, but
she began her studies at the University of Chicago in 1896, earning a bachelor’s
degree in 1900. While undertaking graduate study at the university, she also
taught at a high school, serving for two years as its principal. In 1904–5, she
taught at Mount Holyoke College, filling in for Ellen Bliss Talbot who was
studying in Germany that year. She then returned to Chicago where she held a
graduate fellowship in 1905–6. After completing the doctorate in philosophy,

she taught at Vassar College for roughly five years, then accepted another
short-term position at Rockford College, the alma mater of both Jane Addams
and Julia Gulliver. Gulliver was president of Rockford at this time and quite
likely hired Castro to fill a gap left by another Chicago alumna in philosophy
who ended her studies at the master’s level, Harriet Penfield.41
In 1913, Castro accepted an offer to join fellow Chicago alumna, Kate
Gordon, at Bryn Mawr to establish a new graduate school of education.
Gordon had been at the college since 1908, and she was to take the lead as
director of the new school with Castro serving as associate director. Both
women accepted the arrangement, but Gordon soon left for a position at the
Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon), and Castro was
promoted to the director’s position.
Castro’s hiring and promotion at Bryn Mawr is significant, given the fact
that the college’s president M. Carey Thomas (1857–1935) had been vocal about
her racial and ethnic biases in earlier years. For instance, at one point she said
that she wanted “a faculty made up, as far as possible, of our good old Anglo-
Saxon stock.”42 In the 1880s and again in the early 1900s, Thomas did her best
to keep Jewish and African American women from becoming members of the
campus community, whether as faculty or students. Of course, Thomas may
have directed her racism toward only a subset of racial/ethnic groups. A Euro-
Latina like Castro may have been acceptable to Thomas. Correspondence does
not indicate that Castro experienced any discrimination or bias at Bryn Mawr. In
fact, in a 1913 letter to James Tufts, she makes reference to a lunch meeting with
Thomas during which she had “a long and satisfactory interview” for the position
at Bryn Mawr.43 In an undated letter, she also referred to the warm welcome
Thomas had given her when she arrived on campus. She made occasional quips
about her workload at Bryn Mawr after becoming acclimated to the position, but
such comments are not uncommon in exchanges between colleagues. In short, it
appears that there was no overt conflict or tension related to Castro’s hiring and
years of teaching at Bryn Mawr. One can always hope that Thomas had grown
and changed, setting her biases aside by the time Castro was hired.
Castro’s portfolio at Bryn Mawr included overseeing the Phebe Anna
Thorne model school, named for one of the college’s benefactors. According
to an alumna’s historic account, Castro had a “brilliant” career at the college,
providing leadership for both its education program and the model school:
“Those who worked with [Castro] have long testified” that she possessed “real
genius.”44 In addition, in 1921 she was one of three faculty elected by peers
to serve on the committee charged with establishing the Summer School for
Working Women in Industry at Bryn Mawr, which was approved by its board
of trustees and enthusiastically announced in the alumni magazine.45
Castro remained at Bryn Mawr until 1923 when she married James Tufts
who had been widowed three years earlier.46 He had been the chair of Chicago’s
philosophy department when Castro was a student, and their correspondence
indicates that they had a good rapport. After he retired in 1930, she moved with
him to Santa Barbara, California. The couple then relocated north to Berkeley in
1936, where they remained until Tufts’ death in 1942. James Tufts is said to have
taught part-time while they were in California. He also served a term as president
of the APA’s Pacific division. It is not clear if Castro taught part-time at UCLA
or UC Berkeley or at other colleges in proximity to them, but she remained at
least somewhat active professionally. She maintained membership in the APA
during this time and co-wrote a chapter on ethics with Tufts in an edited volume
designed for classroom use, Teaching the Social Studies.47 After his death, Castro
returned to Chicago, where she remained until the end of her life in 1958, but
there is little information available about her life and work during that time.48
Castro’s Philosophical Work
In her dissertation, The Respective Standpoints of Psychology and Logic, Castro

examined what she considered to be two competing systems of thought and
tried to reconcile them. Her main goal is to establish clear boundaries between
psychology and logic and in doing so to determine the ways they can inform
each other. In the past, knowledge and the mind were seen as generating
thought—almost independently of the person doing the thinking. But in
Castro’s view, the new science of psychology has made that view outdated. The
philosopher’s task is “no longer that of investigating the forms and activities
of pure thought, but is the knowledge-of-reality problem.”49 Logic provides
a structure and method for investigating both—psychology and the “pure
thought” of which Castro speaks. Logic can further be put to good use to
close the gap between epistemology and metaphysics. In her view, the two are
simply different ways of approaching the same problem—that is, “the nature of
reality and the relation of thought to it.”50
Before discussing this work further, however, it will be helpful to clarify that
Castro’s use of the terms “psychology” and “logic” do not always correspond
to current usage. This is due in large part to the fact that she was engaged in an
internal discussion related to then-new trends within each field. In this work,
“psychology” often (not always) refers to what now is known as functionalism
within that discipline, and “logic” frequently (again, not always) refers to the
instrumental logic that was propounded by John Dewey.
Functional psychology was a reaction against structuralism, the goal of
which was to determine the features or structures of consciousness—drawing
on thinkers like Kant, Lotze, and Fichte. Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920), who
influenced several women in this volume, was a proponent of structuralism.
At the time Castro was writing, functionalism was a new movement in
psychology advocated by William James and, not surprisingly, his colleagues
at the University of Chicago. Functionalists had doubts that a “structure” of
consciousness was there to be discovered, and aimed instead to examine the
purpose or function of consciousness: What purposes does consciousness serve
in human growth and development? Functionalism was heavily influenced by
Darwinism but was a short-lived movement. Experimental psychology and
behaviorism soon took hold and dominated psychology for decades.
Instrumental logic was also a new movement in Castro’s time, and Dewey
was its most vocal proponent. Dewey was influenced by Hegelian thought
early in his career, and his view of logic may be the best evidence of this fact.
According to instrumental logic, truth is made in and through experience; it
was meant to overcome dualisms—subject/object chief among them. There
were certainly dissenters at the time, however, as we see in A. K. Rogers,
who described instrumentalism this way: “Thinking arises in a given
psychological situation, and its relevancy is entirely limited to that situation.
Thing and idea are reducible to the phases in this tensional experience which
we call thinking . . . and to the situation in which they appear.” He then voices
his objections:
I can not at all understand how [this] position is to be carried out

consistently, without destroying the possibility of thinking altogether. Of
course my thought of a past experience is not itself the past experience. But
unless I can in my thought really refer to the experience now past, . . . I fail
to see how I am to get ahead at all.51
In Castro’s discussion, “psychology” often refers to functionalism, but it

can also mean the study of the mind, cognitive processes, consciousness,
or subjective experiences. And in her usage, “logic” can refer to Dewey’s
instrumental approach, to careful reasoning, or to epistemology. She is not
to be faulted for this. The boxes we place thinkers in a century after they lived
provide us with neat packages. But they do not always accurately represent
how our predecessors saw themselves and experienced their own work. As
Castro worked out her ideas, she sometimes shifted from relatively modern
uses of both terms to ideas and concepts that are outdated.
Castro poses a question early in this text that makes her leanings toward
pragmatism clear: Must we always look for absolute Reality beyond experience,
or are we able to look at the concrete situation before us and accept it as truth?52
Psychology provided new methods to examine experience and systematic
ways to analyze it. Yet it also threatened to encroach upon territory that belong
to philosophy—namely, epistemology and metaphysics—or even to make

philosophy obsolete. In her words: “Psychology, which has endeavored to free
itself from metaphysic[s] . . . and . . . grown so remarkably under the nurture of
natural science [now wants] the right of dominion, even to the very outposts
of metaphysics itself.”53
As her discussion gains momentum, it becomes clear that Castro believes
both psychology and logic would be more effective tools, as such, if they
were to establish clear boundaries. She expresses a number of concerns
about psychology, the majority of which are based on her understanding of
it as clinging to remnants of historical understandings of epistemology, most
notably, the theories of Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. In her view, Locke
provided “no function for thought to perform, since the only connecting
involved is that of the qualities in the object, and these already ‘coexist in
nature.’” Berkeley created a system in which “real knowledge occurs only at
the moment of perception. . . . There is no genuine connection” between or
among his “ideas of sense.”54 From Hume, psychology inherited “a chasm
between thought as continuity or narrative by itself, and the world of things.”
Kant’s theory “resulted [in] a thorough internalizing of the thought-activity
and a consequent externalizing, to the point of complete alienation, of
reality.”55 Part of Castro’s solution is to “advance from the characterization
of the idea as passive, (1) to the description of it as dynamic, with control
over its own sequences, and (2) to the conception of it as a selective, adaptive
process, which, no longer shut up to internality, issues in overt activity.”56
These moves, she says, would allow the idea to become “an adequate tool for
securing knowledge.”57
Castro goes deeper into the function of an “idea” in psychology in a
lengthy discussion of the misuse of this term, as well as the terms “image” and
“meaning.” All three terms are poorly defined and inconsistently used, and
this hobbles discussions in psychology.58 Ideas end up being characterized
as isolated entities that simply seem to appear in a series or that serve as
intermediaries between objects and perceptions. They are detached from
each other, and as a result there is no clear way to establish a relationship

between “ideas” and the thoughts they supposedly produce. There are
similar problems with images, only in the visual sense, according to Castro.
Somehow, both terms are construed as conveying meaning, but it is not clear
how this is so.
In some sense Castro’s criticisms are directed toward William James, and
another proponent of functionalism in psychology, James B. Angell. There is
no way to bring unity to concepts that, in a sense, that hover out there in
reality waiting to convey knowledge to us in ways that are unclear, unknown,
or unknowable. Here we see Castro alternating between complaints about
psychology, which was a newly independent discipline, and epistemology, a
traditional discourse within philosophy. Yet, within her overall project, her
criticisms have merit. Even when contemporaries were able to disentangle
psychology from epistemology, it was becoming the analysis of singular,
independent events and processes. Psychology was not able to examine the
structure of the mind or explore the content of experience.
Castro saw promise in Dewey’s instrumental logic to provide methods
for this more holistic project. Psychology should be “a thoroughly objective
science; there should be no objective-subjective problem.”59 But, of course,
there is such a problem in Western thought, and there has been since Descartes
(if not earlier). Instrumental logic is the remedy needed, because it “accepts
the realism of psychology, which makes the idea a factual existence . . . but it
rejects the subjectivism which makes it stand as a representation of an absent
reality.”60 When this form of logic traces the path of experience back to its
origins—in the supposed dualism of empiricism and psychology (in Castro’s
parlance)—it finds that subject and object do not exist as independent entities;
they exist as such only in the act of judgment. In her words: “It is . . . the
function of the judgement (1) to particularize reality into objectivity, . . . and
(2) to overcome that particularity in order to inaugurate a new continuity
[of experience].”61
Here Castro finds a way to come to terms with the errors of psychology. It
is concerned, not with external realities, but only with internal experiences. In
this sense, psychology does not need to overcome the subject/object divide.
Nor does it need to return to earlier epistemological questions or grapple
with theories of correspondence. It only needs to understand and describe
individual mental states. In this sense, psychology is a descriptive enterprise
and, in Castro’s understanding, logic is a normative one. Logic lays out the
ground rules for all knowledge; psychology examines particular types of
knowledge.
As her discussion comes to a close, she provides a brief survey of the
thinkers whose views align with hers in various ways, primarily a cast of
German and American thinkers who also influenced other women in this
study: Theodor Lipps, Hermann Lotze, F. C. Schiller, Mark Baldwin, and
John Dewey. Edmund Husserl is a notable exception, a contemporary whose
phenomenological methods were only in nascent form in this period. Here
we see that, like Ellen Bliss Talbot (Cornell, 1898), Castro was beginning to
lean toward phenomenology herself. Yet she is the only woman in this volume
who mentioned Husserl by name. Husserl’s understanding of psychology as a
descriptive enterprise matched her own: he held that “psychology has to do
with the individual, the contingent, the fact existing in time and space. . . .
Truth [on the other hand] . . . is not factual; it has no existence in time and
space. Facts are contingent, individual existences, which come and go, but truth
is eternal and timeless.”62 He also provided a way to address how individual
judgment factors in: “Husserl is right in implying that the social nature of the
individual cannot . . . extend the validity of his judgment to universality; it can
at best give it a little wider generality.”63 Castro’s discussion of Husserl ends
there, and unfortunately, she was not to produce additional published work—
until she collaborated with Tufts on the previously mentioned the chapter on
ethics many years later. This hint toward branching out into new intellectual
territory is historically interesting, however, providing us with a window into
academic life at Chicago as new approaches to philosophy emerged at the

dawn of the twentieth century.
A Prelude to Activism
Anna Louise Strong (1885–1970)

BA, Oberlin College (1905)
PhD, Philosophy, Chicago University (1908)
Dissertation: “The Social Psychology of Prayer”
Career: Seattle School Board (1916); Seattle labor newspaper, The Union Record
(1916–19); American Friends Service Committee, Russia correspondent
(1921); International News Service and The Nation, Russia correspondent
(1922–5); Moscow News, founder, editor, and writer (1930); Atlantic Monthly,
The Nation, Harper’s, and Asia magazines (1936–50s)
Life and Career
Anna Louise Strong was born in Nebraska, but grew up primarily in Cincinnati,
Ohio. Her father, Sydney Dix Strong, was a liberal Congregational minister who
embraced religiously based commitments to social justice and to pacifism. Little
information is available about Strong’s mother, who died when she was young.
Strong studied first at Bryn Mawr but finished a bachelor’s degree at Oberlin
(1903). She then completed doctoral work at Chicago, with a degree in philosophy,
although she wrote her dissertation on the psychology of prayer. After earning the
doctorate in 1908, she went to Seattle to live with her father. Here, she was engaged
in local community work and was elected to the school board, the only woman at
the time, and in 1916—four years before women were granted full voting rights
in the United States. Yet, she expressed strong political opinions about the war in
Europe, which enraged local residents; a recall vote was taken and narrowly passed.
After this, Strong went on a career path in journalism that involved long stays in
Russia, then in China, where she lived until the end of her life at the age of eighty-
five. Like Matilde Castro, Anna Louise Strong did not marry until she was in her
forties—to Joel Shubin, a fellow journalist devoted to socialism. The two wed in
1931 and remained together until his death in 1942.
A discussion of Strong’s life and work provides an opportunity to explore what
it means to be “a philosopher,” particularly at the dawn of the academic era in the
discipline. In her memoir, published when she was fifty years old, she reflected
on her reasons for studying philosophy, words that merit quoting her at length:
I decided to specialize in philosophy chiefly because I had liked the

religious emotions which accompanied that subject in Oberlin, where one
got the sense of discovering an infinite world. After the first six months of
the dry philosophy of the University of Chicago, with its logic and theory
of knowledge, I knew that I hated it. Nevertheless I stuck. . . . A doctorate
of philosophy was sure proof of efficiency; nobody could call you shallow
after that. So I worked my brain till I could feel it ache, twisting around new
problems which seemed to me to have no connection with life.64
I took my degree as a doctor of philosophy. My subject was so interesting
that the university revived an unusual tradition and made me “defend my
thesis” before the combined philosophical and theological faculties of
Chicago University. . . . I worked my brain with great pressure and won my
degree magna cum laude, analyzing and proving the derivation of various
forms of prayer. . . . I was the youngest student to have taken such a degree
from Chicago. Then I left the lecture hall and grabbed my golf cape and
rushed to an open square of darkness. . . . I turned and threw a kiss to the
stars. “You Loveliness,” I cried. “I’ve been proving the funniest things about
you. I hope you enjoyed that nice debate.”65
Given her own recounting of this experience, it is not a surprise that Strong
never held an academic position, but instead quickly moved to a career path
that seemed more connected to public life: journalism and political activism.
She published a good number of articles and books, but the majority of her
work was social/political commentary meant for the general reading public
rather than an academic audience. In a sense, Strong’s professional life more
nearly resembles the career trajectories of the women discussed in Volume I—
educators and activists like Lucia Ames Mead, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Luisa
Capetillo—than it does the career path of other women in this volume who
were credentialed in philosophy or related fields.
Strong’s study of the psychology of religion was just the first step in her
personal development. She referred to it as “emotional material [that] attracted
me,”66 and saw it as merely a prelude to her life’s work as a devotee of communism.
There is evidence of her growing disaffection with social injustice in poetry
she published in the Journal of Education shortly after completing her doctoral
work. For instance, the poem, “Cheese It, - The Cop,” published in 1910 and
reprinted in a number of venues, depicts a scene in which children scatter and
hide as a police officer sweeps the neighborhood in search of truant or vagrant
youth.67 In this short work she says that city youth are “desperate” and “hunted”
in such a setting. She also points to the contradiction that “these are the lessons
we teach [our] sons” about law and liberty in the so-called land of the free.
Strong also contributed a similar social protest poem, “The Children’s
Court,”68 to the Journal of Education in 1911. It laments a social structure in
which children are punished, by a “wise judge [who] sits in his stately chair”
simply for playing a game of baseball—presumably instead of attending school.
After her ouster from the school board in Seattle, Strong grew ever more
radical, socially and politically. In the 1920s, she made her first trips to Russia
and China and began to channel her energies into journalism and activism.
Over the course of her life she published at least twenty books and countless
articles expressing her political views—producing far more work than there
is room to discuss here. She provided an array of reasons to reject Western
capitalism throughout these works. During long stays abroad, she sought an
ideal of communal life that she believed would be possible in Russia in the
early twentieth century and later in China at mid-century.
Strong’s Philosophical Work
Anna Louise Strong’s academic writings are of interest for our purposes in
that they point to yet more boundary crossing among the women discussed
in this volume—in this case between philosophy, psychology, and religion.
She published three such works: “The Relation of the Subconscious to Prayer”
(1907), which addressed questions she would later discuss in her doctoral
thesis and was published in the short-lived Journal of Religious Psychology
and Education; her dissertation, The Psychology of Prayer (1909); and “Some
Religious Aspects of Pragmatism” (1908) which appeared in The American
Journal of Theology.
Psychology and Prayer

Strong opens her discussion of the psychology of prayer with two assertions
that appear elsewhere among women in this study: first, human beings are
inherently social; we do not “acquire” sociality, but are born with it.69 We saw
Ethel Gordon Muir (Cornell 1896) making the same claim just over ten years
prior to the publication of Strong’s dissertation. Second, psychology as an
area of inquiry that allows us to examine the “material which consciousness
actually presents to view.”70 That is, psychology, for many thinkers in this
period was understood as an objective area of study that simply observed
phenomena as they appeared before the mind. Strong often makes references
to the effect of “temperament,” differing perspectives or points of view on
religious experience. In this sense, she is one of the thinkers who had begun
to understand the challenges that subjectivity presented in conducting
research in psychology. But she also had a great deal of faith in the idea that
“consciousness” did indeed “present material” to the mind. In this sense,
she, like Ellen Bliss Talbot at Cornell, may have benefited from being better
acquainted with phenomenology as it began to gain traction a few years after
she had finished doctoral studies.
It is important to understand another basic assumption Strong makes as she

embarks on a study of prayer as a psychological phenomenon: there are two
aspects of the self, which are essentially in dialogue when a person is engaged
in prayer. There is a “me,” which is the ordinary, limited, experiencing self,
and there is an “alter,” which is a subconscious, ideal self. She assumes these
two aspects of the self are in dialogue in and through the act of prayer. Ethel
Gordon Muir made a similar claim in relation to ethical decision making,
strongly leaning toward a moral psychology. In Strong’s view, the interaction
of these two aspects of the self involves both imagination and interpretation
of experience. In addition, the self emerges from such interactions a new and
more complete self. Here we see remnants of early American philosophical
idealism and its view that education involves escaping the self to explore
other possibilities (through literature, for example) and then returns, a
more knowledgeable and transformed version of the self. Susan Blow and
Anna Brackett developed this discussion fully in their theories of education,
discussed in volume one.
Now that Strong’s basic assumptions have been laid out, it is time to discuss
her claims, some of which align well with studies in the sociology of religion
in this period. In prayer, there is a “constant entering into relation with other
selves, out of which . . . there emerges a self which was not there before.”71
There are two major forms of prayer—the aesthetic and the ethical—and
both help a person aim toward ethical action (i.e., agency) and establish a
“wider” (more enriched) self. Citing a survey in which only 5 percent of
respondents, all of whom reported having an active religious life, indicated
that they believe prayer yields positive outcomes, Strong asks what exactly is
the nature of prayer.72 In her analysis, prayer plays a number of functions, and
here she leans toward social psychology of religion. A person who believes
in prayer feels more confident, has a more positive outlook on life, and/or a
stronger sense of resolve. Their request to perform well on a test, succeed in
their job, or to break a bad habit does not actually get “answered,” but their
conscious statement of their desire and belief in the efficacy of prayer leads
them to feel more self-assured or see the glass as “half-full,” as we say, and
succeed in their endeavors. Prayer can provide a believer with a sense of
community strength and support. Being among others who pray together
ensures any given individual that others embrace their views or are joining
them in a shared struggle.
Prayer can also open a person’s awareness to new possibilities, even in
mundane ways. Strong recounts the experience of a friend who had misplaced
a notebook and was unable to recall where she had left it for days on end. It was
only after she prayed about it that its whereabouts crept back into her memory
and she was reunited with the lost object. Believers generally pray for greater
awareness in a “big picture” sense, of course, not simply to find a notebook or a
parking space (although I personally have witnessed people praying for such).
But Strong provides us with this ordinary example for a reason. She takes a
realist’s point of view, pointing out that what we now call “selective memory”
was in play. Her friend’s memory was triggered by “the relinquishment of the
conscious striving [to remember] . . . It is like the remembering of a name by
giving up the strenuous effort. . . . These latter achievements are not given a
religious sanction, but the psychological process is the same. . . . [There was] a
conscious and reflective connecting of the two selves.”73 The last type of prayer
on Strong’s list: a connection of the two aspects of the self: the day-to-day self
that is “me” and the ideal, higher self that she calls the “alter.”74
Praying in the hope of curing disease is a special category of prayer that Strong
takes up, citing the then-new Christian Science tradition and the Emmanuel
Movement.75 In her day anecdotal reports of faith healing abounded. Thus she
felt compelled to analyze this form of prayer. Reports that prayer has helped
cure illness or injuries, she says, are “extremely subjective,” but her overall
thesis still holds: prayer instills confidence and a positive outlook in a believer.
In addition, prayer may serve as a stimulant to the faithful person, or the power
of suggestion may influence an individual’s perception of their own health. She
concludes that the relation between prayer and health is “as yet incompletely
determined,” but adds that “any disease at all affected by nervous conditions
[i.e., mental health] comes of course well within the province’ of prayer.”76
In the end, Strong wants not only to describe prayer but also to evaluate the
different manifestations of it. Therefore, she concludes this section by saying
that for religion to be “ethical,” there must be an “intrinsic connection between
the morally ideal self and the ideally powerful self.”77
The final question to consider in Strong’s thesis is the nature of “aesthetic”
prayer and “ethical” prayer. In short, aesthetic prayer is contemplative practice
in its many forms; ethical prayer is contemplation focused on action. Aesthetic
prayer focuses on bringing harmony, order, and appreciation of beauty to a
person’s awareness. Forms of prayer that allow a person to be open to such
include prayers of peace, prayers of adoration of the divine, prayers for
deliverance (from sin or suffering), and prayers of thanksgiving. In such forms
of prayer, a person is able to transcend their ordinary selfhood, similar to a
mystical trance—even when such prayers take place in a communal setting.
When these prayers take place among members of a community, they build a
“chain of habit,” “reinforce our strivings,” and/or help each believer resolve to
make their behavior conform to their highest ideals.78 Buddhist meditation,
Strong tells us, is not only the most advanced form of this type of prayer
but also the perfect example of the “complete blotting out of consciousness”
through prayer.79 In such a state, a person has “passed beyond the strife of
selves . . . the alter completely dominates the consciousness . . . there ceases, for
the time being, to be any distinction of objective or subjective.”80 References
to Buddhism and other non-Western traditions repeatedly appear in Strong’s
discussion. But so too does a term used by Theodor Lipps (1851–1914) when
he translated Hume’s Treatise into German: Einfühlung—“feeling into” or
empathy. Strong invokes the term a number of times to underscore how deeply
religious experience can influence a person’s life. Within her discussion,
Einfühlung is “the process of living in a life which you recognize as in a sense
not our own, but which for the moment at least you live more intensely” than
your ordinary life.81 In aesthetic forms of prayer, a believer gives up their
individual will and conditions their mind to give itself over to the process of
contemplation.
Ethical prayer is focused on action and is the “imperative” of “true religion,”
in Strong’s view.82 It is also designed to ensure we develop a “wider self,” but
a person’s temperament can make them more or less open to such forms of
prayer (as is the case with all prayer for Strong).83 Ethical prayer provides
believers with a sense of empowerment, with enthusiasm, an ideal, and the
strength to attain it. She discusses conversion as a special example of ethical
forms of prayer, because it illustrates so effectively how and why prayer can
be transformative. Religious conversion is focused on completely overhauling
the self to create a wholly new self. In conversion, an individual is faced with a
crisis, generally an internal conflict. And they are forced to resolve that conflict
on a spiritual level. As Strong observes, sometimes an individual’s crisis appears
“ridiculously insignificant” to others, as when a would-be convert refuses to
join others at a religious site, and in contrition prays in a mud puddle instead.
And, a religious skeptic in so many ways, Strong later adds that such concerns
can be a terrible “waste of mental energy.”84 At the same time, ethical forms
of prayer, including conversion, prompt us to recognize our self in relation
to others, to build capacities for moral action, and to join together with a
unified sense of purpose. Ethical forms of prayer help us develop a self that
has a “heightened moral tone.” This is essential if prayer is to be meaningful,
because the aim of all prayer is to give believers a sense of inner peace and
evidence of moral uplift.85
Psychology and Pragmatism

Strong was eager to demonstrate the relevance of her study in relation to
contemporary developments in philosophy and published “Some Religious
Aspects of Pragmatism” (1908). In the article, she makes some claims that
provide a window into the history of philosophy, psychology, and religion in
this period. She begins her discussion by declaring there is a false opposition
between religion and pragmatism. Pragmatism has indeed been aligned with
science in the intellectual world, but it is mistaken to suggest that religion is
always anti-scientific and absolutist in its outlook. Theological traditions have
been rationalistic, often clinging to old notions derived from Platonism, so
have been preoccupied with “intellectual interrelations of certain concepts.”
In this sense, theology is similar to traditional approaches to philosophy, in
Strong’s view, which are all too content to let the discipline remain an internal
dialogue without relevance to contemporary life. Lived religion, on the other
hand (religion “for the popular mind” in Strong’s parlance), has long embraced
a trial and error approach, to “verify a hypothesis by acting on it.” In a bit
of a jab at her colleagues in philosophy and science, Strong then notes that
pragmatism has demonstrated that faith actually underlies reason, that in
some sense, “faith in a fact can help create that fact.”86 If theology were more
aware of and responsive to discoveries in science, it too could become one of
the sciences.
Strong’s main aim, however, is to explore some central religious concepts
as a pragmatist: God, freedom, and immortality. She begins with the second
and third items on that list, because she finds them less challenging to discuss.
Freedom is not a concern. As F. C. Schiller (1864–1937) said, we have learned
that nature is not indifferent to human action. We can and do make an impact
in the world, and there is no need to be concerned that we are engaged in a
“weary grinding out of a predetermined course of things.”87 The same is the
case with our discussions of immortality. Strong again agrees with Schiller that
this matter has been resolved since Kant; the question of immortality relates
more to ethical issues than to metaphysical questions that defy our attempts
to answer them.
God, or the idea of God—this is a matter worth discussing for Strong.
The average person in Strong’s time was familiar with the idea that religion
and religious beliefs have changed through time. Citing discussions of the
Jewish and Christian traditions of her day, she claims that most believers
would accept the fact that religion emerged from a tribal tradition that
transformed into belief in a transcendent God, to faith in a reconciling
and redeeming spiritual figure, and to what she described as a democratic
understanding of an immanent presence. Everyday believers might balk at
the suggestion that God as a being has changed over time. Yet, this is what
Strong believes a pragmatist can and must claim. Whether God is seen as
encompassing all of reality, as religious absolutists would maintain, or God
relates primarily to humans as one segment of the cosmos, pragmatism
would embrace a dynamic God, not a static concept called by the same
name.
Whether to consider God as a form of consciousness, as a function of
individual experience, as a broad psychological phenomenon, or a process,
an experience—these are vexing questions. Strong’s own view is that it makes
sense to call God a consciousness, because this is “the one form of unity,
and indeed the one form of experience, that we do know. . . . [A]ll in all, the
particular process we know [that is, conscious experience] will be found our
best analogy for the total process,”—that is, Reality or God.88 At this point,
she light-heartedly recognizes that some readers may identify elements of
Josiah Royce (1855–1916) in her discussion. Her answer? “I confess the
indebtedness.”89 In fact, she recognizes her reliance not only on Royce but also
on Schiller and William James. She fully embraces the somewhat tentative and
humble claims made by pragmatists about the nature of God and humans’
relationship to such, James in particular. The pragmatists, she says, do not
speculate about God and/or the “existence of a long stretch of empty time in
which experience does not yet exist.”90 For pragmatists, it is sufficient to say
that God is an experience that is larger than ourselves. God does not need to
stand outside time or be the author of it. In addition, some pragmatists may
not be inclined toward religion at all. “The category of religious experience
may not be vital for [their] use.”91
Chronicling the Trail of Tears
Rachel Caroline Eaton (1869–1938)

Cherokee Female Seminary (1887)
BS, Drury College (1895)
MA, University of Chicago (1911)
Thesis: “John Ross”
PhD, History, University of Chicago (1919)
Dissertation: “John Ross and the Cherokee Indians”
Career: Cherokee Female Seminary, Tahlequah, Indian Territory (ca. 1888–

92; 1895–?); principal, Nowata Cherokee Nation public schools (ca. 1900–10);
State College for Women, Columbus, Mississippi (1911–12); Lake Erie College
(1913–14); dean of women, Trinity College, Texas (1914–18); Oklahoma
Defense Council (1917–19); Claremore high school, Oklahoma (1919–20);
superintendent of schools, Rogers County, Oklahoma (1920–4)
Life and Career
Rachel Caroline Eaton was born in Arkansas, the firstborn child of Nancy
Ward (Williams) and George Washington Eaton, in a family of four.92 Her
father had European heritage and was a Confederate veteran of the US Civil
War. Her mother was a descendant of Nancy Ward, a revered Cherokee leader
before the American Revolution known as Ghigau, or “Beloved Woman.” The
family moved to Indian Territory in Oklahoma when Eaton was young, and
she was raised near a town called Claremore, the site of a legendary battle
between the Cherokee and Osage tribes in 1818. She attended public schools
there, then enrolled in the Cherokee Female Seminary about 1885. She and
her sister, Martha Pauline Eaton, were star students at the school. Biographical
accounts are unclear, but it appears that immediately after graduating Eaton
taught in the local schools near her home in Claremore, Oklahoma, including
at the Seminary itself.
In the early 1890s, Eaton went 150 miles northeast to study at Drury
College in Springfield, Missouri, where she earned a bachelor’s degree.
Possibly returning home to teach in local schools for the next few years, in
1901 she married James Alexander Burns, who had been a schoolmate at the
boys’ division of the Cherokee Seminary. The two were both professionally
successful. Between 1895 and 1900, James was the superintendent of schools
in Heber, Arkansas, and held the same position in the Claremore public school
system. He helped establish the Indian Territory Teachers Association in 1900,
then was enlisted to organize the Nowata Cherokee Nation public school
system, about thirty miles north of Claremore. Details are not available about
Eaton’s professional activities after her marriage, but in 1905, she and James
attended summer sessions together at the University of Chicago. Sometime
before 1915, the couple divorced.
About 1906 Eaton enrolled in graduate courses at the University of Chicago.
She wrote a master’s thesis on the Cherokee leader John Ross in 1911, then
reworked and expanded it between 1912 and 1914. The first work was just over
fifty pages. The expanded version was 150 pages long, and she submitted it as a
doctoral thesis in 1919.93 She is thought to be the first Native American woman
to earn a doctorate in the humanities.
Eaton’s discussion of John Ross and his role as one of the leaders of the
Cherokee Nation is, like Anna Julia Cooper’s thesis on Haiti and the French
Revolution, discussed in Chapter 6, primarily a historical study. Yet the two
have value for consideration by philosophers today. Like Cooper’s work,
Eaton’s analysis comes from the perspective of a woman of color. It is the first
analysis of tribal history that de-centers the dominant culture and focuses
instead on an indigenous perspective. Eaton herself was a mixed-race woman
educated in the Western tradition, and there are many moments in which she
belies assimilationist ideals and values. Yet she does her best to provide an
informed account of Cherokee traditions and ideals as they developed from
the decades leading up to the “Indian Removals” in the late 1820s until the
period of time just after the US Civil War. Eaton’s work reveals tensions within
Cherokee society between a quest for indigenous autonomy, an interest in
“modernization,” and a purely assimilationist agenda in the nineteenth century.
Eaton is one of ten women in this volume who addressed social and political
issues, four of whom were women of color. She does so in three ways: first, she
informs her readers of long-held traditions in Cherokee culture, which included
shared governance and cooperative management of resources. For instance, she
notes that land was held in common until late into the nineteenth century. She
also makes reference to “neighborhood communities” and networks of mutual
assistance that were in place during times of scarcity. Preemptively countering
biased understandings of indigenous history, she quipped, “The proverbial
‘lazy Indian’ was hard to find among the Cherokee people.”94 Paired with many
of these observations, however, are assimilation-focused assertions that the
Cherokee had long been a “civilized” tribe. They quickly embraced Western
forms of government, religion, education, agriculture, and architecture that
were “advanced,” for instance, and did not resemble the “wild” tribes to their
south and west. She suggests that only the most “conservative” chiefs objected
to the modern practices the Cherokee adopted as a result of contact with
European settlers, and she repeatedly reports that John Ross and his associates
were educated, intelligent, and “refined.”95
Eaton uses an objective tone as she recounts the political events leading
up to and following the “Indian Removals,” but ultimately does the much-
needed work of ensuring the Cherokee perspective is heard. She quickly
identifies Andrew Jackson as “no friend to the Indian,” but also recognizes
that unjust policies toward the indigenous people had begun long before
Jackson took office.96 Essentially from the beginning, officials in the United
States began taking advantage of language barriers and cultural differences in
their interactions with the Cherokee. They drafted treaties that were rife with
“Delphic vagueness,”97 in Eaton’s words—complex, difficult to interpret, and
frequently annulled without notice or cause. The US officials also used deft
legal arguments to make claims against the Cherokee or limit their options.
For instance, after Cherokee leaders established and ratified a constitution—a
sign of “civilization” in their eyes—the state of Georgia charged the tribe had
no right to set up an independent government within the state’s jurisdiction or
“interfere with the rights of a sovereign state” (i.e., Georgia). The state further
claimed that the Cherokee were “tenants at will” who could be ousted at any
time and that they must live under Georgia state law rather than assert their
autonomy.98 Cherokee leadership turned to legal counsel that made skillful
counterarguments on their behalf, saying they were the original inhabitants
of the land, so had an inherent and long-lived right to it. Furthermore, as an
independent and sovereign nation the tribe had entered into treaties with the
US government—and under the Constitution a treaty is the “supreme law of
the land.” Therefore, the Cherokee Nation was under no obligation to comply
with the demands being made by the state of Georgia. In fact, compliance with
that state’s mandates would be a violation of the tribe’s previous agreements
with the federal government. The conflict went to the Supreme Court, which
ruled against the tribe. The Court declared that the Cherokee Nation was not
considered a foreign state under the US Constitution, which meant the state
of Georgia did indeed have jurisdiction over tribal lands that lay within its
borders. Justices John Marshall and Joseph Story wrote dissenting opinions.99
Eaton demonstrates that the conflict with the state of Georgia was just
one of many battles in which crafty political maneuvers ruled the day. But
the realities the Cherokee faced as a result were devastating. After the Court
ruled against the tribe, vigilantism ran rampant. Families were attacked in
their homes or in the fields and their property was ransacked or burned to
the ground. Atrocities took place in waves throughout the removals, as one
“lawless rabble” or another contributed to what could only be called a “reign of
terror.”100 Official actions played a role, too, of course—and in truly terrorizing
ways. An old man named Tsali who tried to escape troops when the removals
began was captured and shot—by fellow Cherokees who were forced into
taking part in the execution.101 White missionaries and teachers who had been
working alongside members of the tribe and built bonds in the community
were convicted under a new law that limited tribal autonomy. They were then
marched through the territory in chains, and sentenced to four years of hard
labor. The incident went to court and this time the ruling was in the tribe’s
favor. Even so, it is clear that tactics like this were used to “impress upon the
Indians the hopelessness of their situation.”102
Eaton appears to have faith in the political process on some level, however.
She cites moments when there was a public outcry against the injustices
the Cherokee were subjected to, saying at one point that the “conscience of
the whole country was aroused.”103 She also recognized specific politicians
who spoke on behalf of indigenous rights, such as members of Congress,
Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, Sprague of Maine, and Webster of Massachusetts.
At one point the pressure from opponents was so strong that things became
“too uncomfortable” for the president, according to Eaton, and he delayed the
initiation of the removals.104 Yet she was a realist at heart and a bit of a cynic.
The removals, she said, were “part of the penalty for Indian patriotism. . . .
All this at the hands of a government established less than three-quarters of
a century before upon the principle of justice and the rights of man. This
same government had shot down Cherokees like dogs, quartered them like
malefactors and even put a price upon their heads.”105
It is difficult to square Eaton’s condemnation of US government atrocities
against the Cherokee with her uncritical acceptance of the tribe’s practice
of keeping slaves before the Civil War. Of course, she was the daughter of a
man who fought for the Confederacy, so she would have been raised with an
emphasis on the slaveholder’s perspective. She also studied documents that
provided details about the debate within the tribe about whether to support
the Union, the Confederacy, or to stay neutral. Neither the North nor the
South had gone out of its way to engage with the tribe in any positive ways
since the removals, after all. According to Eaton, John Ross preferred to
remain neutral, but as events unfolded that position became untenable. The
southern states were right next door, and other tribes began aligning with the
South. In the end, Eaton reports that Ross and other leaders agreed to support
the Confederacy, and she does so with no commentary on the morality of
such a stance. One would expect a woman of color writing more than fifty
years after the Civil War to have had a more enlightened perspective. Slave
ownership is a feature of Cherokee life that she all too often lumps in with
other “advanced” social practices that, in her mind, demonstrated how
modern and civilized the tribe was. A very puzzling and troubling approach,
indeed.
Eaton also demonstrated uncritical acceptance of missionary activity on
tribal lands, which often took place alongside education and the establishment
of schools. Neither is surprising, given her historical and social context. She
lived in a place and time in which Christianity was dominant and sacrosanct,
and she herself was devoted to the Presbyterian faith she was raised with.106
And as an educator herself, Eaton had an affinity for establishing schools. Her
view of education aligns well with the views of some of the women discussed
at length in volume one. At different points in the text, she spoke approvingly
of both “industrial” education (or vocational training) and a gender-based
curriculum: agricultural sciences and the trades for the boys, and domestic
education (later “home economics”) for the girls. Yet, her brief discussion of the
founding of a high school in 1851 demonstrates that vocational training did not
dominate tribal education—and she appears to approve of this as well. “Little
attempt at industrial education was made” at the high school “except that each
student was assigned by turns to some special duty in . . . housekeeping”107—a
model used at both Oberlin and Berea in the early days. Liberal arts education
was a central feature at the high school, with a curriculum that included math,
the natural sciences, history, Latin, Greek, theology, and philosophy. She notes
the philosophy and theology texts by name: Improvement of the Mind, by Isaac
Watts and Natural Theology, by William Paley. The first faculty at the school
had grown up in Indian Territory, the daughters of two missionaries who were
educated at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts—two superior young
women, in Eaton’s estimation: Sarah Worcester and Ellen Whitmire.108 At the
time, Mount Holyoke was considered a model for women’s education, and a
number of prominent members of the tribe sent their daughters there. (Their
sons went to Princeton.) After ten years in existence, over sixty young women
had graduated from the high school, and many of them became teachers
themselves.
As a whole, Eaton’s study of John Ross as a Cherokee leader is a historical
account with political and moral analysis built in. It is clear that one of her aims
was to undermine the popular portrayal of indigenous people as “uncivilized.”
Another was to bring to light the political injustices and abuses Cherokees
were subjected to—despite American claims of freedom and justice for all.
Another of Eaton’s goals may well have been to underscore the resilience of the
Cherokee people through it all: Politicians “did not appreciate the character of
the [people] with whom they were dealing. A people naturally so tenacious of
their right to life and liberty could not . . . yield up their autonomy at the drop
of the hat after all the years of struggle to maintain it.”109
Folkways and Philosophy
Georgiana Simpson (1866–1944)

Certificate, Miner Normal School (1885)
BA, University of Chicago (1911)
MA, University of Chicago (1920)
MA thesis: “The Phonology of Merigarto”
PhD, German Philology (1921)
Dissertation: “Herder’s conception of ‘das Volk’”
Career: Hillsdale School, Washington, DC, teacher (1885–6); M Street School/

Dunbar High School, teacher (1886–1907; 1911–17; 1921–31); study in Europe
(1896; 1905; 1912; 1914); Howard University (1931–9)
Life and Career
Georgiana Rose Simpson was born in Washington, DC, the oldest child in a
family of six born to David and Catherine Simpson.110 Her parents are thought
to have been among the many refugees in the region who were freed from
slavery during the US Civil War. Her mother worked as a laundress, and
her father was a farmer who also held a position at Washington’s Botanical
Gardens; in the 1880s he was listed in the census as a hostler, living on Howard
Avenue in Washington.
Simpson was educated at Hillsdale School, established by the Freedmen’s
Bureau in the Barry Farm section of Washington, DC. Encouraged by Frances
Eliza Hall, a white teacher from New York who told Simpson she had “a
first-class mind,” she continued her studies at the Miner Normal School,
also in Washington. Lucy Moten, a well-known figure in African American
education, also recognized Simpson’s talent and urged her to pursue advanced
study. After getting a start as a teacher at Hillsdale, she accepted a position at
the well-known M Street School (later Dunbar High School) in Washington,
DC. She then acted on the advice of Moten, and applied to the University of
Chicago, which was known to be a progressive institution.
Simpson was successful academically at Chicago, but racist attitudes
presented a good deal of difficulty for her there. She first earned a bachelor’s
degree at the university in 1911, then returned for graduate study in 1917.
Unfortunately, she was subject to racism both times she was in residence at
Chicago. Several white southerners objected to her presence in the dormitories
while she was studying at the undergraduate level and moved out of campus
housing in protest. The dean of women, Marion Talbot, and her assistant dean,
Sophonisba Breckinridge, refused to be held hostage to racist demands and
readily found other students to take their place in the dorms. When the new
president of the university, Harry Pratt Judson, returned from his summer
travels, however, he reversed their decision.111 There was an outcry by liberally
minded members of the campus and local community. As a representative

of the Frederick Douglass Center in Chicago, Celia Parker Woolley, a white
woman and friend of the African American feminist, Fannie Barrier Williams,
wrote to condemn Judson’s decision: “Your action in this matter was based
upon the consideration of the feelings of southern students. We respectfully
submit that nearly every colored young man and woman seeking the benefits
of your institution is a ‘southern’ student, whose rights and feelings deserve
equal consideration.”112 She continued to point out that Breckinridge, a white
woman from the south, as well as several southern-born white students fully
affirmed integration on campus. There was simply no need to reverse the
action Talbot and Breckinridge had taken and to thereby displace Simpson.
Unfortunately, the university’s president was unyielding, and Simpson was
forced to live off-campus.
Simpson’s time as a graduate student overlapped with race riots in Chicago
in 1919, and some white students used this unrest as a pretext for protesting
her presence in the residence halls. Georgiana Simpson again found herself
without official support and was unable to continue to reside on campus. It
is clear that the racism she was subjected to cast a hue over her experience,
because historic accounts indicate that she studied some summers in Chicago
to avoid tensions with other students there. Nevertheless, she completed work
for both a master’s degree and a doctorate, becoming one of the first three
women of color to earn a doctorate in the United States, tied with Eva Dykes,
discussed in Chapter 5, and Sadie Mossell Alexander, an economist who
earned a degree from the University of Pennsylvania and established herself in
a career with the US government.
Despite the turmoil Simpson withstood over campus housing, it appears
that she received strong mentoring as a graduate student at Chicago. In
the published version of her dissertation, she acknowledges each of her
advisors, Starr W. Cutting, Martin Schütze, and Francis A. Wood. Schütze
was given added recognition, however. Simpson said that she owed “a
special debt of gratitude to him, not only for his guidance in this endeavor,
but for the inspiration and encouragement which has come to me from the
very beginning of my work.”113 Schütze, who was on friendly terms with
James Hayden Tufts and shared many of his views, including some of his
philosophical interests, seems to have thought highly of Simpson’s work. He
wrote a review of her book and referred to her work in his own publication
on one occasion.114
After earning each of her degrees, Simpson returned to Washington, DC, to
teach at Dunbar High School. Several women in this volume found themselves
teaching secondary school at some point after completing their doctorates.
Marietta Kies, Eliza Sunderland, Ellen Bliss Talbot, Grace Neal Dolson, Eva
Dykes, and Anna Julia Cooper all taught at high schools for at least a few
years after earning a PhD; Sunderland and Cooper never held official college/
university positions. Simpson was fortunate in that Howard University
recognized her achievements and offered her a faculty position—albeit ten
years later. She taught at the university from 1931 until she retired in 1939.
In Washington, Simpson was part of an active community of African
American intellectuals. She, Eva Dykes, discussed in Chapter 5, and Marita
Bonner, who earned a bachelor’s degree at Radcliffe, were teachers in the city’s
public school system in the 1920s. Simpson and Dykes taught at Dunbar High
School, and Bonner taught at the Armstrong school. Simpson and Dykes were
offered faculty positions at Howard University in close succession—Dykes in
1929 and Simpson in 1931. Simpson would also have met other prominent
African American thinkers at Howard, the philosopher, Alain Locke, and
the historian Charles Henry Wesley, if she had not crossed paths with them
before that time. Within the larger community, Simpson was close to Helen
(Pitts) Douglass, a white woman whose marriage to Frederick Douglass
was controversial. Like Ida B. Wells-Barnett, however, Simpson established
a friendship with the second Mrs. Douglass, who was roughly a generation
older. In fact, she lived in Douglass’s household for a period time at the turn
of the twentieth century.115 Like the majority of career women at this time,
Simpson never married.
Simpson was recognized during her lifetime by having her image on the
cover of the NAACP periodical, Crisis, just after her doctorate was conferred.
More recently, she was memorialized with the installation of a bust in her
likeness at the University of Chicago. There is also an organization named in
her honor, The Georgiana Simpson Society, which is devoted to the study of
Germany and the African diaspora.
Georgiana Simpson’s Philosophical Work
As has been the case for a number of women in this volume, Simpson devoted
herself to teaching, so did not publish a great deal. The two works that are
relevant to our discussion here are first, a slim volume on Toussaint Louverture,
which she produced for her classes at Dunbar High School, and secondly,
her dissertation, a discussion of the concept of “das Volk” in the works of the
German romantic thinker, Johann Gottfried Herder.
In 1925, Simpson reissued Toussaint Louverture (Surnommé le Premier
des Noirs), a concise biography of the Haitian revolutionary by Gragnon-
Lacoste. This edition was in French but included Simpson’s brief introduction
and annotations in English. In producing this volume, she had three goals in
mind: first, the text was to be used for language instruction. Second, it would
introduce students to African-heritage Francophone culture in the Americas.
Third, it would acquaint students with a major historical figure of African
descent who (she believed) would instill them with pride in their own heritage
and culture. She is quite clear about this third point, saying men like Toussaint
are “geniuses and heroes” who “tower above ordinary human heights [like]
. . . supermen [who] belong to the whole world.”116 In this sense, Simpson’s
slim volume joins a body of Harlem Renaissance-era literature that sought to
bring African-heritage culture and achievements to light. Her introduction
touches on the themes of equality and freedom that were an outgrowth of the
American and French revolutionary struggles and which were so central to
Toussaint’s legacy. These are themes that have been “in the air” in nearly every
classroom in the United States since the dawn of public schooling, but were
inaccessible to African American and other minority youth for far too long
and in far too many ways. In this sense, Simpson sought to expand and extend
the reach of traditional American ideals to students of color in her classroom.
Simpson’s most substantial work, Herder’s Concept of “das Volk,” was her
dissertation, published in 1921. In the decades since she conducted research
for the book, interpretations of Herder have varied. Some have identified his
ideas as laying a foundation for nationalism, white nationalism in Europe and
the United States in particular. Others have seen him as an early anthropologist
who attempted to gather empirical data to build a viable theory, rather than
offer up “pure theory” as his contemporaries in philosophy had done. As
he examined variations in lifeways, traditions, and cultures across Europe,
say these Herder analysts, he also tried to explain their value and function
within each cultural community. Still others have held Herder responsible
for validating not only cultural relativism but moral relativism as well. His
observations that social practices vary across different cultural groups, they
say, has led to acceptance of those practices, even when they are harmful.
In my reading of Simpson, she held the second view of Herder. He was
an early anthropologist who was simply trying to understand and elucidate
the lifeways of societies that were unfamiliar to him. Her discussion covers
material that was relevant to the newly emerging disciplines of linguistics and
anthropology, as well as philosophy. She opens with a consideration of the
origin of the term “Volk” and variations of it across cultures. She also reflects
on concerns that were of interest to Herder: the range of lifeways and social
practices within “folk” cultures and what this means about the placement of
“Volk” in the hierarchy of civilizations that Herder and a number of thinkers
in his day considered valid. A “Volk” for Herder is sometimes a more
“primitive” people who have not yet acquired advanced education and cultural
refinement. At other times, Herder characterizes “Volk” as the mass of people
between the cultural elite and the peasantry in a given society. In most cases,
“Volk” produce poetry, stories, songs, and other forms of cultural expression
that help establish their identity as a people. Interestingly, Simpson simply
explains Herder’s hierarchical notions. She does not interrogate them in the
same way that contemporaries, like W. E. B. DuBois and Carter Woodson,
would do elsewhere as they worked to dismantle elitism and Eurocentricism
in American thought. Perhaps this is because she appreciated the nuances of
his thought or was able to excuse its more archaic elements.
The heart of this work is Simpson’s discussion of Herder regarding
individuality, which in turn helps to inform his concept of “Volk.” Each
individual possesses stimulus (Reiz) and powers (Kräfte) that provide both an
impetus to action and a means of appropriating experiences in a coordination
of sense-experience and cognitive processing of that experience. This
combination of forces facilitates a process of individual development that
makes each person unique. In this section of her discussion, Simpson makes it
clear that both she and Herder were well-versed in idealist understandings of
epistemology and ontology. Her discussion of the dynamic process of acquiring
knowledge and the development of personality that results are similar to those
expressed by Susan Blow in Volume I and to some degree with Vida Moore’s
discussion of Lotze in Chapter 2. Societies are similar to individuals in this
way, for Herder. The natural environment and cultural forces that shape
communities and nations combine to create a unique cultural experience that
then leads a people to see itself as not just an aggregate, but a cohesive unit—
that is, a “Volk.” Simpson does not further explore what the cohesiveness of
“Volk” cultures ends up meaning for outsiders, but this later became a source
for harsh criticisms of him as validating nationalism. As far as Simpson was
concerned, Herder was simply a theorist who used more empirical means than
most thinkers in his day to explore linguistic and social structures, and his
work deserved consideration on the basis of those inquiries alone.
As both a woman who earned a doctorate in the early decades of formal
academic credentialing and one of the first three women of color to do so,
Simpson holds an important place in academic history. As a thinker whose
published work crosses disciplinary boundaries, her work is of interest

today. Her discussion of the notion of individuality in Herder intersects
with discussions we see elsewhere among women in this volume. And her
brief discussion of Toussaint aligns her with other thinkers of color in her
lifetime who were laying a foundation for critical race theory as it developed
throughout the twentieth century.
Conclusion
Chicago presents one of the most interesting, yet challenging institutions

to study in regard to the development of philosophy in this period. The
department was established specifically to ensure that the related disciplines
of philosophy, psychology, and education could interact and inform each
other. Its faculty and students were deeply engaged in local community life,
through both its connection to the public schools and its relationship with
Jane Addams and Hull House. My decision to include women whose work was
completed outside the department further complicates matters. Even so, the
women we have discussed here reflect the intellectual breadth of philosophy
Dewey seems to have envisioned when he became the founding chair of the
department. They completed their degrees over a span of twenty years and
focused on significantly different areas of discourse, but there are some points
of intersection among them.
Ella Flagg Young remained in education and pedagogy throughout her
career. She was professionally successful, becoming the first woman known to
become superintendent of a city school district in the United States. Matilde
Castro’s career also veered toward pedagogy when she began teaching at Bryn
Mawr. Castro and Strong both wrote dissertations that blurred disciplinary
distinctions—Castro on the boundaries between psychology and philosophy
and Strong on psychology and religion. Castro was academically successful,
holding academic positions until the early 1920s, although she produced only
one publication after writing her thesis. Strong realized during her course of
study that academic philosophy was not for her, but she put her sharp mind
and moral tenacity to work, achieving success as a journalist and progressive
(even radical) political activist. Eaton was also an educator and public school
administrator. In the work discussed here, she grappled with cultural conflict
and political injustice. She brought to light issues that had been ignored by
the dominant culture, thereby challenging our understandings of democracy
in the United States. Simpson picked up a thread of discussion that had been
central at Cornell and Michigan—the value and significance of German
thought—here, in relation to the concept of “Volk” in Herder. She devoted
most of her professional life to teaching secondary school but spent the last ten
years of her career as a professor at Howard University.
Seven additional women completed doctorates in philosophy and related
fields at Chicago before 1920: Dagmar “Dagny” Sunne (1908), Ella Harrison
Stokes (1909), Julia Jessie Taft (1913), Melicent Waterhouse (1913), Ethel May
Kitch (1914), Esther Crane (1916), and Margaret Daniels (1918).
Dagmar Sunne (1880-1951) wrote her dissertation on post-Aristotelian
philosophy and taught at the Women’s College of Alabama (now Huntingdon
College), then Oxford and Western College (now Miami University of
Ohio). She moved from philosophy to research in child psychology and
social development. She also conducted some studies of the use of language
and grammar by children across cultures.117 Ella Stokes (1863-1950) wrote
a dissertation on Augustine, Aquinas, and Leibniz. Very little biographical
information is available, and it is not clear if Stokes had a successful professional
life and remained in philosophy. Jessie Taft (1882-1960) is well-known in
philosophical pragmatism. Her dissertation focused on women’s social and
political status in the United States, but her career was devoted to social work.
She engaged in community development until she was offered a position at
the University of Pennsylvania as chair of the new department of social work
(1934–50).118 Melicent Waterhouse (1886-1973) wrote her dissertation on
universality and necessity, but also moved from philosophy to social work.
She held a position as a psychologist at the state department of education in

Wisconsin before moving to Hawaii with an aunt and teaching at a mission
school there.119 Ethel May Kitch (1884-1941) had a career similar to that of
several of the more academically successful women featured in this volume.
She wrote a dissertation on subjectivity in Hindu thought but did not produce
additional publications. She remained in philosophy, however, and taught at
Oberlin College throughout her career. In 1923 she married Chester K. Yeaton,
a professor of mathematics at Oberlin120 Esther Crane (1892-1984) produced
a thesis discussing the role of hypothesis in logic. She does not appear to have
produced any additional written work, but had a successful academic career,
teaching for short periods of time at Wells College, Lake Erie, Wilson College,
and Bryn Mawr, before settling into a position at Goucher College.121 Margaret
Daniels (1893-1981) wrote her dissertation on aesthetics and religion. She
taught for a time in an adult education program for the International Ladies’
Garment Workers in New York City. It is not clear, however, if she continued
on in professional life and remained in philosophy.122
Chicago established itself as an institution that allowed exploration and
innovation across disciplines. Half of the women whose career information is
briefly sketched out in the foregoing paragraph appear to have had successful
academic careers. The others appear to have worked for at least a period of
time in social work or related fields. Based on the mission of the department
when it was launched under John Dewey’s leadership, this is exactly as it
should have been. Success in academia has its merits, but the engaged learning
that was encouraged at the university in its early years had a positive impact
on individuals, the local community, and (in theory) society at large. This
approach to intellectual inquiry appealed to a number of women, and they
joined the department to contribute to the effort to unite theory and practice.
194
5
Isolated in the Ivy League,
Prestige without Support
Women at Harvard and Yale
Six women completed doctoral studies in philosophy and related fields at Yale
and Harvard/Radcliffe—three at each institution. Ivy League colleges had long
focused on not only the intellectual ability of their applicants but also the cultural
heritage, economic status—even their faith traditions. Therefore, it is no surprise
that they were often closed to women. Yale was an exception to this rule, at least
at the graduate level. It began admitting women into graduate study in 1892, and
the university has quite deservedly celebrated this aspect of its history.1 Its first
female doctoral students in philosophy were Anna Alice Cutler (1896), Blanche
Zehring (1897), and Clara Hitchcock (1900). Each of these women readily entered
faculty positions after completing their studies and remained in academia until
retirement. Interestingly enough, only Cutler, who was listed as a political science
graduate, However, only Cutler remained within philosophy throughout her
career. Zehring moved into biblical studies, and Hitchcock moved into psychology.
Blanche Zehring (1867–1950) wrote a dissertation entitled, “The Dependence of
the Concept of Duty on Faith in God,” which is no longer extant. She was born
and raised in Miamisburg, Ohio, the daughter of a banker.2 She taught at Wells
College most of her career, where Grace Neal Dolson (Cornell, 1899) was also a
faculty member. She was an early member of the Society for Biblical Literature
and one of the first academically trained women to visit archaeological sites in
Europe and the Middle East. No other information is available about her life or
thought. It appears that all three women who earned doctorates in philosophy at
Yale by 1900 settled into the traditional role of teacher/mentor in their professional
lives, rather than researcher/scholar. None of them produced publications after
completing their dissertations.
Harvard did not admit women at any level of study until 1920, when the
Graduate School of Education first became coeducational. Before this time, women
were granted a degree from Radcliffe—the “annex” established to accommodate
women between 1879 and 1882 and incorporated as a college in 1894—despite
the fact that they studied with Harvard professors. The women who completed
doctoral work at Harvard/Radcliffe under discussion here are Mary Whiton
Calkins (1895), Ethel Dench Puffer Howes (1898), and Eva Beatrice Dykes (1921).
All three held faculty positions for a decade or more and each published academic
work. Calkins gained prominence in both philosophy and psychology and was
one of few people to serve as president of both the American Philosophical
Association and the American Psychological Association; she was the only woman
to preside over both organizations. Howes held two faculty positions for a total of
ten years before choosing marriage and family, which had a profound and negative
impact on her career aspirations. Dykes was one of the first three women of color
to earn a doctoral degree in the United States in any field—in English philology.
She established herself as an authority in African American literature and helped
lay a foundation for the development of critical race theory, an area of inquiry that
crosses disciplinary boundaries.
Faculty and Academic Climate at Each Institution
The contrast between Yale and Harvard/Radcliffe regarding the reception of

women is rather sharp. The corresponding contrasts between women’s career
ISOLATED IN THE IVY LEAGUE, PRESTIGE WITHOUT SUPPORT 197
success after completing doctorates at each institution suggest that mentoring,

advocacy, and academic politics play a bigger role than we might at first
imagine. Women at Yale were formally welcomed, and it appears that faculty in
the department of philosophy just before and after 1900 were accommodating.
Yet it did not gain a reputation as “the place” for women to study at an advanced
level, as was the case at Cornell and Chicago. At Harvard, on the other hand,
formal barriers were firmly in place to prevent women from earning degrees at
the graduate level. Faculty members at Harvard, most notably, William James,
Josiah Royce, Hugo Münsterberg, and George Herbert Palmer, were extremely
supportive of women’s achievement and urged the administration to recognize
their work by formally allowing them to enroll and earn doctorates. Harvard
administrators made it clear that women need not apply and refused to confer
their degrees, however. Only after 1902, when Radcliffe was accredited to grant
graduate degrees, did women begin to pursue advanced study in significant
numbers.
Discussions of the history of philosophy at Yale help shed light on how and
why the careers of its doctoral recipients took the shape that they did. Many
institutions held a traditionalist view of the value of advanced degrees for
women: to teach at women’s colleges. This appears to have been the case at Yale.
Cutler, Zehring, and Hitchcock met expectations and took positions at women’s
colleges, where they remained throughout their careers. Although many men
taught at women’s colleges in this era, the assumption that female students
were ill-suited for rigorous study along with the heavier teaching load at these
institutions made them less prestigious within academic culture. William
James lamented Charles Bakewell’s decision to accept a position at Bryn Mawr,
for instance: “Palmer tells me that Bakewell is going to Bryn Mawr—why, I
can’t imagine, for I should myself hate to be under that petticoat regime.”3 Why
would a man want to tarnish his curriculum vitae in such a way? Secondly,
the department at Yale was in the middle of a conflict over its future just prior
to the turn of the twentieth century.4 Yale had been a traditional institution
at which philosophy, religion, and theology were intertwined. Until Arthur
Twining Hadley (1856–1930) assumed leadership of Yale in 1899–1900, each

of its presidents had been ordained ministers. New trends toward empirical
research were in the air in this era, however, and the study of psychology began
to overtake philosophy’s more traditional approaches to the study of mind and
moral development. Yale’s chair of philosophy, George Trumbull Ladd (1842–
1921), was part of the institution’s old legacy. Younger faculty with training in
empirical research methods, like Edward Scripture (1864–1945) who joined
the department in the mid-1890s, were eager to move in a new direction. The
career paths of Yale’s first three women doctorates in philosophy reflect these
competing forces in the department. Anna Alice Cutler wrote her dissertation
on aesthetics in Kant and taught philosophy throughout her career at Smith
College. Blanche Zehring’s dissertation, which is no longer extant, focused
on faith and moral duty. She spent most of her career at Wells College where
she taught biblical studies. In her dissertation, Clara Hitchcock examined the
nature of expectation in both ordinary experience and in learning. She taught
a combination of psychology and philosophy in a career at Lake Erie College.
Mary Whiton Calkins and Ethel Puffer Howes were refused Harvard degrees,
solely because they were women. In 1902, both were offered Radcliffe degrees
instead. Howes accepted. Calkins refused, saying she studied with Harvard
professors, thus deserved a Harvard degree. Eva Dykes entered Radcliffe after
finishing a bachelor’s degree, summa cum laude, from Howard University.
Radcliffe questioned the adequacy of a Howard degree and required her to
complete a second bachelor’s before entering Radcliffe’s graduate program.
Fully succeeding at both the undergraduate and master’s levels at Radcliffe,
she then completed a PhD at the institution. After allowing high achievers
like Alain Locke, Carter Woodson, and Dykes to study at Harvard/Radcliffe,
the institution became slightly more open to people of color.5 Yet, despite
these formal barriers, the women who completed doctoral work at Harvard/
Radcliffe attained higher academic success; Calkins did so in ways that more
nearly correspond to academic expectations today. She taught at Wellesley
for over thirty years, chairing the philosophy department and establishing
the first laboratory for experimental psychology at a women’s college in the

United States. She also published books and a number of articles. Howes held
positions at Radcliffe and Wellesley and published a handful of articles. Dykes
published two books and taught at Howard University for fifteen years before
finishing out her career at Oakwood College, a small religious institution in
Alabama.
Women at Yale
Campus Administrator and APA Liaison

Anna Alice Cutler (1864–1957)
BA, Smith College (1885)
MA, Smith College (1889)
PhD, Philosophy, Yale (1896)
Dissertation: “Aesthetical Factors in Kant’s Theory of Knowledge”
Career: Teacher, private high schools (1885–92); Rockford College (1892–3);

Smith (1893–1930); American Philosophical Association charter member
(1902); American Philosophical Association executive committee member
(1920–22)
Life and Career
Little information is available about the childhood and early education of

Anna Alice Cutler. She was born in New Haven, Connecticut, the daughter
of Evarts and Ellen Louisa (Knight) Cutler. She attended Smith College where
she was in the same class as Mary Whiton Calkins, graduating in 1885. The
first of three women to graduate with a PhD from Yale by 1900, she began
her career as a college professor before she had completed a doctoral degree.
She first taught at Rockford College in 1892–93, filling in for Julia Gulliver
(Smith PhD, 1888) who was studying in Leipzig that year. Cutler then secured
a full-time position at Smith, her alma mater, and she remained there until her
retirement in 1930. She did not publish significantly but was professionally
engaged in academic life. At Smith, she lived in campus housing as the
“Resident Member of Faculty” of Tyler House, a dormitory that continues to
exist today and houses roughly sixty students. She also spent countless hours
advising students and serving on a number of committees—for curriculum
development, admissions, scholarships and fellowships, community education
programs, tenure and promotion, graduate education, honorary degrees, and
other college business. Such a high level of service inhibited Cutler’s ability to
focus on research, of course, and she herself recognized this toward the end
of her career:
It is entirely proper to ask why in so many years there has been so little
evidence of scholarly productivity, and my own disappointment in that
regard is deep. The answer is that the demands of the College for general
service—administrative and social—have been so heavy as to leave little
margin of time or strength.6
One of the administrative roles Cutler fulfilled at Smith was “Representative of the
College to Outside Organizations,” and this item on her curriculum vitae provides
us with insight into women’s entry into leadership roles in academia in the early
decades of the twentieth century. Smith’s president, Henry Norman Gardiner,
was by all accounts a friend and advocate to Cutler. He was also a member of a
small circle of men who met informally to discuss philosophy in the winter of
1901–2 and decided to form what is now the Eastern Division of the American
Philosophical Association. He did a great deal to promote the organization
(which William James rejected immediately, incidentally, saying he considered
philosophy too much of a solitary enterprise to be done effectively in “a society”).7
And it seems clear that Gardiner’s promotion of the APA included nominating
Cutler as a charter member in 1902, under the agreement that her involvement
would be counted as administrative service to Smith College. The APA is one of

three organizations listed on Cutler’s curriculum vitae, along with the Association
of University Professors (1922–4) and the Association of University Women, for
which she served on three different committees over a twelve-year period (1912–
24). No documents have been located to learn more about Cutler’s role on the
executive committee of the APA, but she is one of only two woman known to have
served in that capacity before 1925.
Cutler appears to have crossed paths with other academic women in this
period. Given that she served for a year at Rockford College, filling in for Julia
Gulliver who was studying in Europe, it is very likely that she and Gulliver knew
each other. She also would have known Grace Neal Dolson (Cornell, 1899), who
left her position at Wells College (where she taught alongside Cutler’s fellow
Yale alumna Blanche Zehring) to teach at Smith, from 1911 until 1915. Finally,
Cutler was close to Mary Whiton Calkins, her classmate as an undergraduate
at Smith College, whom she addressed as “Maidy” in correspondence. As an
active member of the APA, Cutler would have interacted with any number of
male colleagues in philosophy, of course, but H. N. Gardiner is the only one
with whom correspondence has been discovered to date. Like the majority of
women in this volume, she remained single throughout her life.
Anna Alice Cutler’s Philosophical Work
Cutler’s only published work is her thesis, “Aesthetical Factors in Kant’s Theory
of Knowledge,” which appeared in print in Kant-Studien in 1896. This essay
allows today’s reader to peer back in time to see how one woman managed
some of the philosophical controversies that were beginning to bubble up at
Yale in the mid-1890s as traditional moralism, philosophical idealism, and
new empirical methods of psychology were vying for primacy. She opens the
essay by acknowledging the disagreement between “positivists” and idealists:
“Those who are of the positivistic opinion that metaphysics offers a field only
to the quasi-poetic imagination [also think] that Kant as a metaphysician was

a dreamer.” Others believe that epistemology is “a branch of philosophical
inquiry [that is] free from prejudice of whatever kind and that Kant . . . is the
epistemologist par excellence.”8 How, she asks, can we reconcile the two?
Cutler’s solution is to see Kant’s intellectual quest as “an expression of artistic
as well as of speculative interest and activity.”9 That is, his “intellectualism”
and the sense of order it brings to the world is, in a sense, emotionally and
aesthetically pleasing to Kant. The sense of harmony and unity in Kant’s
understanding of space and time, for instance “suggest that certain aspects
of science, mathematics, and metaphysics appealed to him for their beauty
as well as for their scientific value.”10 As she continues her discussion, she
charges that Kant did not completely succeed in escaping the pitfalls that
idealist philosophers are susceptible to—a quasi-mystical view of intuition,
for instance, or the “sketchy impressionism” in his account of reason.11 To
bolster her argument, Cutler recognizes the ways in which other thinkers
enter into this discussion. She reminds readers that Schopenhauer considered
the “analytic” to serve “merely as a pendant to the aesthetic.”12 She also draws
on Bernard Bosanquet’s commentary at points throughout her analysis as she
looks at Kant’s aims in the first and second Critiques. In doing so she examines
the rhetorical quality of Kant’s work as much as its philosophical nature.
Asserting that Kant’s system as a whole was not only carefully reasoned but
also reasoned in such a way as to be aesthetically coherent, she then poses these
questions: “Does the fact that so rigorous and self-conscious a thinker as Kant
failed to escape aesthetical influence impeach the integrity of epistemology as
such, or at least that of the rationalistic school? [Do] the new noetics of science
approach more nearly the ideal of the presuppositionless inquiry?” She closes
by acknowledging that other philosophers have pointed to the same problem,
then rather boldly concludes:
It is impossible to tell, and in point of fact it makes little difference whether

the ‘conviction of universal significance’ (the rationality of the world
through and through) . . . is a philosophical motif in aesthetics, or an

aesthetical motif in philosophy. . . . The demand for a knowledge free from
such elements is a demand for a knowledge lacking in fullness. . . . The new
noetics must outgrow asceticism and need not fear to let the whole soul go
to meet the whole reality.13
Devoted Professor
Clara Maria Hitchcock (1853–1933)
AB, Lake Erie Female Seminary (1871)
PhB, University of Chicago (1897)
PhD, Philosophy, Yale (1900)
Dissertation: “The Psychology of Expectation”
Career: Michigan Female Seminary, Kalamazoo (1873–75); Study in Berlin

(1897); Lake Erie College (1888–92; 1897–1917); American Philosophical
Association charter member (1902)
Life and Career
Clara Hitchcock was born into a prominent family near Hudson, Ohio.14
Her father, Rev. Henry Lawrence Hitchcock (1813–73), was the president
of Western Reserve College (now Case Western Reserve). Her mother was
Clarissa M. Ford. Her grandfather, Peter Marshall Hitchcock, was Chief
Justice of the Ohio Supreme Court (1819–33). Her uncles, Reuben and Peter
Hitchcock, were trustees of Lake Erie Female Seminary (later College), from
which she and her sisters graduated.
Two of Hitchcock’s siblings named their children after her, and both of these
younger women also had intellectual interests, which can lead to confusion.
Thus, some disambiguation is needed: Hitchcock’s older brother, Henry
and his wife Susan Delano, named their daughter Clara Delano Hitchcock
(1872–1923). She studied early childhood education at Chicago Kindergarten
College and taught in the public schools in Buffalo, New York, and the model
school at Teachers College at Columbia University before moving to faculty
positions at the state normal school at LaCross, Wisconsin, and finally Kent
State. Hitchcock’s sister, Sarah Melissa Hitchcock, married Thomas Day
Seymour, a specialist in ancient Greek literature and the descendant of two
Yale presidents, who taught first at Western Reserve (1872–80) then at Yale
(1880–1930). Their daughter Clara Hitchcock Seymour (1880–1958) married
George St. John. She was also intellectually minded, assisting her father in
his work and publishing an anthology of Greek literature under her married
name, Clara Seymour St. John. Sarah (Hitchcock) and Thomas Day Seymour’s
son, Charles, would become the president of Yale in 1937, just a few years after
our Clara Hitchcock’s death.
When Clara Hitchcock first began teaching at Lake Erie College, she
was a professor of mental philosophy, but later in her career the focus of
the department moved to philosophy, psychology, and education. This is an
interesting shift, given that in the early decades of the twentieth century the
trend at elite men’s colleges and large universities was toward specialization and
a narrowing of disciplinary focus in philosophy, not its expansion. Although
she appears to have been far removed from the academic centers of activity
for women philosophers—Wellesley, Mount Holyoke, Smith, in particular—
Hitchcock maintained ties with at least one peer from Yale, Anna Alice Cutler,
who presented a memorial note at the annual meeting of the American
Philosophical Association after Hitchcock’s death in 1933.15 Cutler’s memorial
notice indicates that a copy of her statement was given to Hitchcock’s family,
but no document of this nature has surfaced in archival searches to date.
In her dissertation, The Psychology of Expectation, Hitchcock’s main claim
is that expectation is based at least in part on experience and is related to
memory and imagination. It allows us to project into the future to anticipate
possibilities and potential courses of action. In this sense, expectation is tied to
self-consciousness and identity; thus it has a role to play in our discussions of

both ontology and epistemology. Regarding ontology as related to individuals,
Hitchcock asserts that expectation “is more or less active from the beginning
to the end of conscious life, manifesting itself in the simplest [experiences]
of the child mind and in the most complex forms of mature mental life.”16 In
relation to epistemology, she makes an even more daring claim: “Knowledge
of the world about us is dependent on expectation. . . . What are the laws of
motion, for example, but the expectations of reason concerning the position
of bodies in space? We are thus justified, not only in saying that all complete
knowledge involves anticipation, but also in affirming that all rational
expectation is knowledge.”17
Hitchcock’s discussion of expectation was not published until three years
after she had completed the doctorate, and it did not receive a great deal of
fanfare when it appeared in print. When it came time to promote it as a book,
it appears there were few interested or helpful colleagues who would write a
review of the work. Hitchcock herself wrote a synopsis of the work and signed
it “The Author.”18 This is especially curious, because Hitchcock’s family had
long-held ties to Yale, and, as noted, her sister was married to a well-respected
professor in the classics there. A lengthy review in the American Journal of
Psychology was quite critical of the work, with a central complaint being that
she failed to use experimental methods to inform her discussion.19 It appears
that she was caught between old and new methods of exploring psychological
phenomenon, a dispute that was being played out at Yale on the cusp of the
twentieth century. A proponent of empirical research in psychology, Edward
Scripture, was an experimentalist of the most rigorous variety by the standards
of the day. He began his career at Clark University, working alongside one of
the pioneers in experimental psychology, G. S. Hall (1846–1924), but accepted
an offer at Yale in 1892. Throughout the 1890s, he vigorously argued against
the traditional philosophical methods of inquiry that were favored by George
Trumbull Ladd, Yale’s department chair. Ultimately, administrators at the
university found a simple solution: Scripture was ousted in 1903, and Ladd
was forced into early retirement in 1904.20 But during the dispute, Hitchcock
and her fellow graduate students were no doubt caught in the crossfire. While
her dissertation focused on expectation as a psychological phenomenon, her
exploration of it grew out of a philosophical framework. She examined the
experience of expectation in relation to mental processes. But this approach
did not mesh with experimentalists’ methods and—well—expectations. In the
end, her research was associated with traditional concepts like the “faculties”
of the mind in philosophy and with the “old school” faculty at Yale who had
embraced such concepts.
Interestingly enough, a researcher drew on Hitchcock’s work thirty years
after it was published, in a discussion of the phenomenon of surprise as related
to expectation. Citing Hitchcock as a thinker who asserted that expectation
is a prerequisite for obtaining knowledge, the author moved on to their
project of demonstrating that surprise is an outgrowth of expectations not
fully met.21
Women at Harvard
Philosopher, Psychologist, Powerhouse

Mary Whiton Calkins (1863–1930)
MA, Smith College (1887)
PhD, Philosophy (1895; Harvard degree not granted)
Dissertation: “Experimental Research on the Association of Ideas”
Career: Wellesley (1887–92; 1895–1929); American Philosophical Association

charter member (1902); American Psychological Association president (1905);
American Philosophical Association executive committee member (1913);
American Philosophical Association president (1918)
Life and Career
Mary Whiton Calkins was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in a family of five

children. Her father, Wolcott, was a liberal Protestant minister, and her mother,
Charlotte (Whiton), was a homemaker with a commitment to social reform
work. She was raised in Buffalo, New York, where her father held a pastorate.
When she was seventeen, her father took a new position and moved the family
to Newton, Massachusetts. After graduating from Smith College in 1885, she
spent a year with her family in Europe, then returned to Smith to complete a
master’s degree. While at Smith, Calkins is likely to have met Julia Gulliver
who earned a bachelor’s degree from Smith in 1879 and a doctorate from
the college in 1888. Calkins also established a friendship with fellow Smith
alumna, Anna Alice Cutler, and both were teaching philosophy at women’s
colleges by the early 1890s. As their careers advanced, the two corresponded
about graduate study in philosophy, exchanging information about the faculty,
curriculum, and reception of women at Harvard versus Yale.22
Calkins was able to study at Harvard only by requesting permission from
its administration. Harvard was an all-male institution at the time, and its
“annex,” Radcliffe, did not offer graduate degrees. The male faculty she studied
with, William James, Josiah Royce, and Hugo Münsterberg, were all fully
supportive of her work. They also appear to have hoped to break through
gender barriers and force Harvard to grant a doctoral degree to a woman by
default. Calkins completed the required coursework, conducted research in
Münsterberg’s laboratory for experimental psychology, and presented her
dissertation, “Experimental Research on the Association of Ideas”—a set of
achievements that matched or exceeded the work male students undertook
for doctoral degrees at Harvard. Each of these well-respected faculty members
wrote letters to praise Calkins’s work and to urge administrators to award her
a degree. But the institution would have none of it. Her degree was denied
and follow-up letters of protest from Royce and James were of no use. Their
correspondence at this time expresses their frustration in living with barriers
to talented students based on gender alone, but they were unable to change
Harvard’s policy.23 Therefore, despite being one of the most well-known women
philosophers in this era and the first woman president of both of the APAs
(Psychological Association president in 1905 and Philosophical Association
president in 1918), Mary Whiton Calkins was never officially conferred with
a doctoral degree. Harvard has reaffirmed that policy by continuing to deny
the degree, even after three major campaigns to recognize her achievement
over a century ago.24 As noted, Calkins was offered a Radcliffe degree in
1902, but refused it. She had already been teaching at Wellesley College for
women for fifteen years and had no need for an ersatz degree from Radcliffe.
She later was granted two honorary doctorates, one in 1909 from Columbia
University (where Christine Ladd-Franklin was teaching part-time), another
in 1910 from Smith (where Anna Alice Cutler was department chair). Like so
many career women in this era, Calkins was unmarried.
At Harvard, both Royce and James were supportive and reliable mentors.
Both also supported the women’s movement, and Royce in particular put
forward ideas that are generally considered “feminine”—focusing as he does
on nurturing community. Calkins had a strong sense of her own legacy at
Wellesley, one that was fueled and supported by her female colleagues, and
thankfully she is one of the few early academic women whose papers were
saved and archived. Among her papers is correspondence with Dewey, James,
Royce, and, as noted, with Anna Alice Cutler (Yale, 1896) who taught at
Smith College and also was a founding member of the APA. The two women
clearly knew each other well. Calkins’s letters to James E. Creighton at Cornell
University have also been preserved.
Calkins also knew Ellen Bliss Talbot (Cornell, 1898), a similarly productive
colleague at another women’s institution: Mount Holyoke College. But
it is unclear if Calkins and Talbot were friends or simply professional
acquaintances. Talbot reviewed two of Calkins’s works in The Philosophical
Review, Der DoppelteStandpunkt in der Psychologie and The Persistent
Problems of Philosophy. Both reviews were favorable overall, but in the second,
Talbot charged that Calkins’s discussion of the self should be enhanced by

comparing it more carefully with the early modern understanding of the soul.
In response, Calkins wrote “Self and Soul” which appeared in a subsequent
issue of the Review.25
Calkins published more work in philosophy than any of the women
in this volume. She produced six books, primarily for classroom use: An
Introduction to Psychology (1900), A First Book in Psychology (1901), Der
DoppelteStandpunkt in der Psychologie (1905), an abridged edition of Locke’s
Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1905), The Persistent Problems of
Philosophy (1907), and The Good Man and the Good (1918). Her introductions
to philosophy, ethics, and psychology were widely read and reviewed in
professional journals. She also wrote roughly forty articles and twenty or more
book reviews. Her writings focus on personal idealism, philosophy of mind,
and uncharacteristically for a woman who was so successful in academia,
feminism. Given these achievements, Calkins’s relative absence from histories
of philosophy and philosophy readers is unwarranted. Thankfully, she has
received more attention in recent years, with excellent discussions by Dana
Noelle McDonald, Mathew Foust, Erin McKenna and Scott Pratt, Alexandra
Schuh, and Kris McDaniel.26 Clearly, a full discussion of her work could fill a
volume of its own. For our purposes, it will have to suffice to look at Calkins
as perhaps the best example of a woman in early academic life whose work
straddled both philosophy and psychology, and to look at the themes she
addressed within each discipline.
Mary Whiton Calkins’s Work in

Philosophy and Psychology
Calkins was an idealist, but in the academic tradition as it developed in the

late nineteenth century. Those who preceded her, most notably, Susan Blow,
Anna Brackett, and Ellen Mitchell, discussed in Volume I, were members
of the pre-academic philosophical idealist movement in St. Louis, which

attempted to apply philosophy to education and social/political issues. Blow
embraced Hegel’s thought to such an extent that it was nearly a doctrine
to her. Brackett and Mitchell took a more pragmatic approach, adopting
idealism when it was useful, but dismissing certain aspects of it that they
considered outdated—such as archaic views of women within the works of
Hegel and some of his disciples. Other women in early academic philosophy
also embraced idealism or were heavily influenced by it, most notably,
Ellen Bliss Talbot and Vida Frank Moore at Cornell, and Marietta Kies,
Caroline Miles Hill, and Eliza Sunderland at Michigan. Like Talbot, Calkins
succeeded in making the transition from pre-academic philosophy in the
nineteenth century to the more modern approach to the discipline that was
under development in the early twentieth century.
Calkins published her first articles in academic journals in 1892, one
discussed the association of ideas in philosophy and another outlined the work
in psychology she had begun at Wellesley College. She maintained interests in
both disciplines throughout her life and continued to publish in both fields
until the late 1920s. The very last article she wrote, “Against Behaviorism,” was
published in 1930.
Within psychology, most of Calkins’s work focused on cognition, the
concept of self, and the nature of psychological research. This last area of
inquiry often ventured into a discussion of the boundaries between philosophy
and psychology. In this sense, she contributed to a common project along with
other women in this volume: Eliza Ritchie in her discussion of personality,
Ellen Bliss Talbot on the “conscious elements,” and Matilde Castro in her thesis
on psychology and logic. Calkins and her contemporaries—male and female—
were part of a larger enterprise—and she was arguably one the most articulate
voices within it. There is a great deal of overlap between philosophy and
psychology in Calkins’s work. In fact, it can be nearly impossible to determine
whether the fifteen (or so) articles in which she discussed self, soul, mind, or
essence belong in the “philosophy” or the “psychology” category. My focus on
this aspect of her work will be on the writings that lie at the intersection of the
two disciplines—primarily her discussion of self versus soul.
Within philosophy, Calkins wrote four articles about historic figures in the
discipline—Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer—and produced an abridged
version of Locke’s Treatise for classroom use. She also wrote four articles about
the ideas of her contemporaries—Josiah Royce, Henri Bergson, Bertrand
Russell, and Edward G. Spaulding. The bulk of her writings, however, appear
in academic journals in which she discussed philosophical approaches or
schools of thought, including idealism, realism, monism, and personalism.
In her philosophical work, Calkins often gravitated toward explorations
of metaphysics and ontology, venturing into religion on occasion. She even
published one piece on pacifism during the First World War. Given the
large body of work she produced within philosophy proper, here we will
look primarily at her discussions of ontology and her own description of the
personal idealism she embraced.
A good place to begin our discussion is with the review of Calkins’s
textbook, The Persistent Problems of Philosophy (1908), by Ellen Bliss Talbot
in The Philosophical Review.27 Calkins produced this book as a history of
philosophy text with a focus on metaphysics, primarily for classroom use. Both
thinkers were idealists, so Talbot’s review is sympathetic to her perspective and
approach. At the same time, Talbot makes some comments and criticisms that
give us a window into philosophy as it was understood in their era, which also
provides us with a better understanding of each thinker.
Talbot begins her review with a quotation from the opening of Calkins’s
book that we can still agree with today: “Philosophy is the attempt to discover
by reasoning the utterly irreducible nature of anything; and philosophy, in
its most adequate form, seeks the ultimate nature of all-that-there-is.”28 The
choices Calkins made about whom to include in the text also make sense
from today’s perspective, but for the near-omission of Locke whom she
considered too similar to Descartes to merit discussing fully. Yet, even keeping
in mind her focus on metaphysics, her categorizations do not align well
with our discussions of historical figures in philosophy today. Descartes, she

characterizes as a “qualitative pluralist.” “Qualitative monists” include Hobbes,
Leibniz, Berkeley, and Hume (the last three of these are also labeled idealists).
Calkins’s chapter on Hume, Talbot tells us, “gives an interpretation from which
many will dissent. . . . When one reads, e.g., that ‘Hume teaches that reality is
through and through immaterial,’ and that ‘he believes the universe to consist
of a great complex of ever shifting sensations and images,’ one is hardly able
to give full assent.”29 Finally, Kant doesn’t “fit into her classification, because
his system [is] internally inconsistent [thus fails] to represent any one type
of philosophy” . . . Fichte and Schelling are like Kant in that they are also
“internally inconsistent,” but they are discussed alongside Spinoza, because all
three “advance toward monistic spiritualism.”30
There are a number of such observations in this review, many of which
are a bit of a shock to the twenty-first-century philosopher’s system. But for
our purposes, Talbot’s comments about how to rightly understand Fichte’s
thought are of interest. Talbot was a Fichte scholar, and in her view, Calkins
misinterpreted him, in part because she wanted his Absolute to be personal,
and in part because she failed to fully understand his metaphysics. Talbot
wants to set the record straight, and discusses Fichte at some length; I will
reproduce only some short selections here:
Regarding the Absolute, Talbot charges that Calkins “underestimates
the difficulty of conceiving the nature of an all-embracing consciousness.
If the finite spirits are united in the Infinite Spirit in somewhat the sense in
which my own separate thoughts are united in my individual consciousness,
it is hard to understand why these finite spirits are not aware of their
oneness”—and in this sense they are personal.31 Regarding the nature
of reality, Talbot maintains that Fichte was “continually teaching that
actuality is not unitary, either qualitatively or quantitatively speaking. . . .
[W]e may say that reality is not [yet one], but is only becoming, one. In
another sense, however, Fichte seems to teach that . . . consciousness is
gradually developing toward unity.”32 Even given their disagreements,
Talbot concludes that “Professor Calkins deserves the thanks of students

and teachers of philosophy. . . . [T]he book is fresh and suggestive, clear in
statement, vigorous and penetrating in criticism. However much one may
dissent from certain of the positions taken, the value of the book as a whole
is unquestionable.”33
In her review of Persistent Problems, Talbot briefly noted that she is not
clear on Calkins’s “doctrine of the self.” Although no correspondence remains
to enlighten us about their personal or professional relationship, it seems no
coincidence that Calkins produced a good deal of work discussing her notion
of the self just after Talbot’s review appeared in print. In the paragraphs that
follow, we will look at this aspect of her thought.
Not incidentally, Calkins opens “Self and Soul,” a relatively brief article, by
noting that she is comfortable using the terms soul, spirit, mind, and spiritual
substance interchangeably. She then proceeds to outline how modern thinkers
conceive of the self and to follow it with a sketch of how philosophers conceived
of the self or soul in earlier time periods.34
The “self ” in Calkins’s framework has
(a) conscious experiences—ideas, mental processes, psychological states,

conscious functions, or faculties.
(b) persistence through time
(c) uniqueness—it is distinct from others (whether other selves or other

entities, objects)
(d) relation—to other selves or entities that are “other-than-itself ”
In earlier philosophical systems, a “soul” had
(a) faculties, ideas, operations, or experiences
(b) persistence through time
(c) uniqueness—again, was distinct from others (whether other selves or

other entities, objects)
In Calkins’s view, earlier conceptions of the self fell short in three ways: they
failed to recognize the relational aspect of the self; they treated the soul as if
it was “merely a shadowy sort of body,” in a sense subordinating the soul to
the body; and they understood the soul as abstract—essentially as empty, in
Calkins’s view.35 The modern concept of the self in her time focused instead
on what she considered to be the concrete reality of the self. It starts with “the
introspective study of the immediately realized self and recognizes in this self
all the rich content of actual experience.”36
For Calkins, the concrete experience of the self and its relational nature
in her version of idealism is central to its success in a philosophical system,
specifically because the world coheres in and through the relations of selves
to other selves. If each self were separate and independent, unable to relate
to other selves, there would be no activity, no continuity in the world, but
instead stasis. For Calkins and other idealists, the world is a dynamic force,
not a static entity. Much like thinkers in Process thought who were developing
a cosmology alongside Calkins in the early decades of the twentieth century,
subjectivity presupposes relationality. This relationality is what also makes it
possible for human beings to have an intuition of the divine, of the Absolute
Self, as Calkins would put it, which is a dynamic and relational being.
Calkins appears to have been working out her understanding of the “self ”
for some time, and published an article in three installments, “Psychology as
Science of Self ” (1908). In these discussions, she reiterates the central elements
of her concept of self, but elaborates on them. Within the history of philosophy
these articles are valuable in that they continue to help us examine the ways
in which philosophy and psychology overlapped in this period. They also
illuminate developments within psychology alone as it became an independent
discipline.
Calkins opens the first installment of “Psychology as Science of Self ” by
distinguishing between two schools of thought that were vying for primacy in
psychology at this time: structuralism, the view that the mind or consciousness
has a structure and/or contents that can be examined (largely using traditional
philosophical systems of thought); and functionalism, the view that we can

understand consciousness only in and through the role it plays in human
life—that is, its function.37 Within these two schools of thought there are
distinct ways to conceive of the relationship between mind and body. We
can understand the self as mind-in-body or as mind-plus-body. We can see
the body, not as part of self, but as closely related to self. Or we can see the
mind as a disembodied spirit—although “nobody nowadays champions this
doctrine and I should not take time to mention it were it not that Professor
Angell attributes it to me.”38 Calkins favors the third view, the mind as distinct
from the body, but related to it. In this sense, the self has a body, but does
not consist primarily or only of body. She adds that, as psychologists, “we
are not concerned with the philosophical problem of the relation of mind
and body; we take for granted the existence of the two, and their relation.”39
Calkins is concerned, however, that functional psychology will lean too far
in the direction of self-as-body—ultimately turning to a biological account
of selfhood. This would be a mistake, however. Biology’s ability to name and
describe physical changes in the body is of course valuable, but it is unable to
describe or explain consciousness.
In the second installment of “Psychology as Science of Self,” Calkins covers
some familiar territory, reiterating that her concept of self is not the outdated
“soul” of early modern philosophy—not a collection of ideas, mental images,
or memories of the epistemologists. Again, the self is persistent and has
experiences. But in this discussion Calkins introduces new and significant
elements: more discussion of the relational nature of the self and recognition
of the immediacy of experience.
She underscored the depths of the relational nature of the self in this article.
If she tries to “describe or distinguish myself except in terms of my relatedness
to other selves: if I drop out of my conception of myself the consciousness of
being a child, brother, friend, and citizen, I simply lose myself.”40 Although she
did not play out this theme, it is a rather dramatic statement to make. It is not
merely to observe relational tendencies in individuals, but to make relationality
a core component of individuality. A second new move in this installment

of her discussion is the recognition that psychology, as she understands it,
involves the immediacy of experience—experience that we then reflect on. Yet
immediacy and reflection defy being paired up. She makes some keen insights
here, gravitating toward phenomenology as she does so in my view:
The peculiarity of psychology is precisely this, that it has to do with the

concept of immediate experience. That which cannot be immediately
experienced is, in other words, no object of psychology. . . . I [must] make
this assertion on the basis of my own introspection—for there is no other
way of making it—and it is open to others to disavow this experience. . . . [I]t
is evident that we must form our concept of consciousness from this, “the
only experience immediately accessible to us.” . . . Such consciousness, it
must be repeated, lies at a far remove from the reflective self-consciousness
of the psychologist.41
The final installment of this article expands on Calkins’s previous discussions.

Of interest here are some elaborations on what it means to relate to others.
In day-to-day interactions, the self is aware of others, whether other selves or
other entities. This is not merely awareness in an abstract and detached sense,
but in an interactive sense. The self experiences its relations to others. A self
is also able to become altruistic, in Calkins’s parlance, when its awareness of
others becomes a focus on the “other-than-self.” She does not play this out as
fully as one might wish. In addition, it is important to keep in mind that here
she speaks of an existential, not a moral altruism. She later tells us that
Only the conception of sharing or sympathizing requires the conception

of the other-than-self as personal. . . . In perceiving and in thinking I am
conscious (immediately or reflectively) not only of selves who share my
experience, but of the impersonal object of our common experience; and
both together constitute the total object of my consciousness, that is to say,
my environment.42
Sympathy in this sense is simply a shared experience—or even a shared focus

on the same activity or aim. Interestingly enough, Calkins made note of
commentary by the psychologist, Margaret Floy Washburn, and credited her
with providing a helpful insight on this point:
To my mind, Miss Washburn offers . . . an admirable structural analysis

of sympathetic joy and a convincing demonstration that such an analysis
is inadequate. The elements of consciousness . . . are indeed discoverable,
but the enumeration falls far short of describing the emotion. In fact,
Miss Washburn seems to me to yield the case for the opposition to self-
psychology, by admitting that a consciousness of the “personality of
another” does belong to sympathetic joy.43
For Calkins, inquiries about the nature of the self in psychology were nearly
conflated with ontology, and both were only a short step away from metaphysics.
She did a good deal of work within these two branches of philosophy, and
consistently maintained her own view—that a monistic and personalistic
idealism best describes the world we live in. A student of Calkins will see her
making a related set of ontological and metaphysical claims throughout her
career: first, she held that the distinction between subject and object, knower
and known, is false. We can reflect on our encounter with others, whether
other selves or objects. In any given moment, however, we simply have the
experience of a human self, or consciousness that engages with another
entity. We are not minds perceiving and “knowing” another self or object in
experience in a detached sense. In her view, “knowledge implies identity of
knower and known.”44
Related to this is her view that the mind/body distinction is also a false
construct. An individual is not a “mind in a body.” This would be to revert
to the Platonic view that a body is the prison of the soul, or to old notions
in early modern epistemology and ontology in which mind was described
as a collection of ideas or series of impressions and thus as a substance
wholly different from body. In her view, each of us is a mind/consciousness
that experiences or relates to our body. What logically follows from this is
Calkins’s claim that a human mind constitutes just one form of consciousness.
Consciousness underlies all of reality and in fact pervades it. In line with
Talbot’s view as a Fichtean, Calkins theorized that, while there is a plurality of
conscious entities within reality, ultimately the world is monistic. “Many selves
may turn out to be members of an all-including Absolute Self . . . for even if the
many selves are parts of the One Self they will retain both their personality and
their relation with each other through the Absolute.”45 In her view, an Absolute
consciousness holds the world’s plurality in unity.
Calkins objected to the many varieties of philosophy and related disciplines
that were mechanistic or metaphysically materialistic. (She takes on not only
psychologists but also biologists and physicists at some points in her writings.)
She considered herself a vitalist, an approach to ontology and metaphysics that
she saw as compatible and even descriptive of the views outlined before. She
also considered herself a personal idealist. One of Calkins’s great strengths is
her ability to discuss her ideas in relation to other schools of thought. This
is especially true in a set of articles she published between 1911 and 1915:
“The Idealist to the Realist,” “Unjustified Claims for Neo-Realism,” “Idealist
to Realist Once More,” “Mr. Muscio’s Criticism of Miss Calkins’s Reply to
the Realist,” and “Bertrand Russell on Neo-Realism.” For our purposes, a
somewhat later discussion, “The Personalistic Conception of Nature” (1919),
will provide an overview of the distinctions she lays out between mechanism
and her own views.
In this article, Calkins makes it clear that murky terminology is responsible
for many disagreements about the merits of a mechanistic versus a vitalistic
approach. She then explains that she, a psychological vitalist, objects to the
type of mechanism that reduces human experiences to merely biological or
neural events:
There exist in addition to whatever elements and unconscious organisms

the world may contain, conscious beings who not only secrete and
digest and react in response to environment but who also perceive and
remember, desire and wish, prefer and choose. . . . [W]e know by direct
observation what we mean by deliberating and willing, feeling and
remembering. . . . That such physico-chemical phenomena may accompany,
condition, or even take the place of deliberation, emotion or memory, the
psychological vitalist does not deny; he merely insists on the observed fact
that consciousness is not identical with the mechanical or the chemical or
the electrical phenomena.46
Calkins saw stark differences between her own views as a personal idealist
and “ideists” or impersonal idealists. Both personalism and idealism took
on different forms over time, and Calkins maintained her commitment to a
combined version of the two. Calkins explains her objection to ideism this
way:
One finds that there are no really independently existing ideas, that an idea,
that is, a mental experience, always is part of a self, who has the idea, who
experiences. In a word, the selfless or impersonal idea, like the impersonal
value, is an abstraction. . . . The world, as mental, inevitably is a world made
up not of ideas, or mental processes, but of selves.47
In a sense the “personal” aspect of her idealism is the most interesting aspect of
it, primarily because it signals her objection to ideism—that is, a metaphysics,
which describes the world as pure Idea. In her view a pure Idea and abstract
individual ideas would be disconnected and unable to interact with or relate
to each other. In this sense, her use of the term “personal/personalism” could
be recast as “relation/relationality.” Another point of interest: her occasional
references to the Absolute as a God-figure, as when she makes the claim
that there is no distinction between knower and known. In her personalistic
framework, knowledge between selves is possible in and through their
relation to the Absolute: “I know the Absolute by being identically a part of
Him; and that I know other selves in so far as they, like me, are genuinely
though partially identical with Him.”48 Interestingly enough, for the most
part she resists venturing into a religious version of personal idealism. At this
point, there is no evidence that she interacted with or aligned herself with
theologically minded personalists in Boston, like Borden Parker Bowne. This
question is one of many about Calkins and her work that could be explored
further, however. As one of the first women to enter academic philosophy,
she developed an important strain of idealism in American philosophy—a
monistic variety in which a theory of the self emerges that takes into account
new developments in psychology, yet remains grounded in philosophical
traditions.
An Academic Antinomy
Ethel Dench Puffer Howes (1872–1950)

BA, Smith (1891)
PhD, Philosophy (1898, Harvard degree not granted; 1902, Radcliffe degree)
Career: High school teacher, Keene, New Hampshire (1891–2); Smith College
(1892–5); study in Freiburg (1895–7); Radcliffe (±1898–1901); Wellesley
(1901–8); Smith College, Institute for the Coordination of Women’s Interests
(1925)
Life and Career
Ethel Dench Puffer Howes was the oldest of four girls born to George and Ella
Puffer in Framingham, Massachusetts. Little is known about Howes’s early life
and education. After graduating from Smith College, she taught high school
for a year, then returned to Smith to teach mathematics. In 1895, she travelled
to Germany where she was able to study psychology under Hugo Münsterberg,
reportedly as a guest in his home.49 She returned to the United States on a
fellowship from the Association of Collegiate Alumnae (now American

Association of University Women) and, like Mary Whiton Calkins, studied at
Harvard University, conducting research for Münsterberg who had accepted
an appointment there, and completing all requirements for a doctoral degree
in 1898. Unlike Calkins, when Harvard refused to grant her a doctorate,
Howes accepted the Radcliffe degree in 1902. Even before receiving a PhD,
her career had begun on a productive note, holding positions at Radcliffe
(1898–1901) and Wellesley (1901–8). After her marriage, however, she was
unable to secure a faculty position. Although she was considered a brilliant
researcher, marriage and family could be a death knell for women’s career
aspirations in this era. When she applied to teach at Barnard, Howes received
a letter from the president of Smith College, L. Clark Seelye, who had written
her a recommendation, but said he feared news of her upcoming marriage
had hurt her prospects and another candidate had been selected.50 Given the
situation, Howes did her best to maintain professional status, publishing a
handful of articles that focused on her two primary interests, aesthetics and
women’s issues—two in academic journals and the remainder in The Atlantic
Monthly.
Ethel Puffer Howes’s Philosophical Work
Howes’s article “The Study of Perception and the Architectural Idea,”

published in The Philosophical Review in 1910 provides a prime example of
a thinker who is straddling two different theoretical frameworks—the “pure
philosophy” that was so dominant at the end of the nineteenth century in
the United States and the newly emerging empirical methods of the social
sciences. Here, she assumes that there can be a standard, unifying theory
of beauty within any artistic endeavor, and she starts by contrasting the
supposed success in analyzing music and the lack of such success in evaluating
architecture. She asserts that recent psychological and physiological research
has been able to solve problems related to aesthetics in music—why a certain

tone is aesthetically pleasing while another is not, for instance. But similar
advances have not been made in architecture. Aside from how culture-bound
Howes’s discussion is on this point, her claim demonstrates a faith in the
then-new developments in science in which researchers conducted surveys,
set up laboratory experiments, and/or measured physiological responses to
stimuli—like musical tones. The problem in architecture, in Howes’s view, is
that there are not yet scientific methods in place to help assess how and why
the proportion, scale, and spatial relations of a building can be aesthetically
pleasing to its viewers or inhabitants.
Citing the aesthetic theories of Theodor Lipps, Howes is clearly aligned with
the romantic and idealist schools of thought that were dominant in philosophy
in the United States prior to the turn of the twentieth century. Like Lipps,
she relied on the concept of Einfühlung (feeling/empathy), a term that was
used by Herder, Lotze, Schelling, and others to point to “the unification of the
subject and object” in this case as related to aesthetics.51 She fears that without
a concept like Einfühlung, we will be without a clear set of standards by which
to assess beauty in architecture. Instead, we will be left with “perception as a
matter primarily of response and reactions, with room in it for all possible
fusions of the most far reaching association.”52 (That is, what nonphilosophers
are perfectly comfortable with accepting—that, in large measure, “beauty” is
simply a subjective and/or cultural preference.)
At the same time, she is optimistic that emerging scientific methods will
supplement pure philosophy when needed and thus answer any remaining
questions about bodily experience in perceptual space: “How is my perception
of objects affected by their bodily presence? How do I perceive different
materials, weights, textures, sizes? . . . How am I affected by latent forces? If
‘the arch never sleeps,’ how does the presence of these forces . . . affect my
perception of it?”53 As she volleys competing theoretical options back and forth
throughout the article, Howes speculates that “the only part of the problem of
beauty that is not solved [by] pure philosophy—in brief the only part of the
problem of beauty which demands to be differentiated as a special field, is the

field of the last resort, psychological and physiological analysis.”54
The contrasts between traditional standards of beauty and new modernist
notions troubled Howes throughout her career. As early as 1901, she wrote
about the value of an appreciative approach to art criticism. Her concern is
that such an approach will ignore the formal, “scientific” and/or historical
principles that lend beauty to a work. Her main concern here is, again, that
subjectivism will creep into discussions of art, and all standards of beauty will
fall by the wayside. A related concern is that the line between an emotional
response to art—which she believes can and should be examined by science—
will be conflated with mere sentimentality. Insisting that objective standards
can indeed be established and maintained, she writes: “Aesthetics . . . is the
science of beauty . . . a system of laws expressing the relation between the
object and aesthetic pleasure in it; or . . . a system of conditions to which the
object, in order to be beautiful, must conform.”55
Howes is one of few women in early academic life to express feminist views.
And her writings took on a more assertive tone over time, quite likely because
her academic career had already been truncated. What did she have to lose? One
of her most incisive feminist articles, “Accepting the Universe” (1922), was given
a title inspired by Margaret Fuller (1810–50), an ardent feminist who was said
to have been lampooned by Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) for her declaration, “I
accept the universe.” In making this statement, Fuller was simply recognizing that
in some sense we are all transient and contingent beings. But Carlyle’s response
was, “By Gad, she’d better!”56 Howes opens her article by saying “An ‘antinomy,’
O my non-philosophical reader, is a contradiction between conclusions [with]
two equally good premises.”57 She goes on to argue against the ways in which
women were forced to choose between marriage and a career. In another article
published later that year, “Continuity for Women” (December 1922), Howes
picks up on this theme, this time with a proposed solution. Here she discusses
the conflict women face when they are forced to choose between career or
marriage and family. Individual women may desire to marry and raise children,
but when they do, they are considered unemployable. And in her day, re-entering
the workforce was close to impossible once children had grown. The solution,
as she saw it, was what we now call flexi-time. Generally speaking, Howes
believed women (who were married and had children) were at a competitive
disadvantage to men in the workplace, because they could not devote the same
number of hours or personal/professional energy to a career. Why not allow
women to step off the racetrack, then, and find more flexible and/or short-term
professional options? At the time, this may have seemed a naïve suggestion.
During feminism’s Second Wave in the 1970s, women like Howes were criticized
for making such arguments, because they reinforced gender difference. Today
flexi-time is a viable option for women and men—one that is not always easy to
find, but an option, nevertheless. In this sense, Howes, like other feminists who
proposed flexi-time, job sharing, community housekeeping, and shared meal
planning, was ahead of her time. After the early 1930s, however, she did not
publish, and there is no record of her holding a professional position later in life.
Sadly, her promising career path in the late 1890s became a cautionary tale after
she married, which (even more sadly) is one reason her life and work has been
better chronicled than the lives of her peers.
Ideas in Literature
Eva Beatrice Dykes (1893–1986)

BA, Howard University (1914)
BA, Radcliffe (1917)
MA, Radcliffe (1918)
PhD, English Philology (1921; Radcliffe)
Dissertation: “Alexander Pope and His Influence in America from 1810 to 1850”
Career: Central Tennessee College (1914–15); Dunbar High School,

Washington, DC (1920–9); Howard University (1929–44); Oakwood College
in Huntsville, AL (1944–73)
Life and Career
Eva Dykes was born in 1893 in Washington, DC, to Martha Ann (Howard)
and James Stanley Dykes.58 Her parents separated when she was young, and
her uncle, Dr. James Howard, took the family in and encouraged Eva and her
sisters in their educational pursuits. He was also able to provide them with
financial support. Eva attended Howard University, where her mother, father,
uncle, and other family members had also studied. After graduating, she taught
for a year at Central Tennessee College,59 then applied to Radcliffe for graduate
study. Although Dykes had graduated summa cum laude from Howard, she
was required to complete a second bachelor’s degree at Radcliffe before being
admitted for graduate study. This may have been fairly common for students
from historically black colleges. W. E. B. DuBois (Fisk, 1888) and Carter
Woodson (Berea, 1903) completed second bachelor’s degrees at Harvard before
moving on to graduate study there. Fully succeeding in her studies—and thus
demonstrating the validity of her degree from Howard—Dykes completed
Radcliffe’s undergraduate program. Her next step was to enter master’s study,
then to fulfill requirements for a doctoral degree with research that culminated
in a 644-page dissertation on the thought and influence of Alexander Pope.
At both Howard and Harvard/Radcliffe, Dykes was associated with several
African American intellectuals who contributed to discussions of race issues
and cultural difference in the early decades of the twentieth century. As an
undergraduate student, she was close to Geneva Townes and Lorenzo Dow
Turner, an academically minded couple who would later marry. The group
would have known Alain Locke and Charles H. Wesley, who were professors
at Howard while they were students. Dykes would, no doubt, see both Turner
and Locke again in Cambridge, Massachusetts, during her graduate studies
at Radcliffe. She and Turner began their master’s work at roughly the same
time that Locke, a Harvard alumnus, returned to the university to complete
a doctorate in philosophy.60At Radcliffe, she also may have met Marita O.
Bonner (1898–1971), an undergraduate in English and comparative literature,
and Caroline Bond Day (1889–1948), also an undergraduate, who would later
earn a master’s degree in anthropology at Radcliffe.
After earning the doctorate, Dykes was again in close proximity to Lorenzo
Dow Turner, Geneva (Townes) Turner, Alain Locke, Charles Wesley, and
Marita Bonner—all of whom were educators in Washington, DC. Dykes held
a faculty position at Dunbar High School (1920–9) and then Howard (1929–
44). Turner, Locke, and Wesley taught at Howard during that time, while
Geneva (Townes) Turner, Marita Bonner, and an additional associate, one of
Yale’s early women doctoral recipients, Otelia Cromwell (1874–1972), all held
teaching positions in the segregated school system in the nation’s capital. Like
Dykes, Chicago doctoral recipient, Georgiana Simpson, also taught at both
Dunbar and Howard in the 1920s.
Dykes’s dissertation advisor at Harvard/Radcliffe, John Livingston Lowes
(1867–1945), was in a sense a teacher/scholar from days gone by who had
wide-ranging interests and was fortunate enough to be able to make a career
of pursuing them.61 His professional life began as a mathematics instructor at
Washington and Jefferson College in Pennsylvania, when a bachelor’s degree
was a sufficient credential for college teachers. He then earned a master’s
degree and taught ethics at Hanover College in Indiana for roughly a decade.
In 1902, he again shifted focus and began graduate studies at Harvard, from
which he earned a doctorate in 1905. Teaching first at Swarthmore (1905–9),
then at Washington University in St. Louis (1909–18), he returned to Harvard
as a faculty member when he was just over fifty years old, remaining there
until his retirement in 1939.
Given his hybrid intellectual identity, getting a better sense of the influences
and ideas at play in Lowes’s work will help put Dykes’s studies at Radcliffe
and later publications into context. Lowes’s most significant work, The Road
to Xanadu, was a discussion of the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–
1834), who although known today primarily as a poet, was deeply engaged
in discussions of philosophy, political theory, and theology.62 Lowes’s earlier
work, Convention and Revolt in Poetry, published in 1919 gives us a window
into his thought at the time Dykes’s doctoral research was underway. In this
work, he makes references to William James, with whom Alain Locke had
studied.
Here on the one hand is what William James once called the “blooming
welter”—everything from a sea shell to Chicago, from a restless gossamer
to the swing of the planets, from my lady’s eyebrow to the stuff of Lear. And
here is the poet who feels it all and strives to catch and fix it—to catch it and
fix it in words.63
More importantly, he belies his own leanings toward philosophy, in particular,

the idealist thought that had been prevalent in previous decades:
The I who see am as manifold as what I see, and what I see takes form and
color, proportion and emphasis, from what I feel. It is obviously a problem
of two worlds with which we have to deal. . . . Call the two worlds, if you like,
the subjective and the objective, the microcosm and the macrocosm—or any
tag-words that will ticket them. What I want to make clear is a situation—a
protean and multiform ego . . . over against a rich and thronging world of
sensible things. . . . [W]hat we are concerned with is the communication
of what is seen, felt, heard, tasted, smelled. And once more the medium is
speech. But words cannot give the things in themselves.64
Finally, despite his lament that poetry had lost its “virility” in recent years,
Lowes demonstrates his familiarity with and respect for work by women: the
philosopher and poet, Madame du Scudery; the poets, Dorothy Wordsworth
and Amy Lowell; and the Renaissance specialist, Edith Sichel.65 It is apparent
that, like other men at Harvard/Radcliffe who offered classes to women and
served as advisors to students of color, Lowes was on board with expanding
access to the elite institution. Given his intellectual interests, he would have
served as a valuable advisor to Eva Dykes as she embarked on her study and
prepared to write a dissertation on Alexander Pope as a thinker and influential
figure in American intellectual life.
Dykes’s Philosophical Work
On African American Literature

Eva Dykes joined efforts with Lorenzo Dow Turner and Otelia Cromwell to edit
a comprehensive collection of works by African American thinkers, across a
range of literary genres, Readings from Negro Authors for Schools and Colleges,
which appeared in print in 1931. One of the first volumes of its kind, the work
was met with a number of positive reviews, although detractors certainly
voiced their views as well. The volume included writings arranged by genre—
poetry, short stories, dramas, essays, and public addresses—and each section
was prefaced by a brief introduction. Dykes and her co-editors did not discuss
the substance of the works, but simply introduce the genre in question in a
traditional and formalistic way. The section on poetry, for instance, outlines
the distinctions between narrative, dramatic, and lyrical verse. The contents of
the selections are telling, however, as are the study questions that follow.
In the sections on essays and speeches in Readings from Negro Authors,
we see addresses by leaders in African American history, such as Frederick
Douglass, Alexander Crummell, W. E. B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington,
and Carter Woodson. Some of these and other pieces applaud historic figures
who serve as exemplars across race and culture, such as DuBois’s discussions
of Alexander Crummell and Francis of Assisi, Douglass’s tribute to William
Lloyd Garrison, and William Pickens’s essay on Alexander Hamilton (in
which he asserts the American patriot’s Caribbean heritage strongly suggests
he had African roots). Essays about contributions to culture and society by
people of African descent are included as well, such as Kelly Miller’s “Negro
Patriotism and Devotion,” Alain Locke’s “Our Little Renaissance,” and W. S.
Scarborough’s “The Educated Negro and His Mission.” A masculine bias is
evident in these sections. Just two out of the eighteen authors in the essays and
speeches sections are women, although there would certainly have been a wide
array of material to choose from by Maria Stewart (1803–79), Frances Watkins
Harper (1825–1911), Mary Ann Shadd Cary (1823–93), Fannie Barrier

Williams (1855–1944), Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862–1931), Anna Julia Cooper
(1858–1964), or any number of other prominent women in African American
history. Just two women were included in this section: journalist Jessie Fauset
(1882–1961) discusses the African American artist, Henry Ossawa Tanner
(1859–1937), and the educator, Clarissa Scott Delaney (1901–27), reflects on
her travels in Germany in the early 1920s. By contrast, roughly one-third of
the selections of poetry, short story, and drama in this volume were produced
by women authors.
Dykes and her colleagues made their editorial choices with a traditional,
slightly moralizing, pedagogy in mind. They intended not simply to produce
another anthology of African American literature, but instead to encourage
students “to read thoughtfully and with appreciation, to form in them a taste
for good reading, and to teach them how to find books that are worth while.”66
Race and Romanticism

Dykes’s work, The Negro in English Romantic Thought (1942), provides us
with a better sense of the breadth and depth of her intellectual abilities. Her
stated aim was to examine the attitudes of English writers toward people of
African descent prior to the abolition of slavery in the Western world. But
two underlying themes are evident: humanistic ideals and faith in interracial
cooperation.
Dykes’s discussion begins with the recognition of four classic types that
appeared in the fiction and poetry of (white) authors who attempted to portray
the experiences of people of African heritage in England and the United States:
the noble slave, who is often subjected to cruelty but occasionally granted
relief; the wounded and heart-broken victim of racial injustice (usually a
woman); the cruel master; and the benevolent master. But she does not linger
on how these types function in literature. Rather she preferred to examine
the “ever increasing humanitarian spirit, which had as its aim the happiness
of all mankind” that she saw in romanticism, despite the presence of these
stereotypes.67 This spirit was characterized by the ideals of innate human
goodness, as espoused by thinkers like Joseph Butler (1692–1752) and David
Hume (1711–76); compassion, as demonstrated by George Fox (1624–91) and
his fellow Quakers; and empathy, as embraced by thinkers like Henry St. John
Bolingbroke (1678-1751) and Matthew Tindal (1657-1733).68 Therefore, her
discussion focuses on writers who expressed humanitarian concern for people
of color, condemned cruelty, rejected religious hypocrisy, and urged for justice.
Creative writing was Dykes’s primary interest in this volume. She discusses
the ideas of literally dozens of thinkers, and just over half of them were best
known for their poetry, fiction, or drama. Yet, she examines other genres as
well: essays, speeches, sermons, pamphlets, and correspondence. Roughly a
quarter of the writers she discusses were philosophical or religious thinkers,
these two fields of thought being far less distinct from each other in the
eighteenth and nineteenth century than they are today. Figures who continue
to be recognized as important thinkers today appear in this volume: William
Paley, Samuel Johnson, David Hume, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, Edmund
Burke, John Wesley, William Ellery Channing, Hannah More, Harriet
Martineau, and Frances Wright. While the three women listed were referred to
at points throughout the book, they are featured more fully in its final chapter,
“Some Women Abolitionists.” Here, we see Dykes reviewing discussions of
racial justice by prominent intellectuals—whether in public forums or private
correspondence. She cites a number of thinkers, chief among them Frances
Wright and Harriet Martineau. Wright, who was born and raised in Scotland,
voiced her opposition to the “odious traffic” in slaves before she visited
the United States in the 1820s.69 At that time, she became familiar with the
abolition movement and praised the US Congress for passing a bill to end
the slave trade. Ultimately, she settled in America and became an abolitionist
and feminist herself. Featured at greater length in Dykes’s discussion is
Harriet Martineau, who wrote about the evils of slavery in fiction, essays, and
correspondence. Martineau sardonically commented on the medical practice
of using only black cadavers in dissections, because, as she put it “the whites
do not like it, and the coloured people cannot resist.”70 Dykes continues to
quote Martineau on this deplorable practice. It was remarkable, she said, that
everything about the human body, including “the exquisite nervous system . . .
can be nicely investigated, on the ground of its being analogous with that of
the whites . . . [but] that [white] men come from such a study with contempt
for these brethren in their countenances, hatred in their hearts, and insult on
their tongues.”71 In Dykes’s discussion of Martineau as a staunch abolitionist,
she notes that she developed intellectual friendships with whites in the
United States, among them William Lloyd Garrison, Sarah Grimke, and her
sister, Angelina Grimke. Once she had learned about the life of the Haitian
revolutionary, Toussaint Louverture, Martineau wrote about him to “aid the
anti-slavery cause and to call the attention of the public to [his] ‘intellectual
and moral genius.’”72
In closing, Dykes belies her optimism: “The growing consciousness of the
inhumanity of slavery which finds its reflection in opposition and indignation”
in English romanticism reflects “a sincere desire to keep the torch of liberty
burning and pass it on undimmed to those who follow.”73
Conclusion
The women who completed degree work at Harvard and Yale at this early
point in the development of academic philosophy overcame immense odds
to win their opportunities to study there. While Yale provided formal avenues
for women to enroll, it appears to have had a faculty that was indifferent about
their presence—or perhaps too preoccupied with their own internal battles
about the future of the department to focus on mentoring female students.
Harvard, on the other hand, maintained official barriers against women, yet
its faculty were not merely supportive, but were strong advocates when their
degrees were denied before 1900. In both cases, the women under discussion
in this chapter had to be prepared for the academic rigor they would face at the
two most elite universities in the United States.
We can see some intersecting interests among different subsets within
the group—experimental psychology for Calkins, Howes, and Hitchcock;
aesthetics for Cutler and Howes; social equality and the use of rhetoric for
Howes and Dykes. At Yale, Cutler and Zehring finished degree work within
a year of each other. Hitchcock completed her degree fewer than five years
later. The theses of the three covered considerably different terrain—for Cutler,
it was Kant on aesthetics, for Zehring, on duty and religious faith, and for
Hitchcock, on psychology and expectation. Archival sources are not extant
to tell us more about their interactions, but it seems unlikely they studied
with the same professors. In addition, after completing the doctorate, their
careers took them to rather far-flung locations—Cutler to Smith in western
Massachusetts, Zehring to Wells College in upstate New York, and Hitchcock
to Lake Erie College in western Pennsylvania. Calkins and Howes were at
Harvard/Radcliffe in close succession, studied with the same professors—men
who testified to their brilliance—both remained in the Boston area, and would
have known each other well. Yet Calkins became something of an intellectual
powerhouse, whereas Howes remained a “mere mortal” who published only a
handful of articles after her marriage. Their academic experiences were similar,
but the outcomes could not have been much different. Dykes arrived on the
scene at Radcliffe much later. It is not likely, but possible, that she met Calkins
or Howes, given their proximity to Cambridge. Dykes was fortunate enough to
have a strong and supportive faculty advisor. She did not appear to encounter
overt racism at Radcliffe, although one has to wonder, given the state of race
relations in the United States at that time.
Yale continued to admit women for graduate study after 1900, but the
institution was not flooded with female students pursuing doctorates in
philosophy. Just three more women earned doctoral degrees in the discipline
at Yale before 1920: Mary K. Benedict (1903), Mary Isabel Park (1904), and
Muriel Bacheler (1912).
Mary Kendrick Benedict (1876-1956) earned a bachelor’s degree at Vassar

College in 1897 and a doctorate at Yale in 1903 with a dissertation on the
metaphysics of F. H. Bradley. She was the daughter of Anne (Kendrick) and
Wayland Richardson Benedict, a professor of philosophy at the University
of Cincinnati. Her brother, Stanely Rossiter Benedict (1884–1936), gained
renown as a chemist. Little information is available about Mary Benedict’s
education and early professional life, and it appears that her dissertation is
no longer extant. Yet with the doctorate from Yale in hand, she became the
first president of Sweet Briar College for women in Virginia and recruited
eight faculty to welcome a class of just over fifty students in the institution’s
first year. She remained at Sweet Briar for a decade, resigning to study at
Johns Hopkins and establish a career in medicine. After leaving philosophy,
she held positions at Bellevue Hospital in New York, Hampton Institute in
Virginia, Ring Sanitarium in Massachusetts, and Connecticut College, where
she was the college physician. After 1930, it appears that she went into private
practice.74
Mary Isabel Park (1868–1966) was born in Monterrey, Mexico to Andrew
Park, an American citizen, and Mary Park, an Irish immigrant, in 1868. She
earned an undergraduate degree at Mount Holyoke College in 1893, thus is
likely to have studied with Marietta Kies and/or Caroline Miles Hill, discussed
in Chapter 3. She spent some time studying abroad—at the University of
London and University of Perugia in Italy. After earning her bachelor’s degree,
she taught at girls’ schools in Massachusetts and New Jersey, then spent five
years at the Worthington School in Berlin, Connecticut, before entering Yale
to study philosophy at the graduate level. Her dissertation at Yale in 1904 was
entitled “A Study of the Philosophical Basis of Leibniz’ Optimism,” the only
hard copy of which appears to be in the collection of the Gottfried Wilhelm
Leibniz Bibliothek in Hanover, Germany. As was common among academics
in her era, she did not produce any other philosophical work. The year after
completing the doctorate, she was offered a position at Heidelberg University
in Ohio, where she remained until her retirement in 1940. At Heidelberg, she
served as the dean of women (1905–29), as a faculty member in education and

philosophy (1929–38); and as acting dean (1938–40).75
Muriel Bacheler (1890–1981) earned a doctorate in philosophy at Yale in
1915. She was raised near Hartford, Connecticut, the daughter of Rebecca
(Fuller) and Rev. Francis P. Bacheler. She studied under Mary Whiton Calkins
at Wellesley, earning a bachelor’s degree from the college in 1912. She and
her brother Theodore (1893–1968) both studied at Yale; Muriel earned
the doctorate in philosophy in 1915, and Theodore completed a master of
divinity in 1917. In her dissertation, Bacheler examined mysticism as “an
epistemological problem,” and this is the only academic work she produced.
She married Edgar B. Dawkins immediately after completing her studies at
Yale, started a family, and appears to have set professional aspirations aside.76
Radcliffe began conferring doctorates in 1902, but only four students
earned a PhD in philosophy there before 1920: Eleanor Rowland, Frances
Rousmaniere, Grace Marshall, and Eleanor Patterson (1914).
Eleanor Harris Rowland (1882–1944) was born in Lee, Massachusetts, to
Elizabeth (Gould) and Rev. Lyman Sibley Rowland. She attended Oberlin
College, but completed her studies at Radcliffe College, with a bachelor’s degree
in 1903, a master’s in 1904, and a doctorate in 1905. She held faculty positions
at Mount Holyoke (1905–12) and Reed College (1912–17), and conducted a
good deal of research, primarily about women and psychology, in each position.
During the First World War, she began service work with the American Red
Cross and continued working in social welfare and psychological services for a
number of years. This was due to a combination of natural interests and gender
norms. She had married in 1917, to Harry A. Wembridge, and the academic
world was less than friendly to women who chose marriage over career at this
point in history. Rather than return to academia, she worked at Walter Reed
Hospital and the US Surgeon General’s office in Washington, DC. She and
her family moved to the Midwest in the mid-1920s, where she served as a
psychologist at the Women’s Protective Association and a girls’ advocate at the
Cuyohoga County Juvenile Court, both in Cleveland, Ohio. Along with her
dissertation on aesthetics she produced a number of works on art, psychology,

and social development.77
Frances Rousmaniere (1876–1964) was a student of Mary Whiton Calkins
at Wellesley, completing a bachelor’s degree at the college in 1900 and a
master’s in 1904, and the two maintained a collegial relationship through the
years. She earned a doctorate in 1906 with a dissertation on experimental
psychology. She produced only a handful of publications immediately after
earning her degree, however. Like Eleanor Rowland and Ethel Puffer Howes,
Rousmaniere’s career was truncated when she chose to marry. She taught at
Mount Holyoke (1906–8) and Smith College (1908–10), but stopped working
after her marriage to Arthur Dewing, a Harvard business professor. This was
in large part due to her own belief that her responsibilities as a wife, mother,
and housekeeping took priority. When asked if she thought women could have
both a career and a family, she replied “I have never seen it done.” She would
not return to teaching until her children were grown—a mathematics position
at Bennington College in Vermont (1943–5). Rousmaniere’s correspondence
and unpublished papers are in the archives of the Schlesinger Library at the
Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University.78
Grace Eiler Marshall (1877–1967) followed an unusual career path for a
woman in her era. After earning a bachelor’s degree at McMaster University
in Ontario in 1898, she held a number of “assorted teaching jobs.” In 1906,
she married Troward Marshall, a Unitarian minister, and then began graduate
studies at Radcliffe. Her dissertation in 1910 examined the ethical theory
of Jean-Marie Guyau (1854–88). She would produce only one additional
published work, a lecture on religion and secularization. Between 1910 and
1918, Marshall attended to home and family while also serving as a tutor.
Shortly before her husband’s early death in 1922, she established the Marshall
Tutoring School, which she managed until her retirement in 1936.79
Eleanor Robb Patterson (ca. 1890–1920) did not leave a significant paper
trail due to her early death. She earned a bachelor’s degree at Wellesley and
went on to complete a master’s (1911) and a doctorate (1914) at Radcliffe. Her
dissertation was entitled “Romantic Elements in Hegel’s Philosophy,” and she

was working on a book about romanticism when her life was cut short by
illness in 1920.80
Between 1921 and 1930, nine additional women would earn doctorates
in philosophy at Radcliffe, among them Susanne Langer (1926) and Mary
Coolidge (1930). But in the early decades of the twentieth century, more women
were attracted to other fields, most notably, philology (now linguistics), history
and social science, and the natural sciences.81 Women were not admitted to all
degree programs at Yale until 1969 and at Harvard until 1977.
6
Overcoming the Odds
Women on Their Own
at Johns Hopkins, Smith, Bern,
and the Sorbonne
Eight doctoral recipients in this volume were the only women at a given
institution to complete a doctorate in philosophy or related fields in this
early period: Christine Ladd-Franklin (Johns Hopkins, 1882), Julia Gulliver
(Smith College, 1888), Florence Watson Blackett (Boston University, 1890),
Sarah Maxon Cobb (Syracuse University, 1890), Emma Rauschenbusch
(University of Bern, 1894), Eleanor Tibbetts (University of Pennsylvania,
1894), Alma Willis Sydenstricker (Wooster College, 1895), and Anna Julia
Cooper (Sorbonne, 1925). Four of these women established themselves
professionally and produced enough written material to discuss and assess
their contributions to philosophical discourse: Christine Ladd-Franklin, Julia
Gulliver, Emma Rauschenbusch, and Anna Julia Cooper. There is a scarcity of
information about Blackett, Cobb, Sydenstricker, and Tibbetts. Their theses
do not appear to be extant, and they did not produce any published work.
Sydenstricker had a successful career as a religion professor at Agnes Scott
College (1920–43). But other than accounts by alumni who adored her—in
part because she was a relative of Pearl S. Buck and stood by the writer through
her divorce scandal—there is little in print to tell us about her life and work.1
By all accounts, the academic experiences Ladd-Franklin and Gulliver
had as graduate students were relatively positive. Ladd-Franklin ran into
administrative barriers at Johns Hopkins, as discussed later in the chapter, but
received good mentoring from male professors and succeeded in teaching at
coeducational institutions, albeit on a part-time basis. She is one of the most
prolific writers in this volume and has deservedly received a fair amount of
attention in recent decades. Gulliver returned to Smith College for graduate
study after completing a bachelor’s degree there. She also appears to have
received good mentoring while at Smith. Like many women in this study, she
published only one significant work and a handful of articles. She exercised
influence, however, by maintaining a commitment to women’s higher
education, teaching and serving as president of Rockford College throughout
her career.
Emma Rauschenbusch and Anna Julia Cooper faced obstacles to earning
their doctoral degrees, though for vastly different reasons. Rauschenbusch was
from a relatively influential family, the daughter of a minister and theologian
from Germany who became prominent in Rochester, New York. Yet she was
unable to complete a graduate program in Berlin and Leipzig. In the end, she
conducted most of her work with an egalitarian professor at the University
of Leipzig, but institutional barriers prevented her from defending her thesis.
Ultimately, she was granted a doctorate at the University of Bern in Switzerland.
She taught as a missionary in India for most of her career and published three
books: her dissertation on Mary Wollstonecraft and two volumes related
to missions. Cooper was born into slavery and became a widow at a young
age. She and Mary Church Terrell, discussed in Volume I, were classmates at
Oberlin College, completing bachelor’s degrees in 1884. Cooper also earned
a master’s degree at the college. Due to her need to be self-supporting, she
held positions as a teacher for many years. Her first attempt to earn a doctoral
degree around 1910 had to be set aside when she took in five nieces and
OVERCOMING THE ODDS 239
nephews who had recently been orphaned. Vowing to complete her degree
at the Sorbonne, even if she had to swim there to get there,2 she became the
fourth African American woman to earn a doctorate. She gave many addresses
and speeches, was a teacher throughout her career, and published a collection
of essays on race, gender, and equality.
Excellence Speaks for Itself
Christine Ladd-Franklin (1847–1930)

BA, Vassar (1869)
PhD, Mathematics and Logic, Johns Hopkins (1882, completed; 1926 granted)
Dissertation: “On the Algebra of Logic”
Career: High school teacher in New York (1882–91); study in Göttingen/

Berlin (1891–2); Sarah Berliner Women’s Graduate Fellowship, administrator
(1901–18); American Philosophical Association charter member (1902);
Johns Hopkins University (±1902–9); Columbia University (1910–30)
Life and Career
Christine Ladd-Franklin was the first of three children born to Eliphalet and
Augusta Ladd in Windsor, Connecticut.3 Her parents were well educated and
from fairly influential families. Her father was a businessman whose uncle,
William Ladd, established the American Peace Society in 1828. Her mother
was the niece of John Milton Niles, a newspaper editor and US Postmaster-
General in President Martin Van Buren’s administration. Ladd-Franklin was
introduced to feminist ideals when she was just five years old and her mother
took her to a lecture by the then-prominent writer and feminist, Elizabeth
Oakes Smith.4 After her mother’s death in 1860, she moved to Portsmouth,
New Hampshire, where she lived with her paternal grandmother.
After completing secondary school, Ladd-Franklin became a member of the

second class to enter Vassar College for women—in 1866. Her journal entries
show that this was a dream come true for her as an intellectually minded young
woman. Like many women in this volume, financial difficulties interrupted
her studies, but an aunt provided funds to continue at Vassar the following
year. With an interest in the sciences, she studied with the astronomer, Maria
Mitchell, who shared and quite likely encouraged Ladd-Franklin’s feminist
views. Just over a decade later, Mitchell would be one of the co-founders of the
Association of Collegiate Alumnae (now American Association of University
Women). Ladd-Franklin graduated from Vassar in 1869 and, also like many
women (and some men) in this era, she taught secondary school for several
years before pursuing graduate study.
Ladd-Franklin had a scientific mind and put it to good use. She began her
studies in mathematics, then gravitated toward logic. After a year of study in
Germany, first in Gottingen with G. E. Müller (1850–1934), then in Berlin
with Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–94), her interest shifted to experimental
psychology. Like Mary Whiton Calkins and Ellen Bliss Talbot, Ladd-Franklin
published a good deal: a book in psychology on color theory and over forty
articles. Unlike the majority of women in this volume, she was married,
to Fabian Franklin (1853–1939), a mathematician, with whom she had
two children.
Just the second woman to complete doctoral study in philosophy in the
United States, Ladd-Franklin had applied to Johns Hopkins University, at that
time a new institution, using only her first initial and last name. There were
objections to admitting her once administrators discovered she was female,
but strong support from an egalitarian professor, James Sylvester (1814–97),
was enough to win approval, and she began her studies there in 1878.5 When
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) arrived at the university in 1880, he
became a valued mentor and significantly influenced Ladd-Franklin’s thought.
Later in life, she reflected on her time at the university, referring to the positive
energy that infused the classrooms in those early years of the institution’s
history.6 Certainly it was an exciting time to be there. Josiah Royce (1855–1916)

had just finished his doctorate at Johns Hopkins as Ladd-Franklin entered the
institution, and it is likely that she crossed paths with the philosophical idealist
George Sylvester Morris (1840–89), who was also lecturing at the university
at this time. John Dewey (1859–1952) entered the institution as a student in
1884, two years after Ladd-Franklin completed doctoral degree work.
Yet, Ladd-Franklin was subject to disadvantages at Johns Hopkins. For
instance, although she was granted a fellowship, she was listed as a student
in official documents rather than as a fellow, because she was a woman. A
more serious offense, however, was the university’s refusal to officially confer
her with a doctorate, even though she had completed all degree requirements.
The institution feared setting a precedent and thus being forced to open its
doors to women. This is a distinction she shares with Mary Whiton Calkins
and Ethel Puffer Howes, discussed in Chapter 5, who were denied doctoral
degrees by Harvard. To its credit, Johns Hopkins recognized the error after a
time and conferred Ladd-Franklin’s degree retroactively in 1926. She was the
only woman to earn a doctorate in philosophy at Johns Hopkins until well into
the twentieth century.
Despite her strong publishing record and abilities as a professor, however,
she never held a full-time position at a college or university. Instead she taught
as a part-time professor or even volunteered her time at the institutions where
her husband held professorships—Johns Hopkins and Columbia University.
She experienced other slights and injustices due to the sexist practices and
policies in place at the time. For example, Edward Titchener, a colleague at
Cornell, attempted to bar women from his Society of Experimentalists, once
writing to a male colleague, “I have been pestered . . . by Mrs Ladd-Franklin for
not having women at the meetings, and she threatens to make various scenes in
person and in print. Possibly, she will [force] us to meet—like rabbits—in some
dark place underground.” Ladd-Franklin reprimanded Titchener in response
saying that his behavior was “medieval . . . unconscientious . . . immoral [and]
worse than that—so unscientific.”7 Yet a historical discussion of Titchener’s
work and legacy credits him with being a strong supporter of the women who
studied with him as graduate students. Perhaps he was comfortable serving as
an authority figure, but had difficulty accepting women as peers.8
Along with Ritchie, Calkins and Talbot, Ladd-Franklin was one of the most
productive writers among the women discussed in this volume. Roughly half
of her writings focus on mathematics and symbolic logic. Another quarter of
her work consists of discussions related to psychology and color theory, and
the remainder is devoted to epistemology and philosophical reasoning. She
published far more work than it is possible to discuss fully in this study. Here
I will focus on some key selections that best demonstrate her contributions
to the discipline and align well with the concerns and approaches of other
women in this volume.
On Logic and Reasoning
In her doctoral thesis, “On the Algebra of Logic” (1882), Ladd-Franklin

outlined the systems of logic that held currency in her day, recognizing the
work of Boole, Jevons, Schroder, McColl, and Peirce. Then she introduced
new considerations into logic that would bring clarity to future discussions.
Her stated goal in this work was to ensure that a system of logic could better
express the ideas we discuss in natural language. The innovation with which
she is credited in her thesis is her recognition that logic had been unable to
accommodate the ambiguities, negations, and rebuttals that are commonplace
in everyday speech. She used a negative copula symbol to represent such and
provided formulas and tables to illustrate just how well the introduction of this
feature would help to clarify our ideas. Thankfully, she also wrote an article in
1889 that made her system and its merits understandable to nonlogicians, “On
some characteristics of symbolic logic,” in the American Journal of Psychology.
While crediting Boole with “solving” the problem of logic, in “Some
Characteristics,” Ladd-Franklin makes valuable contributions to logic as it
was then understood. Ordinary logic, she says, cannot adequately address the
problem of extricating terms or introducing conjunctions or disjunctions into
a proposition. The example she gives is one that is easily understood in natural
language:
All chemistry students also study either biology or physics,

Chemistry students who do not study physics all study biology.
The problem Ladd-Franklin aimed to address here is that logic failed to

recognize that a subject and predicate “are not necessarily indivisible wholes.”
In her system, “they can be broken up and their separate elements shifted at
pleasure from one side of the copula to the other.”9 Her use of the copula allows
the system to show whether the propositions in question are “universal or
particular, positive or negative, symmetrical or non-symmetrical and provide
a simple rule to transform a given proposition from one form into any other
form.”10 To bolster her claims, she refers readers to the work of John Neville
Keynes (1852–1949), who produced a text, Studies and Exercises in Formal
Logic, which worked out her system in everyday language.
She further clarifies that a system of logic needs to be able to accommodate:
(1) expression—the ability to take the “voluminous number of propositions”
in everyday language and reduce them to a limited number; (2) combination—
rules for uniting or dividing ideas; and (3) elimination—rules for omitting
some information (with the implication being that such information is not
necessary) while retaining other information.11 A good system of logic, in
Ladd-Franklin’s view, will “allow no more variety of expression than absolutely
necessary. A single fact, instead of being expressed at pleasure in four different
ways, as is done in real life, must be expressed in one way only.”12
Ladd-Franklin spends a good deal of time in this article making a case for a
system of notation that will make logic uniform and consistent, simply for the
sake of clarity. She recognizes that presenting logic in a somewhat mathematical
form, makes it appear to be inaccessible to nonlogicians. This is unfortunate,
but incidental in her view. Just as chemistry uses its own set of notations,
logic must establish its own means of expression as a kind of shorthand for
practitioners. At the same time, she comically notes that “a very large amount
of very useless discussion might have been saved if non-mathematical signs
had been employed for logic from the start.” The usefulness of such symbols is
“fully equaled by its deceptiveness” at times.13
Three publications shed light on Ladd-Franklin’s understanding of
epistemology and philosophical reasoning: “Epistemology for the Logician,”
(1908) and a discussion of “explicit primitives” in two parts, published in the
Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods in 1911 and 1912.14
These relatively short articles are contributions to a larger body of work by
other women (and men) in this period, the main objective of which was to
dismantle forms of discourse and terminology that were considered outdated
and lacking in clarity—terms like substance, absolute, and soul. Elements
of this problem were being taken up by Calkins when she discussed “self ”
and “soul.” It is also present in the work of Eliza Ritchie as she ventures from
philosophy of mind into an early understanding of psychology (or more
accurately, psychology-as-epistemology). We see Talbot contributing to this
effort as well in her “Conscious Elements” article, and we see aspects of it in
Matilde Castro’s exploration of the relation between (instrumental) logic and
(functional) psychology.
In the first installment on “explicit primitives” Ladd-Franklin simply
reminds her peers that not all terms can be defined or demonstrated. There are
limits to any “science” or area of study. Therefore, it is important to recognize
what we can truly assert: terms (or concepts) and propositions (or statements).
We must then be ready for them to be rigorously inspected and open to all.
Again making use of her orientation in logic, she notes that we can observe
only particulars. When we attempt to discuss or make rules about universals,
we are in the realm of hypotheticals. It is especially important to recognize the
boundaries of discourse (and here Ladd-Franklin also implies the boundaries
of knowledge), particularly in the mismatch in understandings she saw
between idealists and realists in her day. This article was written specifically
in anticipation of the upcoming meeting of the American Philosophical

Association, in which these two competing philosophical movements would
debate the merits of their respective points of view. The same year, Mary
Whiton Calkins would publish her own work discussing the merits of idealism
versus realism.15
The second installment of Ladd-Franklin’s “explicit primitives” discussion
was a response to Warner Fite (1867–1955), who strongly objected to the claims
she made in the first article. It is clear that Fite misunderstood Ladd-Franklin’s
intent, but her response further clarifies her views. The term itself—“explicit
primitives”—was used not to suggest that primitive or foundational ideas
somehow get at the “essences” of the stuff of the world. Nor did she use this
term to signal that foundational ideas are automatically apparent or explicit.
The term refers to what is basic or foundational in our concepts. Ladd-Franklin
was simply urging philosophers to do what they are best-known for doing: first,
define terms, then discuss how they apply or are instructive in a given situation.
“Epistemology for the Logician” begins by acknowledging philosophy’s
reputation for clinging to time-worn theories without demonstrating their
accuracy or value. In the sciences, outdated hypotheses and theories are
rigorously vetted and weeded out when they fail to be useful. Yet philosophy
has generally taken an approach that says “once a system, then always a
system, no matter how feeble a doctrine may be.”16 To be meaningful or
useful, however, an academic discipline must produce knowledge, not empty
theories—unless philosophy is meant to be “like the so-called philosophy of
Nietzsche, merely a department of literature or art.”17 To remedy this problem,
Ladd-Franklin proposes a new approach to philosophy to ensure adequate
rigor and a commitment to truth. This approach would establish18
a) A theory of reality that focuses on immediate experience, rather than a

hypothetical world beyond experience;
b) A reformed psychology that recognizes there are elements/

constituents [of experience] that cannot be further examined;
c) A theory of judgment that distinguishes between a concept as “a one-

time-one-place relation” and a judgment, which is a relation between
two or more concepts;
d) The truth of propositions, again, making a distinction—in this case

between particulars, which are based in immediate experience (in
space and time) and universals, which arise out of observations of
events and patterns over time and, like Peirce’s “probable induction”
allow us to make predictions and attain genuine knowledge.
In closing this paper, which was delivered at the International Congress for
Philosophy in Heidelberg, Ladd-Franklin’s motivations become clear. Her aim
is to hold her contemporaries in philosophy accountable for failing to meet the
standards she has outlined—pragmatists in particular. This is interesting, given
the fact that Charles Sanders Peirce was an early influence and that in recent
years she has been identified as a pragmatist.19 Yet in her view the pragmatist’s
theory of truth applies to only a small subset of truth. When we make a
statement about the world—that water flows downhill, for instance—we know
it is true, not because of its consequences, but because of “immediate and
innumerable instances” of its occurrence.20 Pragmatism’s truths are actually
hypotheses that become theories, which we then might determine over time to
be true. But as construed in her day, Ladd-Franklin charged that pragmatism’s
“truth” is “not only immoral, but also untrue.” Instead, truth is like a network.
Truths “hang together” and are confirmed by “cross-connections,” similar to
the root system of a tree that gives it stability and strength. Making use of
a feminine metaphor, she concludes by saying that truth is like “a work of
weaving—a woven tissue.”21
In “Intuition and Reason” (1893) Ladd-Franklin addressed epistemology and
gender in ways that are surprisingly modern. If only the genealogy of women’s
thought had been more accessible in the academic world, her work could have
informed the “women’s ways of knowing” trends that were so prevalent nearly a
century later, in the late 1980s. In this article, Ladd-Franklin identifies the claim
that men and women have different kinds of minds as a myth, pure and simple.
Reason in her view is the process of making use of theories and principles in
a practical setting. “Intuition, in the sense in which it is used when discussing
male and female minds” has a number of meanings, it can cover instinct,
experience, automatic impulses, or habitual behaviors.22 Ladd-Franklin is
insistent that there is no difference between the male and female mind, however.
Instead, there are simply different kinds of knowledge that people acquire based
on their social circumstances: “Women’s interests have been so exclusively
social that they have developed a sense for the physical expression of emotion
which makes society for them a matter of complicated relations, of delicate
susceptibility to play of feeling. . . . But there are men who are quite the equals of
women in this respect.”23 She provides a number of examples and insights into
the varying types of knowledge individuals can acquire—mathematics, music,
homemaking, and politics. She then declares that
All is, at bottom, reason; in one case it is conscious [i.e., rational]; in another
it is unconscious [i.e., intuitive], but can be forced into consciousness. . . .
Because a woman’s interests lie more than a man’s in regions in which thought
is instinctive and automatic, it does not follow that she has developed any
peculiar powers of intuition.24
Ladd-Franklin cites Wundt, whose students conducted an experiment

designed to determine whether conscious/rational or unconscious/intuitive
decision making was in play in a set of specific scenarios. Not surprisingly,
his findings showed that the more “reasoned” an action is, the less automatic/
intuitive it is. Ladd-Franklin refers to this experiment to bolster her claim,
not only that reason and intuition are present in both men and women (as in
Wundt’s subjects, presumably), but also that intuition is in a sense a higher
form of reason. She closes with this clearly feminist statement:
So long as a woman’s highest duty was to please her lord and master, her task
was simple, but women are now awake to a sense of wider responsibilities.
They are now aware that it is their highest duty to be the best possible kind
of a human being, and to do whatever lies within their strength toward
making the world the best possible kind of a world to live in.25
Social/Political Discourse
Julia Gulliver (1856–1940)

PhD, Philosophy, Smith College (1888)
Career: Rockford College (1890–1902); study in Leipzig (1892–3); Rockford

College, president (1902–19)
Life and Career
Julia Gulliver was the daughter of John P. and Frances (Curtis) Gulliver and
was born in Norwich, Connecticut. Her father was an ordained minister,
seminary professor, and a college president. Before Gulliver was in her teens,
the family had moved from Norwich to Chicago and then to Galesburg, Illinois,
where John Gulliver was president of Knox College. After moving again to
Binghamton, New York, Julia Gulliver entered the first class of Smith College,
graduating in 1879. She studied philosophy and religion with her father, who
by that time had become a professor at Andover Theological Seminary, before
deciding to pursue graduate work in philosophy.
Gulliver was the third woman in the United States to earn a doctorate in
philosophy—at Smith College in 1888. As an undergraduate at Smith, Gulliver
paved the way for future doctoral degree earners, Mary Whiton Calkins and
Anna Alice Cutler. While these Smith alumnae would go on to graduate
work at Harvard and Yale, respectively, she decided to return for a doctorate
at Smith, where she would study under George Webber, a lecturer in ethics
(1884–91) and Henry Norman Gardiner (Smith faculty, 1884–1924). Gardiner

in particular was a strong supporter of women in philosophy who would later
help establish the American Philosophical Association and welcome female
colleagues as members.
Gulliver spent her academic career at Rockford Female Seminary (later
College) near Chicago. She was among the many women in this volume who
travelled to Germany to study, which at the time was considered the ideal
location for graduate work in philosophy. While in Leipzig, Gulliver studied
under Wilhelm Wundt, a leading ethicist and experimental psychologist.
When she returned, she taught philosophy and biblical literature at Rockford
(1890–1902) then became its president (1902–19). Gulliver’s works include
translations of Wilhelm Wundt’s Ethics (1887) and The Facts of Moral Life
(1901); a collection of her own essays and speeches, Studies in Democracy
(1917); and a handful of articles in philosophy journals. Like so many career
women in this era, she was unmarried.
Through her work at Rockford Seminary, Gulliver became acquainted
with Jane Addams, and the two women were relatively close through the
years. She admired and promoted Addams’s work in social welfare. In
addition, she was acquainted and/or corresponded with a number of figures
discussed in this study. She exchanged letters with James Hayden Tufts at the
University of Chicago, about hiring women from the graduate program in
philosophy, psychology, and education there and giving him feedback on their
performance. She also corresponded with James Creighton of Cornell when
he was editor of The Philosophical Review. As a student at Smith, she is likely
to have known others featured in this volume who graduated from the college
in the 1880s, Mary Whiton Calkins and Anna Alice Cutler. She may have
met or perhaps even travelled with Eliza Ritchie and Marietta Kies, both of
whom studied in Leipzig at least part of the year Gulliver spent there, 1892–3.
Emma Rauschenbusch may have been among the peers she met there as well.
Gulliver’s written work addresses intellectual questions that were in play in
her era: psychology and theories of mind, the free will/determinism debate,
and social/political concerns. She held relatively progressive religious views,

leaned toward liberal political philosophy, and embraced feminist thought.
Julia Gulliver’s Philosophical Work
Gulliver’s first publication in a philosophy venue was an early discussion

of dreams as a psychological phenomenon. “The Psychology of Dreams”
appeared in print in 1888, in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, edited by
William Torrey Harris (1835–1909).26 As discussed in Volume I, Harris was a
central figure in the early idealist movement in philosophy, who established
himself as an educationally minded thinker in St. Louis, Missouri in the
1860s. He was a strong supporter of women’s rights, and he provided career-
boosting opportunities for (white) women in K-12 education, publishing, and
academia throughout his lifetime. Gulliver’s article on dreams is the only piece
in Harris’s journal to be produced by an early woman doctoral recipient. Each
of the other women who published in JSP were public school educators or
independent scholars.
In “The Psychology of Dreams,” Gulliver explores the interplay of mind
and body during sleep. Her overarching question is whether the activity of
the mind during sleep is a form of conscious activity, and as an extension of
this question, whether the selfhood we experience in our dreams is the same
entity as the self that we experience during our waking hours. In the course
of her discussion, Gulliver sketches the main questions that dominated the
exploration of dreams at the time: What “mental faculties” were active during
dreams? What initiates our dreams—physical or mental stimuli? What is the
role of memory and imagination when a person is in a dream state? What is
the distinction between conscious versus subconscious mental activity?
Early on in this article, Gulliver asserts that “in sleep, the soul never remits
its activity.” Our thoughts while in a dream state may not be fully “lucid,” yet it
is clear that in dreams we can have “a certain idea, however confused, of what
we think and act and suffer.”27 In her view, this demonstrates that “the acts of
the soul are always conscious acts. The fact that we retain knowledge of our
personal identity through sleep is a sufficient proof of this.”28 Citing Descartes
as well as other thinkers whose ideas were well respected in her day—Dugald
Stewart (1753–1828), William Hammond (1828–1900), and Samuel Clarke
(1675–1729)—she makes two claims related to personal identity. The first is
the following: even in the midst of the most unusual dream, the dreamer has
the experience of being the main character in the scene before them. They
retain a sense of their own selfhood. The dream is their own dream—not the
dream of another. The second claim she makes is this: even though we may
not be able to actively exercise our will to achieve a specific outcome while
in a dream state, individuals still maintain a sense of having needs, interests,
or desires that then play themselves out in dreams. We may not be actively
employing our will, but we are conscious of having our moral aims met or
frustrated while in a dream. At this point, she introduces the role of distinct
mental faculties into her discussion. While memory and imagination seem to
play dominant roles when we dream, other faculties, like imitation, judgment,
or reason, can enter into our dream states. The latter faculties can edit or alter
our dreams to make them less overwhelming, confusing, or frightening, she
says. The problem is not with the nature of our mental capacities themselves,
but that we have less command over them in the midst of a dream. In the end,
Gulliver concludes that when the mind is at rest in sleep, its activity is the same
in kind, but less forceful in degree than during waking hours.29
Free Will versus Determinism
Another significant contribution to philosophy as it emerged as an academic

profession is Gulliver’s response to an article by Eliza Ritchie on free will in
The Philosophical Review. This exchange appears to be the first public debate
between two academic women philosophers in the United States. Although
both were influenced by early American idealism, Gulliver and Ritchie

nevertheless disagreed strongly about the nature of human will and the
question of whether we are able to make truly free choices within a world that
is at least partly fixed and determined. Drawing on Spinoza, the thinker she
most admired, Ritchie held that libertarian free will is a fantasy. In her view,
human capacities are fixed by the laws of nature, therefore we are bound by
those very laws of nature. Gulliver not only disagrees but also charges Ritchie
with committing a logical fallacy. The notion of “cause” upon which Ritchie’s
arguments rely is used in a number of different ways. The sense of cause that
Ritchie really has in mind, in Gulliver’s view, is the scholastic notion of logical
causation. Gulliver’s counter claim is worth quoting at length:
It is possible for a man to be a libertarian and hold that volitions are

subject to the law of causation in two senses: (i) that they are caused by
motives as being their essential conditions . . . (2) that volitions are caused
by the conscious, choosing ego as being their efficient cause. When such
a libertarian doctrine is practically held and defended, though with great
variety of treatment, by such writers as Wundt, Paulsen, Lotze, Janet,
Martineau, Green, James, and Baldwin, I submit that it is an anachronism
to go back to the scholastic figment of the liberty of indifference, to find
a form of libertarianism that can be successfully coped with by the clever
determinism of to-day.30
In a subsequent article by John Dewey, “The Ego as Cause,”31 that also

addressed the free will/determinism debate, Gulliver sought to make a similar
objection. Writing to James Creighton, editor of The Philosophical Review,
she first half-joked that “the stones will cry out” if she failed to respond to
Dewey.32 She wanted to make the case for her view of free will and causation in
her own words, for fear of being misrepresented and further misunderstood.
Creighton’s reply does not appear to have been preserved, but a few weeks later
Gulliver again sought an opportunity to respond: “If nothing appears from me
in answer to Prof. Dewey’s article, it will inevitably seem to be because I have
nothing to say, and I should be sorry for that, inasmuch as he refers to my

paper directly as his point of attack.”33 The article she proposed to write was set
aside, however, in favor of an article by James H. Hyslop (1854–1920) whose
views were similar to her own.
On Democracy
In her most significant work, Studies in Democracy, Gulliver addresses her

concerns in three chapters: “The Essence of Democracy,” “In Search of the
Holy Grail” (regarding women’s advancement), and “Efficiency in Democracy.”
The ideas that Gulliver discusses in the opening chapter of this work are
wide-ranging. While she draws some parallels between the outbreak of war in
Europe and America’s struggle to maintain national unity through the Civil
War era, her main focus here is on democracy as an ideal to be embraced on
both an individual and a national level. Democracy, she says, is “an attitude
of heart, mind, and soul.”34 It cannot be “a dead abstraction, but . . . [must be]
a living organism known as the American people.”35 She adds to this a claim
that she expands on later in the work. The equality that has traditionally been
embraced in the United States is not a collectivism or a bland uniformity, but
instead is the ability of each person to express their individuality—to be part of
the whole, yet to stand apart.36
In this chapter, Gulliver puts forth the classic conservative view that
a democracy cannot guarantee equality of results, but only equality of
opportunity. Lamentably, she accepts many of the tired old claims about race
that simply served to perpetuate racism in the United States. While asserting
that all people deserve the freedom to achieve, for instance, she simultaneously
claimed that some cultural groups were naturally inferior. She held more
modern views about women, however. Gulliver rejected the claim that men
are the initiators and creators in society and women the preservers and
nurturers.37 Both men and women must be attuned to concerns related, not
only to home and family but also to the sanctity of life itself. “Men and women
are alike summoned”—in her view, by God—to ask: “What will make peace
not only possible, but honorable and permanent? What can make the human
personality more sacrosanct in all its relations”—in the family as well as in
public/political life?38 In regard to gender, then, Gulliver stands apart from
many of the women discussed in this study, Volume I in particular, who fully
embraced gender complementarity. In an era in which the peace movement,
the temperance movement, and any number of other reform movements were
established by women and fueled by ideals of maternal feminism, Gulliver
insists that men should share the burden of care and concern for their families,
their communities, and perhaps even the nation and the globe as well.
Gulliver was a woman of her time, of course. She also devoted her life to
promoting women’s higher education. Therefore, she certainly paid close
attention to the achievements of women and applauded them. The second
chapter of Studies in Democracy was devoted to just such achievements and
is an especially optimistic discussion. The paragraphs of this chapter make
it clear that, like Emma Rauschenbusch in this chapter and Marietta Kies,
discussed in Chapter 3, Gulliver was familiar with Christian socialism or the
“social gospel” tradition. She refers to the “God-intoxicated souls” who know
that God is present in the world today. This is a Hegelian God, in Gulliver’s
view, by which she means a God who is made manifest through the stages
of evolution, presumably to make the world a better, more equitable place.
Using feminine imagery, she describes this God as one who “groaneth in
travail” while awaiting the redemption of the world.39 In today’s more secular
age, such faith-based terminology seems misplaced in a discussion of political
philosophy. But her goal was to inspire her readers and urge them to see what
would otherwise be mundane political concerns as matters that are infused
with meaning—even purpose in the ultimate sense of the word.
To strengthen her claims about women and their influence, Gulliver
discusses a number of examples of international cooperation that—she
believes—point to a future of cross-cultural harmony. The Panama Canal
serves as a bridge between East and West, for instance. The San Francisco
World’s fair brought all nations together to celebrate achievements in science
and the arts. Artistic creations in and of themselves have celebrated not only
unity but also the influence of women and/as mothers throughout the world.
She celebrates the contributions to science and the social good by Marie Curie
(1867–1934), Bertha von Sutter (1843–1914), and Selma Lagerlof (1858–1940)
internationally and by Jane Addams (1860–1935), Lillian Wald (1867–1940),
Vida Scudder (1861–1954), and Katherine Bement Davis (1860–1935) in the
United States40 These women demonstrate that women can accomplish great
things because they have contributed to the “evolution of social consciousness.”41
Their work helps the nation to realize “the democratic ideal [which] is not
the product of a single mind. It is the result of common experience and the
common thinking of many generations.”42 In her view, women like Addams,
with whom she appears to have been fairly close, were helping to lead us away
from egoistic ideals that make individuals unsympathetic to the needs of
others. Again, using religiously infused language, Gulliver asserts that Addams
and other colleagues were helping her contemporaries see that “no soul can be
saved without the common salvation of all.”43 Women were taking the lead in
bringing both sympathy and unity into their work in public life, she said, and
in that sense were the most creative force in American society in her day.
Gulliver’s final chapter in Studies in Democracy tackled the problem of
how to balance economic/industrial efficiency with moral/political liberty.
She draws contrasts between the United States and Germany to illustrate the
points she makes in this chapter, which gives us a window into the mind of a
thinker who was heavily influenced by German idealism, but grappling with
political realities that were yet to be put into context. Gulliver’s main claims
about German governance at that time were that (1) it placed an emphasis
on efficiency; (2) it was still influenced by feudalism; and (3) it let state
interests take priority over individual interests. Throughout this discussion,
Gulliver recognizes the strengths of Germany’s economic and political system.
The country provided its citizens with excellent education, employment
opportunities, and social welfare benefits.44 Yet, its emphasis on efficiency,

often at the expense of individual autonomy, in combination with its feudal
institutions and power brokers led to a situation in which personal and
political freedom could all too easily be erased. “No nation has so completely
subordinated the individual to the state,” according to Gulliver.45 From here,
she argues that part of the problem with an over-emphasis on efficiency in
political life is that it fails to recognize that a nation is a “spiritual organism.”46
Ideally, a society will find a way to unite efficiency and freedom, social welfare
and individual initiative, so that in “living, breathing, throbbing common life [a
nation can] find self-expression in every part, as each part finds self-expression
in the life of the whole.”47 This, Gulliver says, is the essence of democracy.
Feminism, Philosophy, and Religion
Emma Rauschenbusch (1856–1940)

Rochester Female Seminary (ca. 1876)
Wellesley College (1887–9)
PhD, Philosophy, University of Bern (1894)
Dissertation: “A Study of Mary Wollstonecraft and the Rights of Woman”
Career: Chicago public schools (ca. 1876–7); Ongole, India, Women’s Baptist
Mission Society, missionary, educator (1882–8); study in Berlin, Leipzig,
and Bern, Switzerland (1891–4); Ongole Mission, educator and ethnologist
(1894–1910)
Life and Career
Emma Rauschenbusch was born in Rochester, New York, the second of three
children born to Augustus and Caroline (Rump) Rauschenbusch. Both of her
parents were German born, and her father was a well-respected minister and
theological thinker in the evangelical Baptist tradition. She was relatively well-
educated for a woman in this era, attending Rochester Female Seminary48 and
later Wellesley College before studying in Europe. Her dissertation at Bern
examined the life and ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97), the English
thinker who is most often identified as the first modern feminist, although
Mary Astell (1666–1731) is sometimes credited with laying the foundations of
Western feminism.
Emma Rauschenbusch is one of just two women featured in this volume
whose parents were immigrants. The other is Matilde Castro (Chicago,
1907). The Rauschenbusch family was fairly well-to-do, so she was able to
visit her parents’ home country periodically. As the daughter of a Baptist
minister and theologian, she worked as a missionary in India for several
years before returning to the United States to study at Wellesley in the
late 1880s. It is not clear if she earned a degree from the girls seminary in
Rochester or from Wellesley. But she was able to undertake graduate study
in Europe, as did her brother, Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918). Her
German roots benefited her very little at European universities, however.
She first sought to study in Berlin, then at the University of Leipzig where
a professor who supported women’s higher education, Maximilian Heinze
(1835–1909), served as a mentor, guiding her to write a dissertation on the
life and thought of Mary Wollstonecraft. Like other universities in this era,
Leipzig refused to fully accept her work, however, so Rauschenbusch had to
transfer to Bern in Switzerland where her dissertation was vetted by Ludwig
Stein (1859–1930).
Emma Rauschenbusch has not received as much attention as her younger
brother, Walter, who became a minister like their father. As was the case
in many families during their lifetime, Walter received more educational
advantages than Emma and their older sister Frida. He also earned a degree
of fame as a theologian, public speaker, and social activist. The writings of
both siblings show that they later departed from the orthodox faith they
were raised with. Walter became a leading member of the Christian Socialist
movement—the same movement Marietta Kies, discussed in Chapter 3,
identified with in the 1890s. He later recast his views as the “social gospel”—a
rejection of religious moralism, piety, and abstract Christian doctrines in
favor of a conviction that religion should address real-world concerns, like
hunger, poverty, and inequality. Emma served as a missionary to India
both before and after earning her doctorate at Bern. Over a total of twenty
years, she established a normal school for women and taught high school
in Ongole, near India’s eastern coastline, roughly 625 miles/1000 km north
of Kanyakumari, a city at the country’s southern tip. It appears that she
developed an even more liberal understanding of religion than her brother.
By the time she returned to the United States permanently in 1910, she was
attracted to Theosophy and believed in reincarnation. She was single until
her late thirties, when she married Rev. John Clough, the Baptist minister
who founded the mission in Ongole. He had been widowed the previous
year when his wife, Harriet (Sunderland) Clough, succumbed to illness.
(Incidentally, Harriet was a sister-in-law of Eliza Sunderland, discussed in
Chapter 3.) Clough was close to twenty-five years older than Rauschenbusch;
she may have studied alongside his daughters, Nellora and Ongola, who also
attended Wellesley College.
Emma Rauschenbusch’s Philosophical Work
Rauschenbusch published three books: A Study of Mary Wollstonecraft and

the Rights of Woman (1898), While Sewing Sandals: or, Tales of a Telugu Pariah
Tribe (1899), and Social Christianity in the Orient: The Story of a Man, a Mission,
and a Movement (1914). The last of these is an account of her husband’s life
and missionary activities in Ongole. Her study of the Telugu tribe and the
book about her husband (a collaborative effort that she published after his
death) are both interesting for historical reasons. Sewing Sandals also has value
as an early example of an ethnographic study of an Eastern cultural group
by a Western colonialist—one who clearly pursued her task with a number
of preconceived notions in mind. Each of these works may be of interest to
students of anthropology, Christian theology, or missions.
The work that is of interest for our purposes is Rauschenbusch’s study of
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97), quite likely the first examination of a woman
philosopher by a woman who formally studied philosophy at the graduate
level. Rauschenbusch provides a thorough study of Wollstonecraft’s ideas,
her views of women’s role and rights in particular. She also pays attention to
Wollstonecraft’s political views generally speaking and—not surprising coming
from a missionary—her religious views. Finally, she looks at Wollstonecraft’s
reception in Germany, including the thinkers she may have influenced.
Rauschenbusch accurately characterizes Wollstonecraft as a revolutionary
thinker who was part of a circle that included English liberals, like Richard
Price (1723–91), Thomas Paine (1737–1809), and Wollstonecraft’s future
husband, William Godwin (1756–1836). One of the most vexing questions
Wollstonecraft addressed at the time was how her older contemporary,
Edmund Burke (1729–97), could oppose the prospect of a revolution in France.
In fact, she produced her first extensive political work, A Vindication of the
Rights of Man (1790) as a series, largely in response to Burke. His resistance to
an abstract concept of political rights was misplaced in Wollstonecraft’s view.
Burke believed political changes must take place gradually and that it is best
to allow long-held traditions to evolve over time. Wollstonecraft considered
this approach to be inadequate, because injustices that have accrued over time
are simply compounded when we rely on time bound traditions to change. In
her view an abstract assertion of rights helps establish a new set of ideals that
will challenge and transform the concrete conditions we face. Rauschenbusch
observes, however, that
If Burke was one-sided in banishing the speculative element from politics,

[Wollstonecraft] was equally one-sided in ignoring the significance of
historical growth. The very demands for the Rights of Man . . . had their
roots in the centuries that had passed. Mary Wollstonecraft . . . overlooks
the intricate windings of these roots and rootlets. She sees [instead only]
gross prejudice and immortal superstition.49
Rauschenbusch also notes that Burke was responsible for supporting many
liberalizing movements during his long and rather distinguished political
career. While she is sympathetic to some of Wollstonecraft’s criticisms of
him, she had little tolerance for Wollstonecraft’s scorching rhetoric. She could
and should have understood Burke better and should have had the ability to
recognize the value of his ideas in context. Rauschenbusch could accept the
passion with which she wrote, but could not quite excuse the lack of courtesy
toward Burke.50
Wollstonecraft’s treatment of Rousseau was far more generous on most levels.
She shared his political ideals of individuality and liberty, and she appreciated
his view that social/political structures are a manifestation of a social
compact. As a feminist herself, however, Rauschenbusch readily highlighted
Wollstonecraft’s major objection to Rousseau: “They are diametrically opposed
to each other [regarding] the nature and position of woman. . . . [At the time]
Rousseau expressed the opinion of the civilized world, concerning the nature
of woman. To disprove Rousseau, therefore, went far toward refuting the whole
false system of woman’s education and position.”51
One of the Wollstonecraft’s main criticisms of Rousseau was his claim that
women should be educated primarily to please men:
She rightly asks, why a girl should be educated for her husband with the
same care as for [a] harem. . . . [Wollstonecraft’s] rationalism was intensely
antagonistic to a system that magnified the physical aspects of human life,
and hopelessly cramped the faculty of reason in one-half of the human race.
She considered the unfolding of reason the chief end in life; and believed
that it is the right of [all people] to seek to attain this end. Rousseau denied
this right to woman. [Therefore] his system . . . called forth her fierce
opposition.52
Interestingly, Rauschenbusch notes that similar criticisms could have been

launched against Wollstonecraft’s somewhat older contemporaries on
occasion, Richard Price, James Fordyce, and John Gregory. Each of these men
had writings that indicated women’s education should mold them into the
kind of creatures that will be pleasing to men.53 She likens Wollstonecraft to
a thinker whom Rauschenbusch appears to have agreed with: August Bebel
(1840–1913) a prominent German socialist who denounced the notion that
women should be subject to men’s domination and control.54
Rauschenbusch recognizes other women intellectuals with whom
Wollstonecraft agreed on this and other issues related to women’s role and rights,
namely Hester Chapone (1727–1801) and Catherine Macaulay (1731–91); the
latter of the two has been given attention as a philosopher in recent decades.55
By contrast, Wollstonecraft disagreed with other female contemporaries, most
notably Madame de Stael, whose essay written in tribute to Rousseau glossed
over his treatment of women. Hester Lynch Piozzi (1741–1821) and Caroline
Stéphanie Félicité (1746–1830) were other women with whom Wollstonecraft
disagreed on women’s issues. The fact that “other women should thus unite
with men in adopting sentiments, that had the direct tendency of degrading
them, calls for Mary Wollstonecraft’s scorn.”56 Yet Rauschenbusch cites a
letter that Wollstonecraft wrote to her daughter as she was struggling to lay a
foundation for women’s freedom in the future, commenting, “There is a note
of sad resignation [in it] . . . a tacit admission that existing conditions are more
powerful than the individual who wages war against them.”57
Rauschenbusch makes it clear that Wollstonecraft’s primary goal was
to demonstrate that women’s “inferiority” was due to education and social
circumstances, not natural shortcomings. She incorporates new social
scientific analysis into this part of her discussion. Research in anthropology
and archaeology by Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815–87), Lewis Henry Morgan
(1818–81), and Julius Lippert (1839–1909), she says, had demonstrated

that in previous historical eras, matriarchal social structures and forms
of governance were in place. In her view, this means feminine norms and
values in the past had been undermined over time. This is a theory that
gained currency in the last decades of the nineteenth century. It also saw
a strong resurgence nearly a century later in the 1980s and 1990s as new
work in feminist theory took hold in theology and religion. Although such
theories have been largely debunked since then, they provided an impetus
for rethinking patriarchal traditions that for centuries had been considered
sacrosanct.58 Wollstonecraft did not have access to the theories of Bachofen
et al., of course. But Rauschenbusch asserted that she did have philosophy to
guide her reasoning and argumentation. Wollstonecraft used philosophical
theories to good effect and anticipated the arguments that would later be
made by feminists in Rauschenbusch’s time. She made especially good use of
Descartes regarding the nature of human reason. If human beings are made
in the image of God and thus are given the same capacities, regardless of
gender, Wollstonecraft insisted that human “knowledge and virtue must be of
the same nature in all.”59
At the same time, Rauschenbusch seems to have agreed with Wollstonecraft
that women’s social role contributed to making them more attuned to
emotion, to focus on feeling, rather than reason. In Rauschenbusch’s view,
there is no reason this should be the case. Emotion or “sensibility” has its
place, but should not be over-emphasized, as it seems to have been for women
through the centuries.60 Interestingly enough, however, Rauschenbusch
cites similarities between the thought of Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley,
Wollstonecraft’s daughter by William Godwin, who discussed the nature
of emotion and also contemplated whether “souls” have a sex or gender.61
Rauschenbusch inserts her own view at this point, however. Given the fact
that science assures us women and men have the same intellectual capacities,
the task in her own era was to provide an environment in which women
could develop over time: women’s “gentleness, [Wollstonecraft] says, loses its
godlike character, when it becomes the submissive demeanor of dependence,

the support of weakness that loves, [only] because it wants protection. . . . Not
even the negative virtues [like forbearance] could flourish beneath the scepter
of authority.”62 The task of feminism on the cusp of the twentieth century,
then, was to finally release women from attempting to meet these repressive
gender expectations.
In concluding her discussion of this aspect of Wollstonecraft’s thought,
Rauschenbusch notes that “It is difficult, in our day, to appreciate fully the
serious drawbacks, experienced by the women, in certain classes of society,
a century ago, who had been educated according to the approved standard
of female excellence of the day.”63 This led to the question whether women,
as they had been educated in Wollstonecraft’s time, could contribute
fully to society. Wollstonecraft’s answer was that they could not: “Reason
is absolutely necessary to aid in the performance of any duty, and again
she repeats that sensibility is not reason.”64 Rauschenbusch defends what
appears to be a harsh (if not contradictory) judgment by saying that it was
Wollstonecraft’s reform-mindedness that led her to perhaps exaggerate
the challenges women faced. Rauschenbusch also holds Wollstonecraft
accountable, however:
A subtle error runs through her argument, which has its root in . . .
excessive rationalism. [Wollstonecraft] makes the mistake of applying to
the moral nature of women a formula of rationalism and according to this,
demonstrates their inferiority. To argue, that reason and virtue stand to each
other in close relation, that women have not learned to use their reason,
and that therefore they have no virtue . . . leads to a false conclusion. Mary
Wollstonecraft could not arrive at a correct estimate of the moral status of
women, by exalting reason.65
Nor did Wollstonecraft do women justice by ignoring how women’s

psychological development and social placement have shaped their self-
identities and character traits, in Rauschenbusch’s understanding.
As noted earlier, Rauschenbusch took time to discuss Wollstonecraft’s

religious views as well. In this part of her discussion, it is clear that
Rauschenbusch was well versed in theology and held relatively progressive
views, despite her conservative religious upbringing. Wollstonecraft’s lover,
William Godwin was proudly atheistic. Therefore, his “statements about his
wife’s religious views are very meagre and must be accepted with some degree
of hesitation; for here, as elsewhere . . . he seems inclined to substitute his own
philosophical views for the actual facts of the case.”66 Wollstonecraft herself,
however, was religiously observant and spiritually minded, especially early in
life. She also had an intellectual understanding of the interplay between faith,
reason, and morality, according to Rauschenbusch. Like John Locke (1632–
1704), she believed that human reason could perceive the attributes of God
and that an understanding of the divine in turn guides moral development.
Agreeing with her contemporary, Richard Price, on the question of morality,
Wollstonecraft believed that moral truth is “perceived by an act of intelligence
and not by the exercise of a special moral faculty.”67 In this sense, Rauschenbusch
identifies her as a Deist. Wollstonecraft’s belief in the inherent goodness of
humanity (and by implication of the created order, in Rauschenbusch’s view)
wavered when she was in Paris during the French Revolution. But even during
that time, she did not consider herself an atheist. Despite Godwin’s boast that
even when his wife was on her deathbed, “not one word of a religious cast fell
from her lips,”68 Rauschenbusch charges that the depths of Wollstonecraft’s
religious belief “eluded both his logic and his psychological insight.”69 Her
own conclusion is that Wollstonecraft rejected orthodox Christian beliefs
about sin, eternal damnation, and biblical infallibility. She also despised
hypocrisy of any sort, and her resistance to such was at the root of her many
condemnations of church doctrines and policies. This in turn led her to
question clerical authority. Yet, Rauschenbusch maintains that Wollstonecraft
was a believer at heart and that she was characterized as an agnostic or atheist
after her death simply because of her association with Godwin. However,
Rauschenbusch claims that Wollstonecraft went through two distinct

religious phases: “a period of religious thought that was evangelical, a worship
of the heart; and another that was rationalistic, an eager seeking for truth as
acceptable to reason.”70
Rauschenbusch closes her study of Wollstonecraft with a discussion of the
German reception of her work after her early death in 1797. In both England
and France, revolutionary ideas had become pervasive enough to have made
Wollstonecraft’s views familiar, if not fully palatable. In Germany, this was
not necessarily the case. There was little recognition of women’s rights in
German territories just before and after 1800. So Wollstonecraft’s work
seemed merely outlandish to the majority of influential thinkers there, not
a realistic threat to the social order as it was characterized by conservatives
in England. There were a few exceptions, however. One of the first German
thinkers to translate Wollstonecraft’s work was Christian Gotthilf Salzmann
(1744–1811), though he diluted some of the more progressive aspects of her
ideas.71 Decades later, the historian Gustav Klemm (1802–67) applauded
primarily her writings on pedagogy.72 The philosopher, Franz von Baader
(1765–1841), was enthusiastic about Wollstonecraft’s bold claims. In fact, as
a result of reading her work, Baader was convinced that “all misuse of power,
all usurpation must absolutely vanish from society if virtue is to . . . remain
in it.”73 Rauschenbusch also argues that Wollstonecraft may have made an
impact on the essayist Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel (1741–96). Updated
editions of his well-known book on marriage, Über die Ehe in 1792 and 1793,
mark significant changes to his thought in regard to men, women, and gender
roles, which suggest Wollstonecraft’s influence. Even more telling, an edition
of von Hippel’s long essay “Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Weiber”
(On the Civil Emancipation of Women) published in 1794, made a strong
case for women’s right to education and employment—views that also seem
to have been drawn from Wollstonecraft, the only thinker known to have
affirmed women’s rights in this period.74
Women, Race, and Culture
Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964)

BA, Oberlin College (1884)
MA, Oberlin College (1887)
PhD, History, Sorbonne (1925)
Dissertation:
“L’attitude de la France a l’egard de l’esclavage pendant la revolution”
[“The Attitude of France to Slavery during the Revolution”]
Career: St. Augustine’s Normal School (1879–81; 1885–7); Wilberforce

University (1884–5); M Street/Dunbar High School, Washington, DC (1887–
1906; 1910–30); Lincoln Institute, St. Louis, MO (1906–10); supervisor,
Colored Social Settlement, Washington, DC (1911–15); Frelinghuysen
University, president (1930–43)
Life and Career
Anna Julia Cooper was born into slavery in Raleigh, North Carolina, the
daughter of Hannah Stanley and quite likely her master, George Washington
Haywood. Despite laws against education for enslaved people, she was provided
with a rudimentary education at the home of Charles Busbee, a neighbor to
whom her mother was “hired out” as a nursemaid. After the US Civil War,
Cooper studied at St. Augustine’s Normal School (later College) in Raleigh,
graduating in 1877. She taught for a short time at St. Augustine’s before going to
Oberlin, where she was among a number of women of African descent to earn
a degree in this era. After completing her studies at Oberlin, Cooper taught at
a number of institutions, spending the majority of her career at the M Street/
Dunbar High School in Washington, DC, and capping it off as an educator by
establishing Frelinghuysen University, an innovative adult education college
named for the donor who generously funded it. Like Ella Flagg Young, Cooper
married, but was widowed at a young age when her husband died in 1879. The
couple did not have children and she did not remarry, but she adopted five
nieces and nephews when she was in her early fifties.75
Cooper was one of many educators and public intellectuals at the turn of the
twentieth century who analyzed the issues that impacted African American
communities. Living in Washington, DC, most of her life, Cooper interacted
or corresponded with a number of these individuals, including Alexander
Crummell, Fanny Jackson Coppin, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. DuBois,
Georgiana Simpson (discussed in Chapter 4) and Eva Dykes (discussed in
Chapter 5). Well before pursuing a doctorate, Cooper published A Voice from
the South (1892), a book that has been recognized in recent decades as a valuable
contribution to feminist/womanist theory as well as critical race theory. She
also produced dozens of essays and speeches, some of which were published
in venues like DuBois’s journal, The Crisis. Cooper first began doctoral work
at Columbia University in 1910, but there was a tragic death in the family
and their needs came first. As noted, she stepped in to care for five young
nieces and nephews and was not able to pursue graduate work again until the
early 1920s. She was able to complete her studies at the Sorbonne in 1925,
becoming the fourth African American woman to earn a doctoral degree in
any field. Her dissertation on Haiti and the French Revolution provides a great
deal of insight into the failures of liberal political theory to adequately address
issues related to colonialism and slavery, although it was not translated into
English until 2006. Both books are discussed here with a focus on Cooper’s
contributions to the analysis of race, culture, and gender in social/political life.
On Women, Feminism, and Racism
In recent decades, Cooper has been given more attention as a philosophical

thinker.76 In A Voice from the South, she embraces many traditional views of
women. Yet, like so many nineteenth-century thinkers, she does so at least in

part for the sake of transforming them. She also introduces a nascent critical
race theory into her discussion, noting the ways in which women of color
bring insights to social/political critique and social/cultural developments
that were too often ignored by both white women and men of color. In this
way, she aligns with Maria Stewart, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Pauline Johnson
in Volume I. Finally, like Susan Blow in Volume I, Cooper devoted time to
a discussion of metaphysics, which she believes must underlie any practical
work related to education or racial justice. Also like Blow, she placed this
part of her discussion at the end of a book on issues that were not attended to
by (male) leaders in the dominant culture—thus this aspect of her thought was
not brought into academic discussions until recently.
On first glance, Cooper’s voice was one of many in a chorus of women who
made claims that women have a special, nurturing role to play in society as
mothers, teachers, and caretakers, primarily in the home. The foundation of
civilization, she said, is based on the moral standards established in homelife,
which in turn is based on the “influence of good women.”77 In making this
claim, Cooper does not want to suggest that women have an innate goodness
that is absent in men. Instead, she asserts that, due to the fact that they are
most often responsible for the care of young children, women are the first to
direct “the earliest impulses of [human] character, and in this sense, women’s
influence is as strong as the light and heat of the sun within a family’s home.”78
And, as was so common among women of color in this era, Cooper saw a
direct connection between women’s work as mothers and “the vital agency of
womanhood in the regeneration and progress of a race.”79 Also like a number
of women in the nineteenth century, Cooper moved from making claims
about women’s central role in family life to making a case for the education
of women and girls. She recognized that this idea was considered outrageous,
even explosive, in the early and mid-nineteenth century, but it is one that
in Cooper’s day was proving to be beneficial. When women’s colleges were
established and institutions like Oberlin began to open their doors to women
in the 1830s, “there was no upheaval” in society. Women conducted their

studies “modestly and intelligently.” Even when they chose to study the liberal
arts, often called “the gentlemen’s course,” there was “no collapse.”80 Men in
leadership often expressed concern that education would “unsex women,
destroying the lisping, clinging, tenderly helpless and beautifully dependent
creatures” they had become by being systematically excluded from public life
for so long.81 In this sense, the challenge ahead was for both women and men
to adjust to the new educational and social context they were living in.
The question is not now with the woman, “How shall I so cramp, stunt,
simplify, and nullify myself as to make me eligible to the honor of being
swallowed up into some little man?” but the problem, . . . now rests with
the man as to how he can so develop his God-given powers as to reach the
ideal of a generation of women who demand the noblest, grandest, and best
achievements of which he is capable; and this surely is the only fair and
natural adjustment.82
Cooper makes these comments largely in reference to “the chances” educated

women will have to be married and have a family—something that she believes
is a matter that will work itself out over time, as both men and women adjust
their expectations. The important thing about women’s higher education in
her view is that it allows them to contribute to public life, a realm of society
that has been dominated by masculine virtues and values. Public life needs a
“great mother heart to teach it to [have pity], to love mercy, to succor the weak
and care for the lowly.”83 And women are well-suited for this task, because of
the role they have played in society. In Cooper’s view, this is true across race,
culture, and socioeconomic class. She is directing her words primarily toward
an audience of color, but she considers the feminine virtues under discussion
to be universal—applicable to all women. And according to her assessment of
the situation, women were already exerting influence in (Protestant) churches,
social clubs, cultural organizations, and charitable organizations. “From the
President in the White House to the stone-splitter of the ditches,” Cooper
claims that women’s “mandates are obeyed,” even after her “lightest whisper.”
Giving a number of high-profile examples, like the Board of Lady Managers
at the 1893 World’s Fair, and the moral force of the Women’s Christian
Temperance Union, she asserts that women are involved and influential in
society at all levels. In her view they are renovating society, purifying politics,
and reforming a number of moral, social, and economic ills.84 In short, in
both public, practical matters, and in questions of moral reasoning, there is a
feminine and a masculine side to truth, and the two complement each other.
In her time, women’s virtues and values were finally making an impact, but the
idea is to balance masculine and feminine ideals to provide symmetry—both
in individuals and in society as a whole.85
Cooper wants to ensure that her theories of womanhood are applicable
across race and culture, but in order to do so, she needed to draw attention to
specific forms of discrimination against women of color. Early on in A Voice
from the South, she cites Alexander Crummell, a well-known Episcopal priest,
rhetorically requesting his permission to make a plea for the education of
young women of color, who are “so full of promise and possibilities, yet so
sure of destruction . . . without a father to protect them . . . [and] waylaid by
the lower classes of white men.”86 As biographers have noted, Cooper drew
on her own experiences when she urged for women’s education. She had to
struggle, largely on her own, to earn an education and saw male peers given
opportunities and benefits that were unavailable to her as a woman. She also
drew from experience when she referred to the humiliations and injustices
women of color were subjected to. Both she and Ida B. Wells had been victims
of racist policies that allowed each of them to be forcibly removed from railroad
cars in the 1880s and 1890s, for instance. “Bullies are always cowards at heart,”
she says, but if there are no penalties for their abusive or violent behavior, they
will continue to quickly identify and victimize people of color.87
While expressing appreciation for notable women of the past—Sappho,
Aspasia, Olympia Falvia Morata, Queen Isabella, Mary Lyon, Dorothea Dix,
Helen Hunt Jackson, and Lucretia Mott—Cooper charges that all too often,
women’s aspirations are “chilled and snubbed in embryo.”88 This is especially

true for women of color. Yet, she also recognizes the achievements of several
contemporaries: Frances Watkins Harper, Sojourner Truth, Amanda Smith,
Sarah Early, Martha Briggs, Charlotte Forten Grimke, Hallie Quinn Brown,
and Fanny Jackson Coppin. These women, she says, “represent all shades of
belief,” but also share “sympathy with the oppressed race.”89 Despite the fact
that many of these women overcame the odds and were able to achieve without
the benefit of higher education, Cooper repeatedly stresses that women of
color “must be loosed from [their] bands and set to work . . . every attempt to
elevate the Negro cannot but prove abortive unless so directed as to utilize the
indispensable agency of an elevated and trained womanhood.”90
A full examination of Cooper’s discussion of race and racism could fill a
volume. Here, the focus will be on Cooper’s treatment of what we now call
intersectionality, on relations between men and women of color, and on cross-
cultural unity. At the outset, Cooper is intent on addressing racism within white
feminist circles. Citing two incidents, Cooper calls white women to account
for their actions and makes a strong plea for cross-cultural understanding and
cooperation. Racial discrimination within the group, Wimodausis—so named
as an abbreviation of “wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters”—provided the
impetus for Cooper’s discussion. A southern white woman within the group
refused to allow a woman of color to participate in its programs. Cooper
praised its president, Anna Howard Shaw (1847–1919), for denouncing
such a racist act and calling for her southern colleague’s resignation. At the
same time, Cooper noted that the event was “just a ripple” that went largely
unnoticed. Shaw was a well-known orator and friend of Susan B. Anthony, and
while she took action, her response did not adequately denounce racism or
contribute to more widespread and lasting change. Cooper has little patience
with continuing to tolerate the attitudes of southern women in her day whose
explanation for their racism had been “well you see, they were once our slaves.”
This “explanation” and the claim that “social equality” would compromise
southern values is all a ruse in Cooper’s view to retain and reinforce racism.
Social interaction among individuals both within and across races and classes
is wholly elective, she said. There is no reason to fear that “social equality”
would be imposed on unwilling southerners. She also reminds her readers that
“forced association” between white and black people was imposed on people of
color in the past, most especially on “the silent and suffering black woman.”91
Rather than simply neutralizing individual instances of racism and quietly
moving on, white women like Anna Howard Shaw would do better to call for a
broader sense of care and concern, not only for African American women but
for all women. Cooper notes that a new society for the prevention of cruelty
to animals had been established; why not establish a similar organization to
prevent cruelty to human beings?92
Cooper also takes on the matter of intersectionality, in particular the
problem of sexism within the African American community. Women of color
are “confronted by both a woman question and a race problem.”93 White women
have been able to draw on support by a significant number of white men. By
contrast, “our men seem thoroughly abreast of the times on almost every other
subject, [but] when they strike on the woman question, they drop back into
sixteenth century logic.”94 Therefore, women of color often find themselves
“hampered and shamed by a less liberal sentiment and a more conservative
attitude” among men of color.95 This is “not universally true,” of course. There
are “intensely conservative white men and exceedingly liberal colored men.”96
But in her view, women of color could use more support from men of color for
social/political rights.
Again citing Shaw, Cooper charges that she contributed to tensions between
women across race/culture when she gave an address entitled, “Women versus
Indians.”97 In this speech, Shaw tried to make a case for women’s voting rights
by urging against voting rights for Native American males. Cooper rightly
charged that her disparaging comments about Native American culture and
lifeways were racist and destructive. She used this incident as an opportunity
to bring white feminists’ attention to racism within their own ranks. “All mists
[i.e., racism and bias] must be cleared from the eyes of woman if she is to be a
teacher of morals and manners,”98 she said. Furthermore, she urged women to
work together across lines of class and culture: “It is not the intelligent woman
vs. the ignorant woman; nor the white woman vs. the black, the brown, and the
red.”99 Ultimately, Cooper asserted that
woman’s cause [is] broader, and deeper, and grander, than a blue stocking
debate or an aristocratic pink tea. . . . Why should woman become plaintiff
in a suit versus the Indian, or the Negro, or any other race or class who have
been crushed under the iron heel of Anglo-Saxon power and selfishness? . . .
If woman’s own happiness has been ignored or misunderstood . . . let her
rest her plea, not on Indian inferiority, nor on Negro depravity, but on the
obligation of legislators to do for her as they would have others do for them
were relations reversed.100
The truly philosophical mind, Cooper tells her readers, “sees that its own
‘rights’ are the rights of humanity.”101
Cooper touches on the related themes of innate human rights and cross-
cultural unity at different points throughout A Voice from the South. And while
she was among one of the first thinkers to reject pseudo-scientific theories of
racial difference, she also accepted some of the theories about race and identity
that were prevalent in her day.102 She affirmed the view that dominant white
culture was able to subdue both Chinese immigrants and Africans held in
slavery, for instance, because both were weak and docile “races.”103 Yet, she also
recognized atrocities in other parts of the world—quite likely with the hope
that doing so would prompt awareness or awaken consciences. She decried
Russian pogroms against the Jewish people in Eastern Europe, while at the
same time noting that Americans would flock to lectures to learn about these
atrocities, seemingly unconcerned or unaware that similar horrors were taking
place against African Americans on our own soil.
Cooper was among the women in this two-volume study who analyzed
literature by white authors that attempted to portray the lives and experiences
of people of color. Pauline Johnson, discussed in Volume I, looked at depictions
of “the Indian girl” in popular literature that were little more than caricatures.
Cooper and Eva B. Dykes, discussed in Chapter 5, looked at American and
English literature respectively, to examine the ideas related to race that were
conveyed there. She begins her discussion by making a distinction between
authors who write for aesthetic purposes or the desire for self-expression
versus authors who wish to convey ideas or “doctrines” in Cooper’s parlance.
The former are more creative forms of literature in her view—the works of
Shakespeare, Eliot, Longfellow, or Poe, for instance. But more writings that
discuss race are in the latter category—the work of Milton, Carlyle, Whittier,
or Lowell. Praising Harriett Beecher Stowe’s work, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as
great literature that is “indigenous to American soil,”104 Cooper notes that it
is didactic yet provides a fair representation of African American life. Few
white authors have succeeded in similar achievements because “not many have
studied [their experiences] with Mrs. Stowe’s humility and love.”105 Instead they
forgot the humanity of their subjects and relied on readily formulated theories
and preconceptions. She discusses the work of a selection of European-heritage
writers at some length, all of them male: Albion W. Tourgée, George Washington
Cable, Ignatius Donnelly, William Dean Howells, and Maurice Thompson.
Albion Tourgée (1838–1905) was a civil rights lawyer and author of twenty-
five books, the majority of them fiction. His novel, Pactolus Prime (1890),
condemned racism through its main character, a light-skinned African
American who at different points in his life passed as white. Cooper admires
this novel as an “impassioned denunciation of the heartless and godless
spirit of caste founded on color.”106 She expressed appreciation for Tourgée’s
commitment to racial justice, including reparations for formerly enslaved
people. “His caustic wit, his sledge hammer logic, his incisive criticism, his
righteous indignation, all reflect the irresistible arguments of the great pleader
for the Negro.”107 An aspect of his work that she found especially valuable was
his criticism of a white Christian morality that allowed believers to embrace
religious ideals abstractly, while failing to put those ideals into action in regard
to racial equality. As Cooper put it, Tourgée
held up the glass of the real Christianity before these believers in a

white Christ and these preachers of the gospel. . . . We all see the glaring
inconsistency and . . . the indignity of having to stand forever hat in hand as
beggars, or be shoved aside as intruders in a country whose resources have
been opened up by the unrequited toil of our forefathers.108
Few other writers were able to present “truth from the colored American’s
standpoint [and] Mr. Tourgée excels . . . in fervency and frequency of . . . any
living writer, white or colored.” Cooper has some criticism to offer as well,
however, largely about his literary style. In her view his characters do not come
to life. Instead, they are all “little Tourgées—they preach his sermons and pray
his prayers.” Despite her appreciation for his work, Cooper sees Tourgée as
“mainly a contributor to the polemic literature in favor of the colored man,”
not a great novelist, as such.109
Cooper also praises George Washington Cable (1844–1925), another white
author who wrote over twenty novels. Unlike Tourgée, Cable was a southerner.
He was born in New Orleans but chose to move to Massachusetts in the mid-
1880s as a result of the criticism he received from fellow white southerners.
Cable, Cooper says, “does not forget . . . that he is a white man” who served in
the Confederate army during the Civil War. While he was another advocate
of racial justice, he wrote as a Southern apologist. Even so, in her view,
Cable wrote with “the impartiality of the judge who condemns his own son
or cuts off his own arm. His attitude is judicial, convincing, irreproachable
throughout.”110 But unlike Tourgée who did not fear polemics, Cable tried to
appeal to the Christian conscience of Southerners, to coax them into seeing
that racial justice was in the enlightened self-interest of the South.
Yet another European-heritage writer making a case for racial justice was
Ignatius Donnelly (1831–1901), who was best known for utopian fiction and
his controversial theories about the authorship of Shakespeare’s works. In her
discussion, Cooper refers to Donnelly’s work, Doctor Huguet (1891) a place-
switching novel about a well-to-do white Southerner who is jailed for stealing
his own hat after being transformed into a working poor African American
man. In a key scene within the book, the main character tries to convince the
judge that he is in fact a well-educated white man in a black body. Yet after
a speech in which he refers to great works of art and literature in order to
demonstrate his knowledge and by implication his whiteness, the judge and
other officials simply conclude he is not only guilty of theft but also insane.
Cooper appreciates Donnelly’s impulse to recognize the ways in which a
person’s social placement can pre-determine their fate. Yet, she voices concerns
raised by other critics of African descent in her era who lamented Donnelly’s
decision to rely on an African American stereotype—a chicken thief—rather
than create a character who would be held in greater esteem by readers. A
more relatable character would underscore the degree to which race alone
shapes human experience and reinforces oppression. Like other white authors,
however, Donnelly too often resorted to caricature. His African American
characters lacked complexity and depth.
William Dean Howells (1837–1920), whose legacy as a writer has made
him a somewhat more recognized name in American literary history, was also
guilty of this error. In fact, Cooper sees little value in the few attempts he made
to speak to the African American experience. “I think the unanimous verdict
. . . is that . . . Mr. Howells does not know what he is talking about.”111 This was
especially apparent when he attempted to write in dialect, a common tool in
literature at the time, or to portray African American religious experience.
Cooper tells her readers that this is understandable, because Howells had
seen African American lives only as an outsider looking in. Like many white
writers, he was not the kind of person who could “think himself imaginatively
into the colored man’s place.”112 At the same time, Cooper does not want to
excuse Howells completely. It is “an insult to humanity and a sin against God
to publish any such sweeping generalizations of a race on [the] meager and
superficial information” available to him.113
Interestingly enough, Cooper did not mention the author who is now one of
the best-known nineteenth-century storytellers, Mark Twain (1835–1910)—a
good friend of both Howells and Cable. This may be because her primary
interest here is to discuss work that had recently been published, and Twain’s
most famous novels, Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, were
written over a decade earlier. It may also be that Cooper and her audience were
not interested in Twain’s work. Many critics, then as well as now, have seen
his satirical approach to race issues as ineffective. Either his approach was too
subtle and therefore any social/political commentary was lost on the run-of-
the-mill reader, or his story lines and literary techniques simply endorsed and
reinforced racism. Whatever her view of Twain, Cooper declined to discuss
his work.
Cooper did discuss a work that she saw as blatantly racist, however:
“Voodoo Prophecy” (1892), by Maurice Thompson, a former Confederate who
accepted emancipation as inevitable, but maintained racist views. Thompson
wrote other poems, including “To the South,” which Cable included in his
essay, “The Freedmen’s Case in Equity” (1885). Yet, “Voodoo Prophecy,” while
purporting to celebrate black freedom and creativity, was filled with all the
negative stereotypes of African Americans that were current at the time.
Especially troubling—to Cooper as well as her peers in African American
intellectual life—was the poem’s violent imagery and its portrayal of males in
particular as dangerous and vengeful. This was a damaging characterization
that Cooper’s contemporary, Ida B. Wells-Barnett (discussed in Volume I)
condemned. Given Cooper’s silence on the work of Twain and other white
writers at this time, it is surprising that she would give this racist text space on
the page. Clearly, she considered it dangerous enough to address directly—and
to condemn herself.
Also interesting is the fact that Cooper comments only very briefly on the
work of several African American writers: the lecturers and essayists, Frederick
Douglass (1818–95), Rev. Alexander Crummell (1819–98), Rev. Benjamin W.
Arnett (1838–1906), Edward Wilmot Blyden (1832–1912), William Sanders
Scarborough (1852–1926), and Joseph Charles Price (1854–93); the journalist,
Thomas Fortune (1856–1928); and the novelists and poets, Frances Watkins
Harper (1825–1911) and Albery Allson Whitman (1851–1901).114 Yet she urges
African Americans to write in order to more fully represent themselves—as
individuals and as a people.
Cooper next looks at racism and African American responses to it. As one
of many thinkers of color in this era who embraced some of the norms and
values of European-heritage culture, she accepted the assimilationist view that
African Americans are in some sense responsible for proving themselves, for
meeting expectations of the dominant culture. She makes her own interests
and standards apparent up front by focusing, not on sentimental ideals, but
on the “cold hard facts” in a “purely mathematical” sense: What do African
Americans as a cultural group produce that is of value to the larger society?
And how might they contribute more in the future?115
Although Cooper aims to be objective in her analysis, she folds several
myths about African American life and culture into her discussion. Most
notably, she embraces the notion that African Americans are less domineering
“as a race,” that in fact they are naturally compliant, honest, chaste. As evidence
she refers to the reliability of enslaved African Americans prior to the Civil
War, noting that if they had been mean-spirited, opportunistic, or licentious,
they would have been unmanageable under the slave system.116 Second, like
many thinkers whose ideas were influenced by pseudo-scientific theories of
racial types and/or cultural pedigree, Cooper claims that African Americans
were made of hardy “material” and were filled with an energy and creativity
that had yet to be tapped and put to good use. Providing a wide range of
educational options for people of color would allow them to enter the trades
and professions and thus to advance economically and culturally.117
These aspects of Cooper’s thought have not been highlighted in recent
sources that discuss her life and contributions to African American intellectual
history. And by today’s standards, they are certainly not her best moments. Yet
it seems valuable to recognize the degree to which even relatively progressive-
minded intellectuals like Cooper were influenced by the ideals and cultural
trends that dominated in her day. As discussed in Volume I, many women
rejected the “vocation vs. culture” debate within discussions of education at

this time—most notably between Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois.
In her own education and pedagogy Cooper leaned toward “culture” like
DuBois—that is, liberal arts education that would prepare individuals to enter
the professional class. Yet, she did not want to err too far in this direction.
She criticized the “foolhardy educators” who over-emphasized liberal arts
education within the African American community. Forcing the majority of
youth to study ancient history and literature, for instance, would be like putting
a “classical crack” into pottery to make it appear to be a precious artifact, when
in fact it is “everyday stone [or] iron ware” that would be better suited for
household use.118 She clarifies that she is not attacking classical education or
culture. She simply believes that youth who are inclined to work as laborers
or artisans should be nurtured in that direction, not forced to study the
liberal arts. To further clarify: “One mind in a family or in a town may show
a penchant for art, for literature, for the learned professions, or more bookish
lore. You will know it when it is there. No need to probe for it.”119
Woven into Cooper’s discussion is a recognition of the damaging role racism
plays in regard to educational and career options, however. She denounces
tenant farming for the exploitation it most certainly was at the time. She
condemned the racist behavior of working-class whites in the North, noting
wryly, “If the Northern laboring man has not become a tyrant, I would like to
know what tyranny is.”120 Similarly, she observes that attention to the plight of
female mill workers throughout the nation—“our working girls,” as they were
called at the time—focused on European-heritage women, not “the pinched
and downtrodden colored woman.”121 She also recognizes cultural clashes
within the working classes, citing an unnamed African American mechanic
who was driven out of business after being threatened by an immigrant
community. One way to address these problems, Cooper said, was to build
stronger networks of support among African Americans. Another is to
demonstrate what African American labor “is worth” by collecting more data
about successes throughout the community. She builds an additional critique
of race-biased policies and practices into this last point: It is easier, she said, to
find information about struggles within the African American community—
poverty, educational attainment, or crime—than about their achievements—
inventions, land ownership, or advancement in the trades and professions.122
As a reminder to her readers, she cites several accomplished people of color
throughout history, including poet, Phillis Wheatley (1753–84); sculptor,
Edmonia Lewis (1844–1907); and the 54th regiment in the Civil War, the first
black regiment in the United States.123
Early in A Voice from the South, Cooper makes a claim that is familiar in
today’s discussions of diversity: cultural differences lead to dynamism and
growth. Conversely, she says, a society that is dominated by one group or set
of values leads to similarity, a lack of innovation, and ultimately to stagnation.
Keeping these claims in mind is instructive as we consider her judgments
against both the African American community and the European-dominant
culture that refused to give people of color full access to the social/political
goods that were supposedly assured in a democratic republic. “Resolve to keep
out [minorities and] foreigners, and you keep out progress.”124 In her view,
healthy tension between competing cultural groups can be a positive force.
For this reason, she is not advocating full assimilation by African Americans
(or other cultural groups). People of color can and should retain their own
cultural and identity. Yet, domination and suppression will harm both minority
populations and members of the dominant culture. Only by allowing for full
participation by all cultural groups will American society survive and thrive,
in her view.125
Cooper closes this work with a brief overview of her philosophy of
religion, and in this chapter, she also demonstrates familiarity with a number
of philosophical thinkers: David Hume (1711–76), Voltaire (1694–1778),
Auguste Comte (1798–1857), John Stuart Mill (1806–73), along with the
historian, Thomas Babbington Macaulay (1800–59), and one of the first
avowed atheists in the United States, Robert Ingersoll (1833–99). Her aim
in this discussion is to debunk religious skepticism as a valid metaphysical,
epistemological, and moral stance. She charges that skepticism is blind to

value and purpose in human experience, for the skeptic there is nothing but
“darkness and eternal silence.”126 Similar to Susan Blow in Volume I, Cooper
rejects such a view—and for a number of reasons. In her view, a skepticism
that runs this deep renders the universe an “automaton” which may function
mechanically but is void of volition or supernatural forces. This in turn would
mean the universe has no inherent worth or meaning. Such a view—which
she identifies as aligned with the skepticism of Hume, Comte, and Voltaire—
leads to an epistemological problem. In such a world, “the essential nature of
phenomena . . . their ultimate causes are unknown and inscrutable to us.”127
How then would skepticism allow us to know the nature of the cosmos and
speak meaningfully about it?
Cooper rejects Ingersoll’s statement that we must be honest with ourselves
and “admit the limitations of our minds and have the courage and candor
to say we do not know” the nature of the universe.128 In Ingersoll’s view, the
reasonable person must squarely face facts in this way, although the rank and
file in society tends to rely on feelings to make sense of the world. Cooper,
however, reminds her readers that feelings can be a very good thing. Our
impulse to rescue a person in danger or help a person in need, for instance,
is based on a sense of concern, on feeling—not on reason. While Ingersoll’s
intellectualized skepticism may be captivating and thus catch “the fancy and
charm the imagination,” Cooper notes that “no heroism, devotion, or sacrifice”
will grow out of it. Only religion is able to spark an interest in “higher growth”
among people of faith.129
As this chapter comes to a close, Cooper holds that life is more than
philosophical speculation and religion is more than a mere ancient need
to worship. Truth in the biggest sense of the word—which for Cooper is
metaphysical, epistemological, and moral—“must be infinite.”130 At this point,
she aims to bring religion into conversation with lived experience and in
so doing, she underscores the moral import of faith. She cites social reform
movements as evidence of the impact of religion. She points to the ways in
which faith empowers those without social/political influence. And she speaks
of the ideal of universal unity among people. In the end, she underscores the
power of faith in great religious leaders, like Ignatius of Loyola, the Apostle
Paul, and the Prophet Muhammed. Their examples “must be our strength,” she
tells readers, “if our lives are to be worth the living. . . . Without them, I have no
inspiration to better myself, no inclination to help another.”131 Furthermore,
it was this same faith that helped “the slave brother” endure and escape
oppression in years past. She closes by saying “Yes, I believe there is existence
beyond our present experience; that that existence is conscious . . . and that
there is a noble work here and now in helping [people] live into it.”132
On Revolution and Racism
Cooper’s dissertation, “L’attitude de la France a l’egard de l’esclavage pendant

la revolution,” is available in English translation as Slavery and the French
and Haitian Revolutionists. This was the first work to focus exclusively on
the connections between revolutionary ideals in France and slavery in Haiti
at the end of the eighteenth century. Like Rachel Caroline Eaton’s work on
John Ross and the Cherokee people, discussed in Chapter 4, it is a historical
study, but it includes analysis of political themes. Both studies come from the
perspective of a woman of color and have value for analysis by philosophers
today. Cooper’s thesis is also part of a larger body of work by thinkers of
color who drew on the Haitian revolution as a triumph of freedom or held up
Haiti’s Toussaint Louverture as a model political figure.133 In the 1830s, David
Walker and Maria Stewart made references to Haiti’s revolution; so did W. E. B.
DuBois and Frederick Douglass just before and after the turn of the century.134
DuBois and Cooper developed their ideas within an academic context. DuBois
examined the impact of political events in Haiti on political reasoning and
legal justifications of slavery in the United States. As discussed in Chapter 4,
the same year that Cooper produced her dissertation, another early doctoral
recipient, Georgiana Simpson, republished a biography of Toussaint with a
brief introduction that cast him in heroic terms.
Cooper examined Haiti’s political and economic conditions before, during,
and after the French Revolution. She also analyzed French revolutionary
thought in relation to Haiti as a colonized territory. Her work opens with a
condemnation of slavery as “an institution founded solely on the abuse of power
[that was] created by a barbarous and shortsighted politics, and maintained by
violence. . . . [It was] incomparably more cruel than that which was rampant
in antiquity.”135 In her discussion, she examines the competing interests of five
sectors of Haitian society as revolutionary ideals took hold in France: white
colonizers and property owners, many of whom were extremely wealthy and
lived in France; mulattoes, many of whom owned slaves and often identified
with the colonial ruling class; white workers who had little economic or social
power; free blacks, who also lacked economic and social power; and enslaved
Haitians. As revolutionary thought intensified in France, white colonialists,
many of whom assumed they would be beneficiaries of a liberation movement
were eager to join the cause. But they soon discovered that the ideals of liberty
and equality would undermine their power if it extended to the colonies. Soon
a discourse similar to one that developed in the southern United States gained
currency: Haiti had distinct needs and interests, according to the colonists.
The National Assembly in France declared that “it had never intended to
include [Haiti and its people] in the constitution decreed for the realm, or
subject them to any laws which might be incompatible with their local needs
and customs.”136 Haiti was a territory of the motherland, not part of France’s
political fabric, and its inhabitants were not capable of self rule. Throughout
this period, a group calling itself Friends of the Blacks agitated for the abolition
of slavery in Haiti and for full racial equality. The organization had members
in both Haiti and France, including both whites and free blacks. Friends of the
Blacks embraced humanistic ideals and was unyielding in its call for immediate
emancipation. As Cooper puts it, they ignited a “dangerous compassion” in

both Haiti and France.137 Intolerance for slavery and oppression in the colony
(and all French territories) arose. The situation posed a threat for mulattoes,
who had invested a great deal in holding themselves above both free blacks and
slaves on the island; they nearly always took the side of white colonists in the
debates that ensued. At one point travel bans were put in place for people of
African descent in France. Rights were so limited for people of color in Haiti, it
appears a travel ban from the island to Europe was not needed. White colonists
continually sought to gain power, so they could resist or reverse decrees that
would have secured freedoms in the colony.138
While the Friends of the Blacks made a strong case for putting French
revolutionary principles into effect for all members of Haitian society, they were
unable to win any political ground. The parties involved were at an impasse
and the island was on the brink of civil war. As a result, when Louis XIV was
deposed and France no longer had a king, Cooper notes that the colony also
lacked a king. A contest for power in the island ensued between England and
Spain, and “All the correspondences of the time are heartbreaking. . . . All
describe what they saw of the insurrections [in Haiti] in terms which leave no
possible doubt of the horror.”139 By 1796, Toussaint had allied with the Spanish
and was appointed lieutenant governor of the island, and the era of the Haitian
revolution was ushered in. Cooper carefully analyzes Toussaint as a military
and political figure and in doing so, she steers clear of idolizing him. In fact,
a significant theme in this work is her lament that revolutionary thought in
France did not advance more steadily and extend to Haiti, and thus make a
violent revolt unnecessary. Had French-born political thinkers been more
forward-thinking, they would have seen that a revolution that did not include
all French subjects was doomed to fail. Even so, Cooper asserts that the ideals
that were born in the French Revolution “are immortal principles [that left]
an indestructible legacy and they remain benefactors of the African peoples
whom they awakened to the knowledge of their individuality and their right
to liberty.”140
Conclusion
The year after Anna Julia Cooper completed her degree at the Sorbonne in
1925, Christine Ladd Franklin was formally awarded the degree she had earned
almost fifty years earlier at Johns Hopkins. Cooper was nearly seventy years
old, and Ladd-Franklin was close to eighty when each was finally able to call
herself a doctor of philosophy. By this time, Julia Gulliver had retired from the
presidency at Rockford College, and Emma Rauschenbusch was struggling to
adjust to life in the United States after decades as a missionary and educator in
India. Clearly their life experiences varied immensely. At first glance, common
themes do not appear in their academic work. But let’s take a closer look.
With a specialty in logic, Ladd-Franklin produced some of the most abstract
texts in philosophy and won accolades (though not professional status) for doing
so. Yet she was also a vocal women’s rights advocate—on both the theoretical
and practical levels. She published an academic article on women and reason.
She also helped establish funding programs for women’s higher education.
Gulliver’s academic work focused on theories of democracy, but she too was
a strong proponent of women’s rights and did a good deal of work behind the
scenes in academia to advance them professionally. Rauschenbusch devoted
her dissertation to an analysis of Mary Wollstonecraft, long considered the
mother of modern feminist theory. She also worked to advance women’s rights
on a practical level by helping to establish a women’s and girls’ school at her
husband’s mission in India (though missionary efforts are criticized today as
a form of colonialism). In her most well-known work, A Voice from the South,
published over thirty years before she was able to complete a doctorate, Cooper
not only advocated for women’s rights but also pointed to racism within white
feminist circles and sexism within the African American community.
So then, one common theme among these women is a passion for women’s
education and equality. Another commonality is their persistence and “grit.”
Christine Ladd-Franklin had to get special permission to remain at Johns
Hopkins after being declined when administrators discovered that “C. Ladd”
was a woman. She also endured years of discrimination within academic circles,
as noted in the previous discussion of her life and work. Gulliver remained
in the women’s college network throughout her career, so was sheltered to a
degree. But like so many women in this era, she had to cope with the bias
against women’s colleges in masculine academic circles. No doubt she also
witnessed the capriciousness of academic hierarchies in Europe during her
year of studying abroad. Rauschenbusch lived in the shadow of her younger
brother Walter, not only as a child but also in her professional life. In addition,
while studying in Europe, she had to go to three different universities before
one would accept her credentials and grant her a doctoral degree. Of course,
the struggles of these women pale in comparison to Cooper’s experience of
being born into slavery, widowed at a young age, and faced with racism day in,
day out in American society throughout her life. The fact that she continued
to pursue an advanced degree after her first truncated attempt in the 1910s,
all while raising orphaned relatives and managing her own career, is nothing
short of remarkable.
It was relatively common for women who had the means to take the path
chosen by Rauschenbusch and Cooper and explore educational opportunities
in Europe. In fact, there were a number of academic “firsts” among women
in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who helped
pave the way for others. Martha Carey Thomas (Zurich, 1882) was the first
US-born woman on record to earn a doctorate in Europe, and Janet Donalda
McFee (Leipzig/Zurich, 1895) was the first Canadian woman to do so. The
women who followed were the first to study and/or earn doctoral degrees in
philosophy and related fields at their respective institutions; in chronological
order: Margaret Keiver Smith (Gottingen/Zurich, 1899), Lucinda Pearl
Boggs (Jena/Halle, 1901), Florence M. Fitch (Berlin, 1903), Henrietta “Ettie”
Stettheimer (Freiburg, 1903), and Rowena Morse Mann (Jena, 1904).
At the University of Zurich, M. Carey Thomas (1857–1935) wrote a
dissertation on a text in old English literature, “Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight,” but she did not publish academic work after that time.141 Instead, she
became well known as the president of Bryn Mawr College and a champion of
education, but only for white women who were Christian. Recent attention to
Thomas’s racism has severely tarnished her legacy. She made no secret of the
fact that she wanted to hire only women of European heritage at the college.142
In 1886, she attempted to block the admission of Sadie Szold (1868–95), the
younger sister of Henrietta Szold, the founder of Hadassah, a Jewish women’s
organization. She insisted that she would “on no account take them, and I
register my strongest protest!”143 When her efforts failed, she instituted a quota
that was to be strictly adhered to. In 1901, she reversed the decision to admit
Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882–1961), who would later become a central literary
figure in the Harlem Renaissance. After Fauset had been on the Bryn Mawr
campus for close to a month, Thomas arranged for her to be admitted to Cornell
instead, contributing her own money and raising funds for a scholarship
there to help seal the deal.144 Thomas’s racist ideals and practices cannot be
explained away as biases that were common in her day. Her colleagues, Julia
Rogers (1854–1944) and Mary Garrett (1854–1915), opposed her treatment
of minorities. In fact, it was Garrett who admitted Szold and refused to yield
when Thomas wrote, belying the depths of her racism: “Cannot your action be
withdrawn? . . . I wish us to escape them at all hazards. It is so important.”145
The women had been lifelong friends, but this conflict led to friction between
them for years. In the end, Julia Rogers left Bryn Mawr and went to Goucher
College in Baltimore, where she left a large bequest and several buildings are
now named for her.146
Other women with degrees from Zurich also became academically
successful. Janet McFee (1863–1957) was born near Montreal, completed an
undergraduate degree at McGill (1888), and began graduate work at Cornell
in 1888–9 before going to Leipzig to study with Wundt. It appears that, like
Rauschenbusch, McFee found Leipzig unwilling to confer her degree, so
she completed her work in Zurich where she wrote a thesis on the thought
of George Berkeley. She did not produce additional academic work after
this point, and taught at a girls school with her sister in New York City for
a number of years.147 Margaret Keiver Smith (1856–1934), also a Canadian,

had begun graduate work at Cornell a few years before McFee, in 1883–5,
after completing undergraduate studies at Oswego Normal School in New
York (1880–3). She went to Zurich in the summer of 1898 where she studied
philosophy and literature and wrote a dissertation entitled “Rhythmus und
Arbeit.” After 1900, she held a position as a professor of psychology and
geography at what was then a normal school in New Paltz, New York (now a
state university). She translated some of Johann Herbart’s work and published
articles on psychology and education.148
Both Lucinda Pearl Boggs (1873–1931) and Rowena Morse Mann (1870–
1958) began doctoral work at the University of Jena, but Boggs transferred
to Halle in 1900 after Jena balked at granting her degree. Her original thesis
was to cover the question of “interest” in pedagogy, but she was urged to
focus instead on the work of John Dewey, who had become prominent in
philosophy by this time. Her dissertation was entitled “John Dewey’s Theory
of Interest and its Application in Pedagogy.” She published an additional work
on “interest,” this time as related to emotion. She also published several articles
on education and psychology and a book on Chinese womanhood. Boggs held
positions at a normal school in Ellensburg, Washington and at Western and
Oxford colleges (now Miami University of Ohio).149 Rowena Morse Mann
was the first woman to earn a doctoral degree at Jena, writing a dissertation
on Locke’s theory of truth. She does not appear to have published additional
work after completing graduate study, but held a position in the philosophy
department at the University of Chicago in 1904. She became ordained as a
Unitarian minister two years later and led a church on Chicago’s West Side,
continuing in that position as a volunteer after her marriage to Newton Mann
in 1912.150
Florence Fitch (1875–1959) studied with Carl Stumpf (1848–1936), Max
Dessoir (1867–1947), and Friedrich Paulsen (1846–1908) at the University
of Berlin, writing a dissertation on hedonism in Hermann Lotze (1817–81)
and Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–87). After completing her studies, she
held a position at Oberlin where she taught philosophy and biblical literature.
Her publications include two articles on education and a number of books
on religion for children and youth, primarily on world religious traditions
and histories.151
Henrietta “Ettie” Stettheimer (1875–1955) was born in Rochester, New
York. Her father was a well-known rabbi who worked across faith traditions,
so was acquainted with Emma Rauschenbusch’s father and brother, both of
whom were ordained Protestant ministers. Stettheimer earned degrees at
Barnard (BA, 1896 and MA, 1898), one of the first women’s institutions to
admit Jewish students, before she undertook doctoral work at Freiberg. She
wrote her dissertation on judgment and religious belief in the work of William
James. There is little information available about Stettheimer’s life and career,
but she published two novels under the pseudonym Henri Waste, one of which
is of interest from a historical perspective: Philosophy (1917), a fictionalized
account of her experiences as a student in Germany. Her sister Florine (1871–
1944) was a well-regarded artist who painted portraits of Henrietta and other
family members.152
After the early 1900s, universities in the United States and Canada became
more accessible to women, and a number of philosophy departments in North
America grew in prestige. So women no longer had the need to study abroad to
gain credentials in philosophy. As with each of the chapters in this volume, we
will conclude with these early “firsts” and for the time being set aside questions
about women in academic life further into the twentieth century.
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7
Conclusion
The women featured in this volume produced a wide range of written

work over a span of nearly fifty years, from formal logic to literary analysis
informed by a nascent critical race theory. Yet themes and patterns appear
in the academic work of this early generation of philosophical thinkers.
Ten of them did work in the history of philosophy, primarily in the modern
period, and more than half of these focused on thinkers or themes related
to philosophical idealism. Women from Cornell and Michigan produced
the most historical discussions in this volume. An equal number of women
did work related to social and political theory, and, nearly half of these
focused on race/culture or gender. Work of this nature is scattered across
the institutions discussed here. A subset of women engaged in discussion of
new developments in philosophy and related fields, specifically, pragmatism,
logic, and psychology. Explorations of psychology were also common
across the institutions represented in this study. With some overlap with the
historically minded group, ten women did their work in psychology. Some
of them performed the difficult task of delineating the boundaries between
philosophy and psychology; others resisted making a distinction but rather
sought to recast psychology as a type of epistemology. Religion was a fairly
common area of interest. Again, with some overlap six women engaged in
discussions in this area of inquiry.
Work on Historical Figures
Some women were among the first to discuss historical figures, thus
contributing to their recognition and/or future scholarship. Eliza Ritchie
contributed some of the first articles on Spinoza to philosophy journals in the
United States. Similarly, Grace Dolson was an early contributor to analyses of
Nietzsche and appears to have helped establish a framework for understanding
his work that remains in place today. Ethel Muir produced an early discussion
of Adam Smith’s moral theory. Emma Rauschenbusch conducted the first
known analysis of Mary Wollstonecraft as a philosopher, rather than as an
educator or feminist.
As noted in the previous chapters, idealism was a dominant school of
philosophy at this time, and a number of women engaged in discussions of the
idealist movement or thinkers within it. Ellen Bliss Talbot was a central figure
in Fichte studies. Caroline Miles Hill, Eliza Sunderland, and Anna Alice Cutler
produced work on aspects of Kant’s thought. While there has been no shortage
of work about Kant—then or now—these women discussed his ideas at a time
when he was still seen as one in a group of idealists, competing with Fichte,
Lotze, and Hegel for a place in the philosophical canon. Eliza Sunderland
produced a comparative discussion of Kant and Hegel, and Marietta Kies
drew on Hegel’s thought in her theory of altruism. Vida Frank Moore analyzed
Lotze’s system of thought. Georgiana Simpson discussed Herder’s studies on
the boundaries of philosophy, anthropology, and linguistics.
Social/Political Philosophy
As noted previously, a number of women explored social/political issues. A

philosophical purist might tell us that only three of the women in this volume
actually “count” as social/political philosophers, because only their writings are
theoretical. The reason so many women are in this category within my schema,
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293
critics would say, is because I have “cheated” by including women whose work
grew out of practical concerns or is delivered as history or narrative. My
response? Exactly. In Volume I, I made a case for expanding our definition of
“philosophy” to include embodied and/or contextual discussions, in part to
ensure we include more feminine and minority voices. The thinkers in this
volume reflect the commitments to inclusion that I expressed in Volume I.
It seems to me to be an important move. Perhaps these and other women
will be judged duly philosophical over time and will enrich our discussions,
perhaps not. For now, I have decided to cast a wider net and let time and
further discussion make the determination about whether these women are
philosophers, philosophical thinkers, social critics, or should be placed in
some other category in our intellectual world.
Political—in Theory
The thinkers whose work most nearly matches our usual standards for
political philosophy are Julia Gulliver, Marietta Kies, and Ethel Muir. Some
will object that Muir did her work in moral theory, not social/political
philosophy, but at this point I will discuss her alongside the other two.
Gulliver’s theory of democracy grows out of an interesting mix of the
conservative and progressive strains of thought that were current in her day.
There are aspects of it that are similar to the work of Susan Blow (primarily
in correspondence) and her colleague William Torrey Harris—a sense of
maintaining social order. But similarities between Gulliver and Jane Addams
emerge in a reading of her work as well. Overall, Gulliver comes across as
very much a “nineteenth-century thinker,” however. Unlike some other
women in this volume, in my view she did not appear to be ready to enter
twentieth-century discourse.
Marietta Kies and Ethel Muir produced discussions of altruism and the
moral good. And while these have been concerns within philosophy since
Socrates and Diotima walked the earth, they were part of a larger trend at the
time. Like Gulliver, Marietta Kies was a bit too wedded to nineteenth-century
thinking. Her theory of altruism was innovative in that it discussed other-
regarding behavior as a public/political ethic, not simply a private moral
prerogative. In addition, she was part of a trend in political thought that was
new at the time: “Christian socialism,” sometimes identified as the “social
gospel” tradition. Her work also aligns well with the late twentieth-century
“ethic of care,” especially as articulated by Virginia Held. But Kies appeared
not quite ready to fully embrace political progressivism and the intellectual
movements it was paired with, movements that broke free of nineteenth-
century forms of argument and traditions (most notably religion). One can
only wonder if Kies would have ventured into new territory in the twentieth
century if her life had not been cut short by illness. Ethel Muir stands as
the best example of political theory (if purists will allow me to include her
under that umbrella for the time being). She examined Adam Smith’s Theory
of Moral Sentiments by comparing him to his contemporaries, analyzing his
use of terms and concepts, and arguing for the superiority of his thought
over thinkers in the Moral Sense school. She does not develop any of her
own theories in this lone piece of academic writing—and in this regard,
Gulliver and Kies surpass her. But she wins points as a textbook example of
“good scholarship.”
Justice in Context
Eva Dykes, Anna Julia Cooper, and Rachel Caroline Eaton were part of a
larger movement that pressed for recognition of minority concerns. Dykes
and Cooper conducted analyses of literature that sought to address racial
issues. In their discussions, Dykes chose to examine forms of expository
writing, while Cooper looked primarily at fiction. Interestingly, each woman’s
in-depth analyses focused on white writers. Although there was an ample
body of literature by African American authors that they could have chosen
from, the two opted instead to examine works by figures in the dominant
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culture, no doubt to demonstrate how it shaped societal perceptions.

Dykes did additional work that featured African American authors, but her
reflection on that work is minimal. Georgiana Simpson did the same when she
republished a biography of Toussaint Louverture. The simple act of sharing
literature by or about important figures in African American history was
itself a statement; both Dykes and Simpson assumed the works would speak
for themselves. Eaton was the first indigenous woman to examine a period
of American history from the tribal perspective. She saw her own work as
a historical study, but there are certainly moral/political observations and
insights within it. Cooper produced a similar historical study of Haiti during
the French Revolution. She lays out the parties and policies that shaped
discourse about Haiti as a colonized and enslaved territory, but it is clear that
the issues of justice and equality underlying the debates were central in her
own mind.
Feminism, in Theory and Practice

Anna Julia Cooper also contributed to nineteenth-century feminist
discussions, calling white women to account for racist ideals and practices
within the feminist movement and denouncing sexism within the African
American community. Her early work has received a good deal of attention
in recent years, as well it should. Sadly, in their feminist writings, both Eliza
Sunderland and Emma Rauschenbusch were blind to issues of race/culture.
Sunderland embraced a version of liberal feminism that leaned slightly in the
direction of conservatism, although the comments she made about marriage
and children might have been more of a political ploy to win approval than
due to deeply held convictions about women’s maternal role. Rauschenbusch
ventured into new territory within feminist history. Many women had read and
commented on Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminist theory by the late nineteenth
century, but no women produced a full study of her life and thought before
Rauschenbusch’s thesis appeared in print. In addition, she de-centered the
narrative of Wollstonecraft’s lover and first biographer, William Godwin, to

reveal what Rauschenbusch thought was a more authentic picture of her. She
was in some ways a more religious thinker than Godwin had indicated, and
she was more comfortable with emotive interpretations of experience than
he was. In nearly every sense, Wollstonecraft was less interested in following
Godwin’s lead than in developing ideas on her own. Again, one can only wish
that Rauschenbusch had produced more work on Wollstonecraft or feminism.
New Developments, circa 1900
Pragmatism
As a central feature of their work, or alongside it, a number of women
contributed to developments in philosophy that were current in their day, in
some cases charting new territory. Ella Flagg Young was deeply involved in the
pragmatist movement on both the theoretical and practical levels. Caroline
Miles Hill was also linked to this movement, working at Hull House with Jane
Addams and producing a brief sketch of pragmatist principles toward the end
of her career. Both Christine Ladd-Franklin and Ellen Bliss Talbot addressed
theoretical concerns related to pragmatism, each of them from a critical
perspective. Talbot drew on Fichte to offer ways to improve pragmatism.
Ladd-Franklin urged for a more robust pragmatist theory of truth. Christine
Ladd-Franklin’s main focus within philosophy was logic, and in this branch of
the discipline she was not only central but also innovative and contributed to
further advancements in the field.
Psychology
The study of psychology was flourishing at the time this group of women launched
their careers, and ten of them produced work related to this newly emerging
discipline. Calkins, Miles Hill, Howes, and Ladd-Franklin were the most involved
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in early developments in experimental psychology, although other women,

like Talbot, dabbled in that subfield while graduate students. Among these five,
Calkins and Ladd-Franklin made the biggest imprints. Ladd-Franklin took her
studies fully into the realm of science, with an examination of vision and the
perception of color that I did not discuss here, because it goes beyond the bounds
of philosophy in my view. Calkins, however, explored psychology as a new version
of epistemology and ontology. Her work was innovative and challenges the
bounds of philosophy while still (in my view) managing to maintain a distinction
between the two disciplines. If we were able to go back in time and ask Calkins
to share her thoughts on the matter, she may disagree. There is an aspect to her
approach that suggests she would prefer to blur the boundaries, to let philosophy
flow from the theoretical to the empirical and thus to retain psychology as a branch
of philosophy. Although she did not venture into experimental psychology to the
degree that Calkins did, I see Talbot’s work as being in much the same vein, but
perhaps slightly more interested in philosophical gatekeeping. In her “Conscious
Elements” article, she provided helpful distinctions between philosophical and
psychological methods of inquiry. But in the majority of her essays she seemed
content with blurring a number of distinctions that are now in place.
In their dissertations both Eliza Ritchie and Matilde Castro explored the
boundaries of philosophy and psychology, but in ways that in my view signal an
inability to see the big picture. Of course, Ritchie was formulating her ideas very
early in the philosophy/psychology discussion at the tail of the 1880s. So she did
not have the benefit of seeing experimental psychology develop its theories and
methods, which could have provided her with a bit more clarity. But many of
the questions she explored would remain unanswered until modern neuroscience
emerged decades into the twentieth century. In this sense, she anticipated concerns
that would continue to plague her contemporaries and those who would follow.
Castro presents another case. Her discussion of psychology and logic is full of
helpful insights and sharp critiques. Yet, she was too immersed in discussions
taking place among pragmatists in philosophy and functionalists in psychology
to speak to colleagues outside these subfields. One could only wish she had taken
a step or two back to put her own views into perspective and thus ensure her work
had more longevity—or that she had simply found time to produce more written
work. Clearly, she had a brilliant mind and could have contributed a great deal to
philosophy. Hitchcock and Strong each engaged in manageable and interesting
discussions of psychology that seem to me to be valuable. If Clara Hitchcock’s
insights into the influence of expectation on experience and learning had received
more attention at the time, it could have informed both epistemology and
pedagogical theory. It seems to have been overshadowed by other developments
in experimental psychology, however. Interestingly enough, it was picked up by
a researcher exploring the element of surprise decades later. Anna Alice Cutler
provides an interesting case. In a sense her study of Kant in relation to aesthetics
provides some insights, but she makes a move that essentially attempts to peer
into the psychology of Kant himself. As someone trained in philosophy as an
“objective” area of inquiry, my first impulse is to reject this highly subjective
reading of Kant. At the same time, it is a provocative claim. We will have to leave
it for aestheticians to make a judgment about this work. Anna Strong produced
some valuable analyses of psychology and religion, bringing elements of the
sociology of religion into the mix as she did so. In this sense she is another one of
our disciplinary boundary crossers. But she abandoned her academic explorations
as soon as she was able to do so, in my view depriving philosophy and religion of a
very incisive thinker. Again, each of these women leave us wishing they had done
more research in their areas of interest so we could have come to know them and
their work better—and so they could have enriched philosophy.
Institutions and Their Impact
The quality, style, and tone vary in the work these women produced. The very
first doctoral degree earner, May Preston Slosson, wrote a thesis of barely 5,000
words in 1880. Yet she reported being assigned a more demanding course of
study in her graduate work than her male counterparts, presumably to ensure
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there was no question about her academic abilities. One of the last women
doctorates discussed here, Eva Dykes, wrote a dissertation of well over 100,000
words in 1921. This was after being required to earn a second bachelor’s degree,
presumably because Radcliffe College questioned whether a degree from a
historically black institution was valid.
As noted earlier, several women’s writing is laden with nineteenth-century
assumptions, as well as its forms of expression (and verbosity). But we can set
aside these concerns in most instances, because they were women of their time;
thus, they wrote using the conventions of the day. Some were certainly able to
rise to the occasion and generate the type of discourse and produce the volume
of work that became more common in the twentieth century. Ladd-Franklin,
Ritchie, Calkins, Talbot, Young, Eaton, and Cooper stand out in this regard.
Among these women, only Calkins and Talbot had full-fledged academic careers
based on today’s standards, chairing philosophy departments at Wellesley and
Mount Holyoke, respectively. Ladd-Franklin was professionally active and
well-respected as a scholar, but due to gender biases, she never held a full-time
position. Ritchie abandoned academia after 1900 for reasons unknown. Young,
Eaton, and Cooper spent the majority of their careers in K-12 education.
The matter of women’s career success at this early point in the development
of academia as a professional enterprise is interesting. As noted previously, the
majority of the women in this volume held full-time appointments at colleges
or universities for a period of ten years or more: all six women from Cornell—
Slosson, Ritchie, Muir, Talbot, Dolson, and Moore; only one from Michigan—
Kies; four from Chicago—Millerd, Castro, Eaton, and Simpson; all three
from Harvard/Radcliffe—Calkins, Howes, and Dykes; all three women from
Yale—Cutler, Zehring, and Hitchcock; and two of our independent achievers,
Gulliver (Smith) and Cooper (Sorbonne).
Career success, particularly in this era, called for not only individual
talent and the drive to succeed but also institutional support and professional
mentoring. Cornell graduates had both formal and informal structures
in place to help launch academic careers—for men as well as women. The
institution was immensely fortunate to have funding from a generous donor

to establish the Sage School of Philosophy, which included fellowships that
were available to women. By all accounts the majority of faculty at Cornell
supported women’s career development, even if the social biases of the day
meant men were promoted from within, while women were placed in women’s
colleges. The department set the standard for academic achievement in the
discipline with a rigorous curriculum and courses taught by professionally
engaged faculty. It managed the interdisciplinary aspects of its curriculum by
allowing both faculty and students to identify their niche and grow within it. Its
launch of The Philosophical Review in 1892, one of the first and best academic
philosophy journals in the English language at the time, was an additional
strength, making affiliation with the department even more prestigious.
The University of Chicago had many of the same strengths, sans generous
departmental funding. As the youngest department featured in this study,
Chicago was a new and dynamic place for women. The curriculum was
innovative and interdisciplinary; faculty worked across departments in
their research, and students were encouraged to do the same. High levels of
community engagement in the city by faculty and students were a unique
feature of Chicago’s program. And, based on the evidence available to us, it
appears to have been the institution that was the most welcoming to women of
color. Georgiana Simpson has received recognition at the university in recent
years. Let’s hope that will be the case for Castro and Eaton in the future as well.
Michigan and Yale share a set of significantly different characteristics.
In the early 1890s, Michigan might have provided just as much promise as
Cornell and Chicago did when the first women graduate students joined their
departments. It had faculty who were well-regarded both as public intellectuals
and as serious academics. Its curriculum was perhaps a bit heavier on Hegel
than at Cornell and Chicago, but it was also an older institution, and changes
rarely take place overnight. No doubt, the death of George Sylvester Morris,
the departure of John Dewey, and the university’s failure to retain George
Herbert Mead and James Hayden Tufts were a series of blows that were hard
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for the institution to overcome. This, combined with funding and university
management issues, burdened the department, which did not confer any
doctorates in philosophy to a woman—and only a few to men—in the decades
after our group completed graduate studies there.
With similar results, but for different reasons, Yale also seems to have had a
bit of an identity crisis at this time. As discussed in Chapter 5, the philosophy
department was caught in a contest between old ways of doing philosophy—
as the study of metaphysics, epistemology, and morality/religion—and new
developments in the discipline, most notably in experimental psychology and
emerging discussions in analytical philosophy. The institution also seems to
have held to the notion that women were meant to teach exclusively at women’s
colleges, which is where the students featured in this volume, Anna Cutler,
Blanche Zehring, and Clara Hitchcock, remained throughout their careers.
Harvard/Radcliffe provides us with a set of exceptionally interesting cases.
It placed barriers in the path of our group of women at almost every turn.
Calkins and Howes were denied their degrees, and Eva Dykes was required to
earn a second bachelor’s degree before she could be admitted. Yet Calkins and
Dykes had incredibly successful careers. Howes’s professional advancement
was truncated almost solely because she chose marriage over career.
Among women who were “solo acts,” the only institution we can safely say
provided adequate support was Smith, where Julia Gulliver completed her
degree. As a single-sex institution, it was a haven for women, so was a natural
fit for a woman like Gulliver who then assumed leadership at a women’s
college in the Midwest. Anna Julia Cooper seems to have had a smooth
enough experience at the Sorbonne, but only after a false start at Columbia,
due largely to family responsibilities. At the other universities—Johns Hopkins
and Bern—women were completely dependent on the good will of the faculty
they studied under. If there was an egalitarian man they could study with, they
had passed the first barrier. Then there was the question of getting approval
from the department and/or the university administrators to enroll or audit
courses. In short, they were subject to the whims of a very capricious system.
Concluding Thoughts
As I conducted research on this group of women, I found it reassuring to

see that they covered such a wide range of intellectual territory and that the
majority of them had successful academic careers. This suggests that they had
good advising, mentoring, and the freedom to explore their own interests. It is
unfortunate that such a high number of women failed to produce more written
work after the dissertation. Yet academic life was of a different nature at that time,
with a greater emphasis on campus life, particularly at single-sex institutions:
larger teaching loads, more advising responsibilities, and higher demands for
service on committees. This resulted in lower research productivity. This, in
turn, is an issue related to gender hierarchies in academia at the time. Clearly
it had a big impact on women’s status in the profession—and no doubt on
their professional self-esteem. At the same time, the women’s college system
created a ready-made network that many women thrived in—both personally
and professionally. And some women, like Mary Whiton Calkins and Ellen
Bliss Talbot, were essentially unstoppable. They were determined to succeed
and did so, even within the confines of the women’s college network. Yet, the
women who published less than they did also deserve attention, because they
too contributed to the development of philosophical thought in this period.
As a whole all the women in this volume provide us with a valuable chance to
look into the past to see how philosophy was understood by the first women
to enter academia and make the path that much smoother for the women who
would follow.
NOTES
Chapter 1
1 See also Walter Crosby Eells, “Earned Doctorates for Women in the Nineteenth
Century,” American Association of University Professors Bulletin, vol. 42 (1956), pp.
645–51.
2 See Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association (May 1902), pp. 283–5. See
also Eells, “Earned Doctorates for Women in the Nineteenth Century,” pp. 645–51.
3 See John H. McClendon III and Stephen C. Ferguson II, African American Philosophers
and Philosophy (Bloomsbury, 2019), pp. 45–7; 106–7.
4 See Bruce Kuklick, “Philosophy at Yale in the Century after Darwin,” History of
Philosophy Quarterly, vol. 21, no. 3 (July 2004), pp. 313–36.
Chapter 2
1 See “150 Ways to Say Cornell”: https://rmc.library.cornell.edu/cornell150/exhibition
/sexcolor/index.html.
2 See “Early Black Women at Cornell,” compiled by P. Jackson, in Cornell University
archives: https://rmc.library.cornell.edu/earlyblackwomen/EBW_Resources.pdf.
3 May Preston Slosson alumni file, #2516, Box 2, Fld 14; Cornell University archives.
4 Source for Schurman’s role as an instructor: Cornell University catalogs, 1891–1900,

available online.
5 Sources for Schurman’s biographical information: Cornell University, Legacy of

Leadership: Cornell’s Presidents: https://rmc.library.cornell.edu/presidents/exhibit
ion-sec=3.php.html; Encyclopedia Britannica (1911) online at: https://theodora.com
/encyclopedia/s/jacob_gould_schurman.html
6 Sources for Creighton’s biographical information: Cornell Alumni News, vol. XXVII,
no. 4 (October 16, 1924), p. 46 and Katherine Gilbert, “James E. Creighton as Writer
and Editor,” memorial address given at the annual meeting of the APA, December
1924; in Journal of Philosophy, vol. 22, no. 10 (May 7, 1925), pp. 256–64.
304 NOTES
7 Creighton team-taught a course with Albee in 1893–94 and Schurman in 1895–96.

Source for Creighton’s role as an instructor: Cornell University catalogs, 1891–1900,
available online.
8 Gilbert, “James E. Creighton as Writer and Editor,” p. 261.
9 Ibid., p. 260.
10 For Hammond’s, review of Mitchell’s Study of Greek Philosophy, see Philosophical

Review, vol. 1 (1892), pp. 211–13. For my discussion of Mitchell’s work and his
criticism, see Rogers, America’s First Women Philosophers: Transplanting Hegel
(London: Continuum, 2005), pp. 114–15.
11 As noted in the companion volume to this book, while the terms “rationalism” and
“empiricism” had certainly been in use for some time, they were not well-established
to signal distinct schools of thought within epistemology until academic philosophy
was emerging at the cusp of the twentieth century. See Rogers, Women Philosophers:
Education and Activism in the Nineteenth Century (Bloomsbury, 2020), pp. 38–9 and
197, note 40.
12 David Irons’s appointment at Bryn Mawr, to replace Charles Bakewell, who had
accepted a position at the University of California, was announced in academic
venues, including Science (New Series), vol. 11, no. 277, p. 640. Information about
his other academic roles is from Bryn Mawr College catalogs from this era.
13 As noted in Chapter 6, Titchener had an especially contentious relationship with

Christine Ladd-Franklin, the accomplished logician, mathematician, and early
experimental psychologist.
14 Katherine Everett Gilbert, “James E. Creighton as Writer and Editor,” p. 264.
15 Biographical information for May Preston Slosson comes from her obituary: Ann
Arbor News, November 26, 1943; available online: https://aadl.org/aa_news_19431
126_p3-mrs_may_preston_slosson_dies_after_heart_attack.
16 Information about Preston Slosson’s husband and her early career is from the
undated notes she provided to Cornell University about her education and career in
May Preston Slosson alumni file, #2516, Box 2, Fld 14; Cornell University archives.
17 Information about Preston Slosson’s work at Hastings and at the Wyoming

penitentiary is from the undated notes she provided to Cornell University, in May
Preston Slosson alumni file, #2516, Box 2, Fld 14; Cornell University archives.
18 See Jessica Dawson, “Wyoming in Poetry: May Preston Slosson,” https://library.wyo.

gov/wyoming-in-poetry-may-preston-slosson/.
19 See May Preston Slosson, undated notes she provided to Cornell University, in May
Preston Slosson alumni file, #2516, Box 2, Fld 14; Cornell University archives.
20 See May Preston Slosson’s obituary Ann Arbor News. For information about Dunbar
Community Center, see Carol Gibson and Lola M. Jones, Another Ann Arbor
(Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2006), pp. 40–42.
NOTES
305
21 Information about Preston Slosson’s experience as a graduate student at Cornell is

from the undated notes she provided to Cornell University about her education and
career in May Preston Slosson alumni file, #2516, Box 2, Fld 14; Cornell University
archives.
22 May Preston Slosson, undated notes provided to Cornell University, in May Preston
Slosson alumni file, #2516, Box 2, Fld 14; Cornell University archives.
23 May Preston Slosson, “Different Theories of Beauty,” doctoral thesis, Cornell
University, 1880, p. 4.
24 Slosson, “Different Theories of Beauty,” pp. 5, 11.
25 Ibid., p. 11.
26 Ibid., pp. 6–7.
27 Ibid., pp. 8, 10–11.
28 Ibid., p. 9.
29 Ibid., pp. 10–11.
30 Ibid., pp. 6–7.
31 Ibid., p. 8.
32 Ibid., p. 14.
33 Ibid., pp. 13–15.
34 Ibid., pp. 11–12.
35 Ibid., p. 4.
36 Biographical information for Eliza Ritchie comes from: Judith Fingard, “Eliza
Ritchie,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 16. http://www.biographi.ca/e
n/bio/ritchie_eliza_16E.html; and Ernest Forbes, “Eliza Ritchie,” in The Canadian
Encyclopedia,https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/eliza-ritchie
37 A basic genealogy search shows no obvious links between Eliza Ritchie and her
contemporary, the Scottish philosopher David G. Ritchie, although it is possible
that they have common ancestry before 1750. Neil J. MacKinnon, “John William
Ritchie,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 11. As MacKinnon notes, Ritchie
is not to be confused with his brother, Sir William Johnston Ritchie, who became
chief justice of Canada in 1879. http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/ritchie_john_willia
m_11E.html
38 For an informative discussion of Ritchie and her sisters in social reform work in
Halifax, see Judith Fingard, “The Ritchie Sisters and Social Improvement in Early
20th Century Halifax,” Journal of the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society, vol. 13
(2010), pp. 1–22. The distinction between the personalities of the three sisters
appears on page 8.
39 Lives of Dalhousie, p. 134.

306 NOTES
40 Ibid.
41 Three women fulfilled requirements for a doctorate in philosophy before Ritchie

finished at Cornell: May Preston Slosson (Cornell, 1880), Christine Ladd-Franklin
(Johns Hopkins, 1882), and Julia Gulliver (Smith, 1888). Due to sexist policies at
Johns Hopkins at the time, however, Ladd-Franklin was not awarded the degree
until decades later. I still include her as the third woman to earn a PhD, however,
as do most historical discussions of women in the history of philosophy. In email
exchanges, Rodney Parker shared information with me about the second Canadian
woman to earn a PhD in philosophy: Janet Donalda McFee (1863–1957), who
completed doctoral work at the University of Zurich in 1895.
42 Information about Ritchie’s role at Dalhousie in the 1910s and 1920s is from the
website of Dalhousie University, doctoral entrance scholarship page: https://www
.dal.ca/faculty/gradstudies/funding/appprocres/scholarshiprefs/eliza.html.
43 Eliza Ritchie, letter to J. G. Schurman, n.d.; a note indicates his reply date was March
11, 1892.
44 See Patricia Ann Palmieri, In Adamless Eden: The Community of Women Faculty at
Wellesley (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 46, 51, 187, and 287 at fn#8.
45 Mary Whiton Calkins to James E. Creighton, January 4, 1900, in Cornell University

archives.
46 Eliza Ritchie, letter to James E. Creighton, June 17, 1901, in Cornell University
archives.
47 For Ritchie’s attitude toward Wellesley, see Fingard, “Eliza Ritchie.”
48 See Dalhousie University Calendars for each academic year in question. Note that
the 1901-02 volume provides a historical overview of faculty appointments across
departments and programs: https://dalspace.library.dal.ca/handle/10222/11500.
49 See Fingard, “The Ritchie Sisters and Social Improvement in Early 20th Century
Halifax,” pp. 2–3.
50 Eliza Ritchie letter to John Daniel Logan, September 19, 1912, in John Daniel Logan
fonds (MS-5-1, Box 3, Folder 46), Dalhousie University archives. This letter was
discovered by Dalhousie librarians, Creighton Barrett and Geoffrey Brown, after
several email exchanges with them about Ritchie and her legacy at the university.
They sent it just a few days before I was due to deliver my manuscript to the
publisher, for which I am ever so grateful.
51 See Fingard, “The Ritchie Sisters and Social Improvement in Early 20th Century
Halifax,”– regarding Ritchie’s community engagement in Halifax, see pp. 6–7, 9,
11–12, 14–15. On pages 6 and 7, Fingard warns that Eliza Ritchie and her sisters
were often confused with each other, even in obituaries, thus mistaken attributions
have been perpetuated by historians.
52 Eliza Ritchie, The Problem of Personality (Ithaca: Andrus & Church, 1889), p. 4.
NOTES
307
53 Ritchie, The Problem of Personality, pp. 7–8.
54 Ibid., p. 7.
55 Ibid.
56 Ibid., pp. 18–21.
57 Ibid., pp. 19–20.

58 Ibid., p. 22.
59 Ibid., p. 25.
60 Ibid., p. 26.
61 Ibid.
62 Ibid., p. 29.
63 Ibid., pp. 32–3.
64 Eliza Ritchie, “The Ethical Implications of Determinism,” Philosophical Review, vol.

2, no. 5 (1893), p. 531.
65 Ritchie, “The Ethical Implications of Determinism,” p. 532.
66 Ibid.
67 Ibid., pp. 533–4.
68 Ibid., p. 533.
69 Eliza Ritchie, letter to James E. Creighton, October 18, 1894, in Cornell University
archives.
70 Ritchie, “The Ethical Implications of Determinism,” p. 541.
71 Ibid., p. 540.
72 In 1882, John Dewey published an article on “The Pantheism of Spinoza.” Journal of

Speculative Philosophy 16, pp. 249–57. But the majority of the earliest articles about
Spinoza were published in Mind, by Pollock (1878), Sorley (1880), Pearson (1883),
Taylor (1896) and Latta (1899) and in The Philosophical Review by Miller (1895),
Murray (1896), and Ritchie (1902 and 1904). A two-part article about Spinoza
appeared in the religious journal, Biblical World, by Pick (1893). Amy Tanner’s
article is the last Spinoza discussion to appear in this early period, in the Journal
of American Psychology in 1907. The next round of articles to examine Spinoza
appeared between 1915 and 1925, beginning with one article in the Proceedings of
the Aristotelean Society and another in the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and
Scientific Methods; the others were distributed fairly evenly between Mind, Monist,
and Philosophical Review.
73 Eliza Ritchie, “Notes on Spinoza’s Conception of God,” in Philosophical Review, vol

11, no. 1 (1902), pp. 3, 4, and 11.
308 NOTES
74 Ritchie, “Notes on Spinoza’s Conception of God,” p. 4.
75 Ibid., p. 5.
76 Ibid., pp. 8–9.
77 Ibid.
78 Eliza Ritchie, letter to James E. Creighton, June 17, 1901, in Cornell University
archives.
80 Ibid., pp. 9–10.
81 Ibid., p. 10. I have added emphasis to help convey Ritchie’s meaning here.
83 Ibid., pp. 13–14.
84 Eliza Ritchie, “The Reality of the Finite in Spinoza’s System,” in Philosophical Review,
vol. 13, no. 1 (1904), p. 16.
85 See Charles Ritchie, An Appetite for Life: The Education of a Young Diarist, 1924–
1927 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1977), p. 24.
86 Eliza Ritchie, “The Essential in Religion,” Philosophical Review, vol. 10, no. 1
(January 1901), pp. 4–5.
87 All quotes in this paragraph are from Ritchie, “The Essential in Religion,” pp. 8–9.
88 Ritchie, “The Essential in Religion,” p. 11.
89 Eliza Ritchie, “Truth-Seeking in Matters of Religion,” International Journal of Ethics,

vol. 11, no. 1 (October 1900), pp. 76–77.
90 Ritchie, “Truth-Seeking in Matters of Religion, p. 78.
91 Ibid., p. 79.
92 Eliza Ritchie, “The Relation of Morality to Belief,” in International Journal of Ethics,

vol. 7 (1897), p. 181.
93 Ritchie, “The Relation of Morality to Belief,” p. 185.
94 Ibid., p. 184.
95 Ibid., p. 189.
96 Ibid., p. 190.
97 Biographical information for Ethel Gordon Muir is from an obituary notice in

Cornell Alumni News, vol. 43, no. 32 (June 12, 1941), p. 451 and the genealogy
site maintained by Douglas Graham, “A Family Reunion: The Muir Family of
Kirkcudbrightshire and Nova Scotia,” http://douglasjgraham.net/Muir.html. Sources
vary about the year of Muir’s birth. Family historians place her birth at 1856 or ’57,
NOTES
309
but census records and travel documents suggest she was born 10-12 years later, as
late as 1869 in some cases. Family lore wins the day: I was able to locate her death
certificate using links provided in Nova Scotia’s Provincial Archives, which shows
that Muir was born in November 1857 and died at the age of 83 on November 17,
1940: https://www.novascotiagenealogy.com.
98 Ethel and her sister Mary, who was sometimes known as May or Mae, were both
included on a list of students who attended Nova Scotia Provincial Normal School
before 1885. For Ethel, a “C” appears to indicate the type of teaching certificate she
earned. This column was left blank for Mae, who was roughly ten years younger
than Ethel and may not have completed her studies before she married. See Annual
Report of the Normal and Model Schools of Nova Scotia, 1886 (Halifax: Commissioner
of Public Works and Mines, Queen’s Printer, 1886), Ethel Muir is listed in Appendix
A, page 9; Mae is listed in the same section on page 6. Ethel’s letter to family about
teaching at Cambridge House was cited in Graham, “A Family Reunion.”
99 See Cornell University Registers, 1893–94, p. 191; 1894–95, p. 200; and 1895–96, p.
204.
100 Walter Crosby Eells, “Earned Doctorates for Women in the Nineteenth Century,”
American Association of University Professors, Bulletin, vol. 42 (1956), p. 650.
101 Information about faculty positions at Mount Holyoke is from faculty listings and
course descriptions in its college catalogs in this era. A notice that Muir was leaving
the college and Talbot would fill the position was published in The Philosophical
Review, vol. ix, no. 5 (September 1900), p. 571.
102 Briarcliff was established as an elite secondary school for girls in 1903, began
adding two-year advanced degree options in 1923, and officially became a two-
year women’s college in 1933. By 1957, it remained a women’s college, but began
offering bachelor’s degrees. By the 1970s same-sex colleges had become less popular,
and in 1977 Briarcliff became part of Pace University. The university sold the
former Briarcliff campus in 2017. See A Handbook of American Private Schools,
vol. 8 (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1923), p. 176. See also Briarcliff Historical Society
Chronology: http://briarcliffhistory.org/briarcliff-chronology.html; and Zak Failla,
“Pace Sells Briarcliff Campus,” The Daily Voice online (February 23, 2017): https://
dailyvoice.com/new-york/briarcliff/schools/pace-sells-briarcliff-campus-for-174m/7
00989/
103 Ethel Muir, letter to James Creighton, March 16, 1905, in Cornell University
archives.
104 Muir’s contributions at Grenfell Mission were recognized in Among the Deep Sea
Fishers, vol. 30–31 (Grenfell Association Publication Office, 1932), p. 64. A number
of contemporary works have discussed Muir’s work at Grenfell Mission. See: Jennifer
J. Connor and Katherine Side, The Grenfell Medical Mission and American Support
in Newfoundland and Labrador, 1890s-1940s (Montreal: McGill University Press,
2019), pp. 150–54. Gail Lush, “Nutrition, Health Education, and Dietary Reform:
Gendering the ‘New Science’ in Northern Newfoundland and Labrador, 1893-1928”
310 NOTES
(MA thesis, Department of History, Memorial University of Newfoundland, May

2008), pp. 70, 133, 154. Finding Grenfell: Tracing the Grenfell Mission in Southern
Labrador: https://www.findinggrenfell.ca/home/summer-schools.htm.
105 Several additional discussions of Adam Smith’s life, heritage, and intellectual
interests were published at this time. Reviews of three of them appeared in
academic journals: R. B. Haldane’s Life of Adam Smith, John Rae’s Life of Adam
Smith, and James Bonar’s Catalogue of the Library of Adam Smith. In addition,
Mary T. A. Bannerman published an article about the “Parentage of Adam
Smith,” The Scottish Antiquary, or, Northern Notes and Queries, vol. 9, no. 36
(1895), pp. 157–58; and Edwin Canaan published a short piece, “Two Letters
of Adam Smith’s,” The Economic Journal, vol. 8, no. 31 (September 1898), pp.
402–04.
106 For discussions of Adam Smith’s economic theory, see F. W. Newman, “On the
Progress of Political Economy from the Time of Adam Smith,” International Journal
of Ethics, vol. 1, no. 4 (July 1891), pp. 475–83; L. L. Price, “Adam Smith and His
Relation to Recent Economics,” The Economic Journal, vol. 3, no. 10 (June 1893),
pp. 239–54; Edward Bourne, “Alexander Hamilton and Adam Smith,” The Quarterly
Journal of Economics, vol. 8, no. 3 (April 1894), pp. 328–44; J. H. Hollander, “Adam
Smith and James Anderson,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social
Science, vol. 7 (May 1896), pp. 85–88; and Hannah Robie Sewall, “The Theory of
Value Before Adam Smith,” Publications of the American Economic Association, 3rd
Series, vol. 2, no. 3 (August 1901), pp. 1–128. Sewall’s lengthy article (quite likely her
dissertation) was reviewed by A. C. Pigou in The Economic Journal, vol. 12, no. 47
(September 1902), pp. 374–5 and Wesley C. Mitchell in Journal of Political Economy,
vol. 11, no. 1 (December 1902), pp. 144–5. Selections from Smith’s Wealth of Nations
appeared during this period as well, in the Journal of Education, vol. 41, no. 9 (1017)
(February 28, 1895), p. 146.
107 Ethel Gordon Muir, “The Ethical System of Adam Smith” (Cornell University
doctoral dissertation, 1896), Preface (no page number provided).
108 Muir, “The Ethical System of Adam Smith,” p. 15.
109 Ibid., pp. 15–16, 21–2.
110 Ibid., pp. 15–16, 23.
111 Ibid.
112 Ibid., p. 23.
113 Ibid., pp. 29–30.
114 Ibid., p. 35.
115 Ibid., p. 36.
116 Ibid., pp. 51–52.
117 Ibid., p. 60.

NOTES
311
118 Ibid., p. 63.
119 Ibid., p. 65.
120 Ibid., p. 66.
121 Ibid., pp. 52–53, 54.
122 Ibid., p. 46.

123 Ibid., p. 46.
124 Biographical information for Ellen Bliss Talbot is from the Dictionary of Modern
American Philosophers, John Schook, ed., and Who’s Who in New England, second
edition, Albert Nelson Marquis, ed. (1916).
125 A note about Ellen Talbot’s name change was made in Ohio State’s alumni magazine:
“Miss Nellie Talbot, ’86-89, is connected with Mount Holyoke College in South
Hadley, Mass. After graduation she changed her name to Ellen Bliss Talbot, which
accounts for the confusion.” Ohio State University Monthly, vol. 4, no. 5 (January
1913), p. 36. Benjamin, Jr. is the only one of the Talbot children who does not appear
to have attended Ohio State. This may have been the reason historical accounts of
Ellen Bliss Talbot (which I had relied on myself in the past) indicate that she was
from a family of only three children. I have not been able to determine if Benjamin
Talbot, Jr. earned a bachelor’s degree elsewhere. In the 1890s, he appears in
Columbus, Ohio city directories and was working for the City Buggy Company; he
was also was the contact person for the Theosophical Society. Later census records
show that he was an accountant at a mental institution.
126 Source: US Census records for 1910 and 1920 on Ancestry.com. The quip about
Herbert’s venture into poultry farming appeared in Ohio State’s alumni magazine,
Ohio State University Monthly, vol. 4, no. 5 (January 1913), p. 41.
127 Source: US Census records for 1870 and 1880 on Ancestry.com. Note: Deaf is in
upper case, in recognition of Deaf language and culture and out of respect for the
preferences of members of the Deaf community I am acquainted with.
128 See Benjamin Talbot, “Report of the Principal,” Legislative Documents Submitted to
the Twelfth General Assembly of the State of Iowa, vol. 2 (December 1867; published
January 1868), p. 15. Dewitt Tonsley and Conrad Zorbaugh were among several
teachers in both Ohio and Iowa who were Deaf. Lou J. Hawkins and Ellen J. Israel
were identified as hearing teachers who were familiar with “signs,” but it is not clear
if they were fully fluent in Sign Language. See Talbot, “Report of the Principal,” pp.
16–17. The teachers’ dates of hire in Iowa are provided in Benjamin Talbot, “Iowa
Institution for the Deaf,” Annals of Iowa, vol. 1867, no. 4 (1867), p. 958.
129 See Talbot, “Report of the Principal,” pp. 16–17.
130 Ibid., p. 16.
131 Ellen Bliss Talbot, letter to James E. Creighton, Sept 2, 1904, in Cornell University
archives.
312 NOTES
132 Louise Hannum, letter to James E. Creighton, November 16, 1905, in Cornell
University archives.
133 For information about Simmel, see David Frisby, “Preface,” in Georg Simmel (New
York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2002), pp. xiv–xix.
134 For information about Dessoir, see Stuart Brown, Diane Collinson, and Robert
Wilkinson, “Max Dessoir,” Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth Century Philosophers
(New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 184.
135 For information about Paulsen, see Frank Thilly, “Friedrich Paulsen,” The Journal of
Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol. 5, no. 19 (September 10, 1908),
pp. 505–08.
136 Ellen Bliss Talbot, letter to James E. Creighton, January 6, 1905, in Cornell
137 For information about Menzer, a student of Wilhelm Dilthey, see Thomas Soren
Hoffman, “Paul Menzer,” in German Biography online (1994): www.deutsche-bi
ographie.de/gnd116886439.html&usg=ALkJrhiACRLZ1-6I1FMTcL6WdQ_a_3k_rQ
#ndbcontent.
138 Ellen Bliss Talbot, letter to James E. Creighton, January 6, 1905, in Cornell
139 Talbot’s review of The Persistent Problems of Philosophy was favorable overall,
although she charged that Calkins’s discussion of the self should be enhanced by
comparing it more carefully with the early modern understanding of the soul. In
response, Calkins wrote “Self and Soul” which appeared in a subsequent issue of the
Review. See Talbot’s review in Philosophical Review, vol. 17, no. 1 (January 1908), pp.
75–84 and Calkins’ response in Philosophical Review, vol. 17, no. 3 (May 1908), pp.
272–80.
140 Conversation with the late Richard Robin, summer 1999. Robin’s tenure at Mount
Holyoke began after Talbot’s retirement, but he was aware of her legacy at the college
and in the community. Even so, the information he shared with me provides a sense
of Talbot as a person—a rarity indeed for researchers who are reaching 100 and
more years into the past.
141 Talbot’s 1906 book was not widely reviewed, but did receive a commendation from
W. H. Sheldon of Princeton: “Under the category of Fichtestudien, the book deserves
the highest praise, not only for careful scholarship, but also for clearness and
articulation of argumentation.” Philosophical Review, vol. 4, no. 17 (August 1907),
pp. 471–3.
142 See A. E. Kroeger, “The Difference between the Dialectical Method of Hegel and
the Synthetic Method of Kant and Fichte,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. 6,
no. 2 (April, 1872), pp. 184–7. Kroeger is recognized as a member of the St. Louis
movement in my first study of women in philosophy: Rogers, “‘Making Hegel
Talk English’—America’s First Women Idealists,” (Boston University doctoral
dissertation, 1998), pp. 37–8, 49–50, 282; available online: https://digitalcommo
NOTES
313
ns.montclair.edu/religion-facpubs/5/. In that work I mistakenly identified him

as Alfred Kroeger, but his name was in fact Adolph Ernst Kroeger. He was also
mentioned at points throughout Kurt Leidecker’s biography of William Torrey
Harris, Yankee Teacher (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), see pp. 324–5,
which unfortunately does not provide an index entry for Kroeger (or any of the
women of the St. Louis movement, interestingly enough). See also R. C. Ware, “The
Historical and Logical Relations between Fichte and Kant,” Journal of Speculative
Philosophy, vol. 11, no. 2 (1877), pp. 145–151. Mention of Ware as a student at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology appears in George Howison’s report to the
president in MIT’s President’s Report, for the Year Ending 1876 (Boston: A. A.
Kingman Press, 1877), pp. 48–49.
143 Mary Whiton Calkins’s life and work is discussed in Chapter 5. For her review
of Fichte’s work, see Mary Whiton Calkins, “Notes on Fichte’s ‘Grundlage der
Wissenschaftslehre,’” Philosophical Review, vol. 3, no. 4 (July 1894), pp. 459–62.
144 For Leighton’s biographical information, see Albert R. Chandler, “Remembrance of

Joseph Alexander Leighton,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical
Association, vol. 28 (1954–55), pp. 63–64. The seminary at which he studied near
Harvard became known as Episcopal Divinity School. In 2016, it relocated to
New York City and was renamed Episcopal Divinity School at Union Theological
Seminary; though Union is an independent institution, it has long been affiliated
with Columbia University. For his article, see J. A. Leighton, “Fichte’s Conception of
God,” Philosophical Review, vol. 4, no. 2 (March 1895), pp. 143–53.
145 For Thompson’s biographical information, see “Papers of Anna Boynton Thompson,”
description of archival materials held at Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library; “Additional
Description,” section: https://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/8/resour
ces/5004. For a review of her book, see: J. F. Brown, review of Anna Boynton
Thompson, The Unity of Fichte’s Doctrine of Knowledge (MA thesis, Radcliffe
College), in Philosophical Review, vol. 5, no. 4 (July 1896), pp. 438–39.
146 Edward L. Schaub also published discussions of Fichte in this period, and Talbot
published a response at one point. See Schaub, “Hegel’s Criticisms of Fichte’s
Subjectivism. I,” Philosophical Review, vol. 21, no. 5 (September 1912), pp. 566–84
and “Hegel’s Criticisms of Fichte’s Subjectivism. II,” Philosophical Review, vol. 22, no. 1
(January 1913), pp. 17–37. See also Talbot, “Hegel’s Criticisms of Fichte’s Subjectivism:
In Reply to Dr. Schaub,” Philosophical Review, vol. 22, no. 3 (May 1913), pp. 306–07.
147 Ellen Bliss Talbot, “The Relation of the Two Periods of Fichte’s Philosophy,” Mind,
vol. 10, no. 39 (1901), pp. 336–37.
148 Regarding Fichte as an early phenomenologist, see Violetta L. Waibel, J.

Daniel Breazeale and Tom Rockmore, eds., Fichte and the Phenomenological
Tradition (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010). See also Frédéric Seyler, “Fichte in 1804:
A Radical Phenomenology of Life? On a Possible Comparison Between the
1804 Wissenschaftslehre and Michel Henry’s Phenomenology,” The Journal
of Speculative Philosophy, vol. 28, no. 3, special issue with the society for
phenomenology and existential philosophy (2014), pp. 295–304.
314 NOTES
149 Ellen Bliss Talbot, “The Philosophy of Fichte in its Relation to Pragmatism,”
Philosophical Review, vol.16, no. 5 (September 1907), p. 488.
150 Ellen Bliss Talbot, “Fichte’s Conception of God,” The Monist, vol. 23, no. 21 (1913), p. 47.
151 Talbot, “Fichte’s Conception of God,” pp. 48–49.
152 “The Relation of the Two Periods of Fichte’s Philosophy,” p. 346.

153 Talbot, “The Philosophy of Fichte in its Relation to Pragmatism,” pp. 489–90.
154 Ellen Bliss Talbot, “An Attempt to Train the Visual Memory,” American Journal of
Psychology, vol. 8, no. 3 (April 1897), pp. 414–17.
155 Ellen Bliss Talbot, “The Doctrine of Conscious Elements,” Philosophical Review, vol.
4, no. 2 (March 1895), pp. 155–56.
156 Talbot, “The Doctrine of Conscious Elements,” p. 157, fn1, citing George Trumbull
Ladd in Psychology, Descriptive and Explanatory, preface, p. ix.
157 Talbot, “The Doctrine of Conscious Elements,” pp. 164–65.
158 Ibid., p. 165.
159 Ellen Bliss Talbot, “Individuality and Freedom,” Philosophical Review, vol. 18, no. 6
(November 1909), p. 602.
160 Talbot, “Individuality and Freedom,” p. 604.
161 Ibid., p. 605.
162 Ellen Bliss Talbot, “The Time-Process and the Value of Human Life. I,” Philosophical
Review, vol. 23, no. 6 (November 1914), p. 639. She recognizes here that we make
allowances for reduced capacities or debility when a person’s achievements wane
at the end of life, pp. 640–41. In the part II of this article, Talbot notes that belief
in immortality may influence common views of the self at the culmination of their
life. This question is beyond the scope of her discussion, however, and it would
also make the considerations under discussion become irrelevant, because then the
significance of our earthly lives were be shifted or perhaps lack meaning. See Talbot,
“The Time-Process and the Value of Human Life. II” Philosophical Review, vol. 24,
no. 1 (January 1915), p. 27.
163 Talbot, “The Time-Process and the Value of Human Life. I,” p. 641.
164 Ibid.
165 Talbot, “The Time-Process and the Value of Human Life. II,” pp. 28–29.
166 Ibid., p. 21.
167 Ibid., p. 22.
168 Ibid., p. 23.
169 All quotes in this paragraph are from Talbot, “The Time-Process and the Value of
Human Life. II,” p. 25.
NOTES
315
170 Talbot, “The Time-Process and the Value of Human Life. II,” p. 25.
171 Ibid., p. 26.
172 Ibid., p. 32.
173 Talbot cites John McTaggart as making similar moves in his theory of individual
identity and development. See Talbot, “The Time-Process and the Value of Human
Life. II,” pp. 33 and 34.
174 Talbot, “The Time-Process and the Value of Human Life. II,” p. 35.
175 Ibid., p. 36.
176 For academic and biographical information about Husserl, see Christian Beyer’s
entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy online: https://plato.stanford.ed
u/entries/husserl. For a well-informed and fascinating discussion of the influence
of Dilthey on Husserl and vice versa, see: Bob Sandmeyer, Husserl’s Constitutive
Phenomenology: Its Problem and Promise (New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 55–65.
177 Talbot, “The Philosophy of Fichte in its Relation to Pragmatism,” p. 491.
178 Both this statement and the previous quotation are from: Talbot, “The Philosophy of
Fichte in its Relation to Pragmatism,” p. 492.
179 Talbot, “The Philosophy of Fichte in its Relation to Pragmatism,” p. 496.
180 Ibid.
181 Ibid., p. 497.
182 Ibid., p. 498.
183 Ibid., pp. 500–01.
184 Ibid., p. 504.
185 See The Key, newsletter of Kappa Kappa Gamma fraternity, vol. 13, no. 3, pp. 154, 155.
186 C. A. Dolson letter to James Creighton, June 8, 1898, in Cornell University archives.
Sandra Singer cites Dolson as an example of a woman who found opportunities for
advanced study more limited than expected. Singer’s work brought my attention
to Dolson’s study in Germany, and I was pleased to see the letter from her father
in Cornell’s collection to provide further evidence. See Singer, Adventures Abroad:
North American Women at German-Speaking Universities, 1868-1915 (Westport:
Praeger, 2003). p. 146.
187 J. G. Schurman to Ruth Putnam, May 2, 1905, in Schurman Papers, Cornell

University archives; Box 41, Reel 15, pp. 247–48. I thank Patrick Connelly, formerly
of Emory University, who was writing his dissertation on Nietzsche when he shared
this correspondence with me years ago.
188 See The Living Church newsletter, vol. 60 (February 22, 1919), p. 564 (available
online in Google Books) “On January 27 [1919] Sister Hilary, Miss Grace Neal
Dolson, PhD, Professor Philosophy at Wells College Aurora, took her final vows as
316 NOTES
a member of the Order of St. Mary at their convent at Peekskill, NY where she has
been since 1916.”
189 Information about Dolson’s life as Sister Hilary in the Community of St. Mary is
from the genealogical records of the convent, provided by Mother Miriam, Mother
Superior at the convent, now located in Greenwich, New York.
190 Dolson, “The Ethical System of Henry More.”

191 Ibid., pp. 599–601; quote at 601.
192 Dolson, “The Ethical System of Henry More,” p. 601.
193 Ibid., p. 602; emphasis mine.
194 Dolson, “The Ethical System of Henry More,” pp. 602–03.
195 Ibid., p. 603.
196 Ibid., p. 604.
197 Ibid.
198 Ibid., p. 607.
199 Other early articles on Nietzsche in US-based academic journals were published in
Monist (Goebel and Antrim, 1899), International Journal of Ethics (Bakewell, 1899;
M. Adams, 1900; Fouillee, 1902), Mind (Goldstein, 1902), and North American
Review (Lee, 1904). Nietzsche’s mental health was a point of discussion even at this
early stage, with a brief note on this topic appearing in The British Medical Journal
(Ireland, 1901).
200 William H. Nolte, ed., H.L. Mencken’s Smart Set Criticism (Washington, DC:
Regnery Publishing, 1987), p. 191.
201 Dolson cited contemporaries who recognized Nietzsche as a thinker and/or

discussed his work: Alois Riehl, Henri Lichtenberger, Ritschl, von Meysenburg, and
Ola Hanson—making several references to Hanson’s book, Friedrich Nietzsche, seine
Personlichkeit und sein Systems. See Grace Neal Dolson, The Philosophy of Friedrich
Nietzsche (New York: Macmillan, 1901), pp. iii, 2, 5, 9.
202 Dolson, The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, p. 12.
203 Ibid., pp. 85, 94.
204 Ibid., pp. 88–9.
205 Ibid., pp. 23–4.
206 Ibid., p. 14.
207 Ibid., p. 64.
208 Ibid., p. 63.
209 Ibid., p. 15.

NOTES
317
210 Ibid., p. 102.
211 Ibid., p. 85.
212 Ibid., pp. 92–4.
213 Ibid., pp. 94–6. Here she cites a work by Robert Schellwein, Max Stirner und
Friedrich Nietzsche.
214 Sources: Census records and family probate documents for John G. Moore and
Vida Frank Moore in Ancestry.com; article in the New York Tribune, June 29,
1899, p. 3; available online: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214
/1899-06-29/ed-1/seq-3/. John G. Moore’s widow, Louise Leeds along with Vida
Moore’s nieces, Faith and Ruth Moore, donated family property to the park service
in the early 1920s. See Catherine Schmitt, See Historic Acadia National Park: The
Stories Behind One of America’s Great Treasures (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), pp.
184–6. Note: Although Schmitt describes the naming of Acadia National Park as
an innocuous moment in the process of negotiating a land transaction, as a Maine
native, I can add that there may have been some anti-French sentiment behind their
request to change its name from Lafayette Park to “something less French and more
broad and relevant.” At least within working-class Anglo-heritage communities in
Maine, segregation of and discrimination against French Canadians was common
well into the late twentieth century. A community on “French Island”—near a
similarly segregated community on “Indian Island”—was relatively isolated for
decades, intermarriage with the local older Anglo and Irish immigrant populations
was discouraged, and even school teachers felt free to make “French jokes” in
their classrooms. This is not to suggest that Schmitt was aiming to mask or deny
any cultural frictions; she may simply have been unaware of this phenomenon
because she was not exposed to these harsher realities in the state, which have only
dissipated in recent decades.
215 At the time of her death, Vida Moore was able to leave funds behind to provide for
her elderly mother, to leave thousands of dollars to several family members (in some
cases, as much as $4,000—the equivalent of $100,000 today) and to allow funds from
the sale of her house to be used to support women’s and/or religious organizations.
She also left funds to support the Steuben Parish House, which now houses the
town’s library and is named after her father. She had benefited from the wealth of
her oldest brother, John G. Moore, no doubt, who died nearly twenty years earlier.
He willed $10,000 to each his three surviving siblings, the equivalent of roughly a
quarter of a million dollars each in today’s currency, and provided generous gifts to
other relatives as well as to several of his employees.
216 A notice of Vida Moore’s death in June 1915 was posted in Cornell Alumni News, vol.
17, p. 493.
217 Lotze, as cited by Vida Moore in Ethical Aspects of Lotze’s Metaphysics (Scholar
Select reprint; originally published in 1901), p. 43.
218 Moore, Ethical Aspects of Lotze’s Metaphysics, p. 44.
219 Ibid., pp. 48–9.

318 NOTES
220 Ibid., p. 51.
221 Ibid., citing Lotze at points, p. 29.
222 Moore, Ethical Aspects of Lotze’s Metaphysics, p. 53.
223 Ibid., pp. 52–3.
224 Ibid., p. 35.

225 Ibid., p. 67.
226 Ibid., in part citing Lotze, pp. 67–8.
227 For Benedict’s biographical information: obituary of her mother, Adelia (Teller)
Benedict, in Kingston Daily Freeman, December 2, 1916, p. 9; Benedict’s listing as
the archivist of the Hermanus Bleecker Papers at the State Library of New York,
Albany in 1928; notices in Library School Bulletin of the State Library of New York,
1912–30; necrology entry in Library Journal, vol. 83 (1958), p. 163. For publications:
WorldCat Identities.
228 For deLaguna’s biographical information: Isabel Stearns, Memorial Notice: “Grace
Andrus de Laguna,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical
Association, vol. 51 (1978), pp. 577–8; Cornell college catalogues. For publications:
WorldCat Identities and JSTOR listings.
229 For Murray’s biographical information: Murray’s obituary, in The Evening Times,
Sayre, Pennsylvania, October 1, 1965, p. 1; Elsie Murray Papers, Cornell University
archives; Tioga Point Historical Museum (regarding mother’s historical work),
https://www.tiogapointmuseum.org/about. For publications: WorldCat Identities
and JSTOR listings.
230 For Gilbert’s biographical information: C. Sylvester Green, “Katherine Everett

Gilbert,” in NCPedia: https://www.ncpedia.org/biography/gilbert-katherine (1986).
For publications: WorldCat Identities and JSTOR listings.
231 For Barr’s biographical information: Connecticut College Alumni News, vol. 3,
no. 4 (1926), p. 15, accessible online at: https://digitalcommons.conncoll.edu/cgi/
viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=alumnews. For publications: WorldCat
Identities.
232 For Thorne’s biographical information: Cornell college catalogues; Cornell Alumni
News, vol. 18 (1916), p. 459. For publications: WorldCat Identities.
233 For Crane’s biographical information: Cornell college catalogues; Bryn Mawr alumni
newsletters, 1919–22; R. David Arkush and Leo O. Lee, eds., Land Without Ghosts:
Chinese Impressions of America from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 113 and 116; and Maria Forte,
“Bertrand Russell’s Letters to Helen Thomas Flexner and Lucy Martin Donnelly,”
doctoral thesis, McMaster University, 1988, p. 334. For publications: WorldCat
Identities.
NOTES
319
234 For Swabey’s biographical information: Louise Antz, Memorial Notice: “Marie
Collins Swabey,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association,
vol. 40 (1966–7), p. 127. For publications: WorldCat Identities and JSTOR listings.
235 Source for Harris’s biographical information: Catherine Hundleby, “Marjorie

Silliman Harris,” Encyclopedia.com: https://www.encyclopedia.com/women/encyc
lopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/harris-marjorie-silliman-1890-1976. For
publications: WorldCat Identities and JSTOR listings.
Chapter 3
1 Source: Michigan’s Philosophy Department webpage. Oddly, George Sylvester Morris
did not appear on the page when I viewed it in Spring 2020. Neither did James
Tufts, who joined the department for a short time before joining John Dewey at the
University of Chicago.
2 Citations for Dewey’s articles: “The New Psychology,” Andover Review, vol. 2
(September 1884), pp. 278–89; “Psychology as Philosophic Method,” Mind, old series,
vol. 11 (1886), pp. 153–73.
3 See “Introductory Essay,” in James Dorfman, ed., Relation of the State to Industrial
Action and Economics and Jurisprudence: Two Essays by Henry Carter Adams (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1954), pp. 37–42, citing a March 15, 1887 letter
from Adams to Angell.
4 Information about Henry Carter Adams’ education and career comes from the
University of Michigan’s “Faculty History Project,” https://www.lib.umich.edu/faculty
-history/faculty/henry-carter-adams/memorial.
5 Information about graduate degrees earned in philosophy and related fields before
1900 comes from “Order of Examinations for Higher Degrees, Horace H. Rackham
School of Graduate Studies,” published by the University of Michigan in 1923 and
now available as a print-on-demand volume from ULAN Press. Doctoral degree
recipients in philosophy: Charles Emmet Lowrey (1885, Ralph Cudworth’s response
to atheism), Elmer Manville Taylor (1888, ethical basis of the state), Marietta
Kies (1891, altruism in political life), Caroline Miles (1892, Kant’s ethics), Eliza
Sunderland (1892, Kant and Hegel on the absolute), George Rebec (1898, philosophy
of discourse), and Lewis Clinton Carson (1899, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason).
Doctoral degree recipients in related fields before 1900: J. Rose Colby (1887, ethics/
English drama), Max Winkler (1892, ideas/German drama), Toyogiro Kotegawa
(1893, economics of Japan), Mary Gilmore Williams (1897, Latin/Julia Domna),
Gertrude Buck (1898, metaphor), Samuel Allen Jeffers (1900, Latin/Lucretius).
Master’s degree recipients: Lucy C. McGee (1890, Plato’s influence on Edmund
Spencer), Arlisle Margaret Young (1890, Rousseau’s influence on Wordsworth),
320 NOTES
James Rowland Angell (1891, image-making and Mind), James Rood Robertson
(1891, Boethius’ influence on Chaucer), Frederic Augustus Henry (1891, freedom in
Kant and Hume), Mary Clark Bancker (1892, ethics in Greek myth), James Melville
(1892, development of law), Charles Ambrose Bowen (1893, philosophy—topic not
provided), Augusta Lee Giddings (1893, French literature), Ellen Garrigues (1893,
English literature), Helen Louise Halch (1893, philosophy—topic not provided),
Marilla Caroline Wooster (1893, English literature), Lawrence Thomas Cole (1896,
ancient Christian philosophy), Georgiana Cleis Blunt (1897, American literature),
Annie Louis Barcorn (1898, rhetoric), Kathryne Griffin (1898, rhetoric), Sophie
Chantal Hart (1898, rhetoric), Grace Lord Lamb (1898, history of philosophy).
6 Michigan Argonaut, 5:134 (February 1887).
7 See Michigan Argonaut, 3:18 (February 1885) and 5:101, 110 (February 1887).
8 Sherbern S. Mathews, In Memoriam: Marietta Kies (Boston, 1900), pp.16–18. At this

time, Kies taught in the towns of Putnam and Brooklyn, Connecticut, as well as the
borough of Danielson; a district within the town of Killingly, CT.
9 Available records from Colorado College are unclear about Kies’s status and years of
service there. Memorialists claimed she was an instructor in Latin and mathematics
from 1883 to 1885. Colorado College archives list Kies as the supervisor of a girls’
dormitory one year and as an instructor in the “Preparatory” department in another.
In addition, the College shows her tenure there as lasting from 1882–4. These
discrepancies needn’t concern us too much. It is conceivable that Kies taught Latin
and math, but at the preparatory rather than advanced level. She may also have been
assigned to serve as house mother of a girls’ dormitory, which was common at the
time for women in academic life.
10 See Mount Holyoke Archives, college catalogs for 1885–6, p. 5 and 1890–1, pp. 6, 29.
11 Mathews, In Memoriam, 19.
12 See Ethel Coldwell, letter to “Mr. James,” January 3, 1944, Mills College archives.
13 See Mathews, In Memoriam, pp. 19, 70. See also Marietta Kies, letter to George
Holmes Howison, June 15, 1892, in George Holmes Howison Papers, Bancroft
Library special collections, University of California, Berkeley.
14 Gertrude Pradel, “Dr. Marietta Kies: The Strenuous Life,” in Helen M. Sheldrick, ed.,
Pioneer Teachers of Connecticut (Winsted: Dowd Printing Company, 1971), p. 51.
15 Butler College, Minutes of the Board of Directors, July 14, 1897, p. 316.
16 See especially Patricia Jagentowicz Mills, ed., Feminist Interpretations of G. W. F. Hegel

(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996).
17 Marietta Kies, The Ethical Principle (Ann Arbor: Inland Press, 1892), p. 1.
18 Kies, The Ethical Principle, pp. 1–2.
19 Ibid., p. 2.
NOTES
321
20 Ibid., p. 12.
21 This stands in contrast to contemporary feminists whose theories have asserted that
gender difference is at the root of moral or ethical decision-making. It is ironic that,
without so much as hinting at gender difference, Kies has spontaneously arrived
at the type of moral theory Carol Gilligan suggested might evolve if different (i.e.,
women’s) voices were allowed into the moral/political dialogue.
22 See especially Marietta Kies, Institutional Ethics (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1894),
pp. 12–13, in which she calls up ideas of organic unity, self-consciousness and
distinctions between Western and Oriental thought, derived from both the
Phenomenology of Spirit and Philosophy of Right.
24 Kies gives the examples of women’s higher education and slavery here. See Kies, The
Ethical Principle, p. 17.
26 Mathews, In Memoriam, 25.
28 Ibid., p. 52.
29 See G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, H.B. Nisbet translation, Allen W. Wood, editor
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), §§34–40.
30 See Philosophy of Right, §§235–7.
31 Kies, The Ethical Principle, p. 65.
32 Ibid., p. 52.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid., p. 73.
35 Ibid., p. 97.
36 See especially Philosophy of Right, §187–8, and §184, Addition.
37 See G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, rev. edn; A. V. Miller translation (Oxford

University Press, 1977) §389 and §392.
38 See Philosophy of Right, §§189–208 regarding the system of needs and role of the
estates, and §§182–187 regarding civil society as the realm in which a person
becomes individuated.
39 See S. W. Dyde’s translation of The Philosophy of Right §243 (London: George Bell and
Sons, 1896), p. 231.
40 Philosophy of Right, §241.
41 Ibid., §242, including Note.

322 NOTES
42 Philosophy of Right, §245.
43 Ibid., §246–8.
44 Ibid., §245 regarding coerced public begging; §247 regarding foreign trade.
45 Kies, The Ethical Principle, p. 65.
46 Ibid., p. 79.
47 Ibid., pp. 95–6.
48 Ibid., p. 91.
49 Ibid., pp. 65–6.
50 Ibid., p. 86.
51 Ibid., p. 91.
52 Ibid., pp. 110–13.
53 Ibid.
54 Ibid., p. 131. Mill was not a central figure in Kies’s theory. Other than this reference,
Mill is not mentioned.
55 Biographical information for Caroline Miles Hill comes from her alumni file at the
University of Michigan, in the archives at Bentley Library; from Wilfred Scott Downs,
ed., Encyclopedia of American Biography, New Series, vol. 9 (New York: American
Historical Society, 1938), pp. 302–3; and from her letter to Jane Addams in July 30,
1913, in the Jane Addams Papers, Swarthmore College Peace Collection.
56 See Caroline Miles Hill’s letter to Jane Addams, July 30, 1913 in the Jane Addams
Papers, Swarthmore College Peace Collection. Sadly, in this letter Caroline was
reflecting on her early attraction to her husband en route to disclosing that he had
recently told her he had grown tired of their shared interests in academic work
and social reform and asked for a divorce. She was so devastated that her marriage
had failed that she confessed she was on the verge of suicide. She cautiously asked
Addams about the possibility of returning to the work she’d done at Hull House
several years before. Addams welcomed her return, of course, and Miles Hill spent
the next year there.
57 See Caroline Miles Hill, letter to Eliza Sunderland, February 13, 1892, in the Eliza
Read Sunderland Papers at Bentley Library, University of Michigan.
58 Lucy Salmon earned a master’s degree at Michigan before teaching at Vassar College.
Source: Biographical sketch in Lucy Maynard Salmon Papers, Vassar College
Archives. Elizabeth Laird, born in Canada, studied at the University of Toronto before
teaching at Smith, Mt. Holyoke, and the University of Western Ontario. Source:
Henry Duckworth, One Version of the Facts: My Life in the Ivory Tower (University of
Manitoba Press, 2000), p. 103. Agnes M. Wergeland, born in Norway, attended the
University of Stockholm and was the first woman to earn a doctorate at the University
of Zurich. After teaching at Bryn Mawr, she held positions at the University of
NOTES
323
Chicago, the University of Illinois, and the University of Wyoming in Laramie. She
was a descendant of Henrik Wergeland, known as the George Washington of Norway.
Her father’s cousin, also named Henrik, gained renown as a poet, and Agnes’s second
cousin (the younger Henrik’s daughter), Camilla Collett, was a prominent feminist.
Her brother, Oscar, became a well-known artist. Sources: Rock Springs Rocket
newspaper, no. 17, March 13, 1914, citing the Cheyenne Tribune and Larry Emil Scott,
“The Poetry of Agnes Mathilde Wergeland,”in the Norwegian-American Historical
Association Journal, vol. 30, p. 273; available online: https://www.naha.stolaf.edu/pubs
/nas/volume30/vol30_09.htm.
59 Miles Hill cited Sanford’s support of her work at the opening of her article about the
first psychological study, “A Study of Individual Psychology,” American Journal of
Psychology, vol. 6, no. 4 (January1895), p. 534. She notes in her second article that
she was able to do work at Harvard, and her work with Münsterberg is cited in her
biographical sketch: Downs, ed., Encyclopedia of American Biography, pp. 302–3.
60 William Hill appears to have struggled with mental health issues, which may have
contributed to his sudden departure from a successful academic career. The year
before he and Caroline married, he was on a leave of absence from the University of
Chicago, reportedly after having had a psychological breakdown. See: “Prof. Hill of the
University of Chicago Given a Vacation,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 15, 1894,
p.1: “Prof. William Hill of the University of Chicago has been granted vacation under
peculiar and sad circumstances. . . . [He] began his lecture, but before going far the
rambling manner of his talk so alarmed his listeners that a physician was summoned,
who forbade him to finish. . . . [A student] was awakened before daylight Tuesday by
hearing the professor talking in a loud and disconnected way. He was laboring under
the delusion, apparently, that the faculty did not properly understand his case. ‘The
facts must be laid before the members in a proper way,’ said Prof. Hill, ‘so that they will
know all about it. I know I am ill. Of course I am ill, but if the thing is not done right
who is to know it?’ . . . ‘What the professor was saying,’ said the one who overheard
him last night, ‘and his manner of saying it was like that of a man in a delirium. He
has been overworked and overexcited over something. . .’ (William Hill graduated
from the University of Kansas in 1891 and spent the next year at Harvard where he
took his masters degree under Dr. Taussig. At Harvard he also won the Lee Memorial
Fellowship. . . . He came to Chicago University in October 1892 and has since then
become popular with both students and faculty. He is Acting President of the Political
Economy club of the University and is known as a bicycle rider and tennis expert.)”
61 Caroline Miles Hill, “Transcendentalism in New England,” unpublished master’s thesis

at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor 1890, p. 2. Available online at Hathi Trust:
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015093616632&view=1up&seq=1.
62 Note: Miles Hill used an older set of terms in this essay, referring to “physics” when
today we would say “metaphysics,” “cosmology,” or in some cases “ontology.” As
was common in this era, she uses the term “psychology” to refer to almost anything
related to mind, knowledge acquisition, or cognitive processes.
63 Hill, “Transcendentalism in New England,” p. 3.

324 NOTES
64 See Dorothy Rogers, Women Philosophers: Education and Activism in Nineteenth-

Century America (Bloomsbury, 2020), pp. 120–2 for a discussion of Margaret Mercer
who expresses similar views in her book, Popular Lectures on Ethics, or Moral
Obligation for the Use of Schools (Petersburg: Edmund & Julian C. Ruffin, 1841).
66 Ibid., p. 4.
67 Ibid., p. 14.
68 Ibid.
69 Ibid., p. 18.
70 Ibid., p. 17.
71 Ibid., p. 20.
72 Ibid., p. 21.
73 At one point, Miles Hill makes a favorable comparison between the subjectivism
of Emerson and Berkeley, interestingly enough. The way in which this part of her
discussion is sandwiched in, however, leads me to believe that she may have been
urged to include it to appease a professor who wanted to be sure she “covered the
territory.” See Hill, “Transcendentalism in New England,” pp. 31–2.
75 Ibid., pp. 21, 26–7.
76 Ibid., pp. 30–1.
77 Ibid., p. 35.
78 Ibid., p. 37.
79 Hill, “A Study of Individual Psychology,” pp. 534–58.
80 See Jason Colavito, ed., “Ghosts and Kindred Horrors,” in A Hideous Bit of Morbidity:
An Anthology of Horror Criticism from the Enlightenment to World War II (Jefferson:
McFarland and Company, 2008), pp. 265–7.
81 Caroline Miles Hill, “On Choice,” American Journal of Psychology, vol. 9, no. 4 (July
1898), pp. 587–98.
82 Caroline Miles Hill, “Economic Value of the Home,” a book review essay discussing
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Home: Its Work and Its Influence (New York: MacClure &
Philipps, 1903), in the Journal of Political Economy, vol. 12, no. 3 (June 1904), pp. 408–19.
83 Miles Hill’s collection of religious poetry went through fourteen printings and even
later editions were favorably reviewed. See reviews by W. E. Garrison in the Journal of
Religion, vol. 19, no. 4 (October 1939), p. 408 and Carl E. Purinton, in the Journal of
the Bible and Religion, vol. 8, no. 2 (May 1940), p. 121.
84 See Caroline Miles Hill, ed., Mary McDowell and Municipal Housekeeping; a
Symposium (Chicago: Millar Publishing), 1938. Digitized by the University of Illinois at
NOTES
325
Champaign-Urbana. Miles Hill’s contributions to this volume include the Preface as well
as a final chapter, “What ‘the Angel of the Stockyards’ Meant to the City,” pp. 126–32.
85 Caroline Miles Hill, “Economic Value of the Home,” Journal of Political Economy, vol.
12, no. 3 (June 1904), pp. 408–9. She mentions three anti-feminists by name in this
essay: Laura Marholm, Studies in the Psychology of Woman; Helen Watterson Moody,
The Unquiet Sex; and Helen Kendrick Johnson, Woman and the Republic.
86 Hill, “Economic Value of the Home,” pp. 414, 417.
87 Ibid., p. 414.
88 Ibid., p. 416.
89 Lucinda Hinsdale Stone wrote a multipage letter to James Angell, president of the
university, on October 19, 1891, to make a case for Sunderland’s appointment to a
faculty position. The quote from an unnamed female student at the University of
Michigan comes toward the end of the letter. In James B. Angell Papers, Bentley
Historic Library Archives.
90 John Dewey to James Angell, June 23, 1894, in James Angell Papers, Bentley
Historical Library archives.
91 The two most prominent Boston Personalists were Borden Parker Bowne (1847–
1910) and Edgar Sheffield Brightman (1884–1953), both of whom taught at Boston
University in the early twentieth century. The movement was active into the 1950s
and 1960s, with Walter Muelder, dean of the university’s school of theology until
1972, espousing this school of thought as well.
92 This quotation is from the last page of Sunderland’s handwritten unpublished

manuscript, “Man’s Relation to the Absolute according to the philosophy of Kant
and of Hegel,” doctoral dissertation, University of Michigan, 1892 in Eliza Jane Read
Sunderland Papers, Bentley Library, University of Michigan.
93 Sunderland’s work appears in Thoemmes Press’s “History of American Thought”

series, in a four-volume set. See Dorothy Rogers, ed., The Women of the St. Louis
Idealist Movement 1860-1925, volume four (2003).
94 Sunderland, “The Importance of the Study of Comparative Religions,” in The World’s

Congress of Religions: The Addresses and Papers Delivered before the Parliament,
August 25-October 15, 1893 (Chicago: Monarch Book Company, 1894), p. 301.
95 As early as 1835, David Friedrich Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu (The Life of Jesus) recognized
the mytho-poetic character of New Testament literature and pointed to parallels to and
transpositions of the prophetic writings of the Hebrew Scriptures with the gospel texts.
By the middle of the century, this discussion had expanded and become even more
sophisticated. See Karl Heinrich Weizsacker, Untersuchungen die evangelische Geschichte,
ihre Quellen und den Gang ihrer Entwicklung (Studies in the Gospel History, Its Sources and
the Progress of Its Development) (Gotha, 1864); and Strauss, Der Christus des Glaubens
and der Jesus der Geschichte (The Christ of Faith and the Jesus of History) (Berlin, 1865).
96 See A Stream of Light: A Short History of American Unitarianism, by Conrad Wright

(Boston: Skinner House Books, 1989), pp. 84–92.
326 NOTES
97 Sunderland, “Higher Education and the Home,” address presented at the Women’s
Congress, World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893, and published in The World’s
Congress of Representative Women, Chicago, 1893, May Wright Sewall, ed.
Chapter 4
1 Several male students completed doctoral degrees in Chicago’s philosophy
department across a wide range of inquiry in this early period as well. In
chronological order: Edward Scribner Ames (1895, agnosticism), Simon Fraser
McLennan (1896, theory of impersonal judgment), William Isaac Thomas (1896,
sex differences), Addison Webster Moore (1898, theology and Locke’s Essay),
Ernest Carroll Moore (1898, education and philosophy in the ancient world),
Arthur Kenyon Rogers (1898, metaphysics and psychophysical parallelism), Daniel
Peter McMillan (1899, negative judgment), Henry Heath Bawden (1900, theory of
criterion), William Franklin Moncreiff (1900, John Stuart Mill), Henry Walgrave
Stuart (1900, the process of valuation).
2 Amy Tanner held an assistantship in philosophy (1899–1900) and then was

promoted to an “associateship” (1900–1). Helen Bradford Thompson also held a
graduate fellowship in philosophy (1899–1900), alongside Harriet Penfield, who
opted to end her studies at the master’s level and later became a librarian. As
is the case today, “fellowships” were held during a degree candidate’s course of
study. “Assistantships” and “associateships” appear to have been similar to today’s
postdoctoral fellowship, and could be directed toward either research or teaching.
Ella Flagg Young held an “associate professorial lectureship” and was promoted to an
“associate professorship”—all in philosophy—during the same window of time. See
the summary of women’s achievements, written by the university’s Dean of Women,
Marion Talbot, in the University of Chicago’s “President’s Report,” vol. 1, pp. 122–7,
in its Decennial Series, published in 1903; available in Google Books.
3 Career and publication information for Amy Elizabeth Tanner is from my initial
research on early women doctorates. See Therese Boos Dykeman and Dorothy Rogers,
eds., Women in the American Philosophical Tradition, 1800-1930. Special issue of
Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, vol. 19, no. 2 (Spring 2004), pp. xxvii–xxxiv.
4 Biographical information for Helen Bradford Thompson is from her profile in

Feminist Voices, by Elissa Rodkey (2010): http://www.feministvoices.com/helen
-thompson-woolley/
5 For all dissertations at the University of Chicago in its early years, see: “Bulletin of
Information: Register of Doctors of Philosophy at the University of Chicago, June
1893 – December 1921,” vol. XXII (May 1922).
6 Biographical information about Kate Gordon Moore is from her profile in Feminist
Voices, by Jacy L. Young (2010): http://www.feministvoices.com/kate-gordon-moore/
NOTES
327
7 Biographical information about Elizabeth Kemper Adams is from the finding aid
from her collection of papers in the Smith College archives: https://findingaids.
smith.edu/repositories/4/resources/302. Publication information is from WorldCat
Identities.
8 A sample of Dewey’s articles at this time: “My Pedagogic Creed,” School Journal, vol.
54 (January 1897), pp. 77–80; “The Aesthetic Element in Education,” Addresses and
Proceedings of the National Educational Association (1897), pp. 329–30; “Democracy
in Education,” Elementary School Teacher, vol. 4 (1903), pp. 193–204.
9 University of Chicago Register, 1904–5, p. 173.
10 Ibid., p. 180.
11 For instance, Michigan doctoral alumna discussed in Chapter 3, Caroline Miles

Hill and her husband William Hill, helped establish a summer school for low-
income youth that was linked to both Hull House and the university. Miles Hill later
worked at Hull House for an extended period after her divorce. See the discussion of
Caroline Miles Hill in this volume.
12 Paul Shorey was chair of the department of Greek Language and Literature and
formally identified in the Chicago course catalog as teaching philosophy-related
courses. Martin Schütze was a member of the Department of General Literature
along with Shorey and James Hayden Tufts, whose contribution to the department
was a course in aesthetics. Tufts was the only non-languages/literature faculty
member in this multidisciplinary department.
13 Some sources report that the University of Chicago opened with nine women among
the faculty. I found ten female faculty and academic staff listed in the 1892 catalog:
Julia Bulkley, associate professor in pedagogy and dean of women’s colleges;
Elizabeth Cooley, tutor in Latin and history; Martha Foote Crowe, assistant professor,
in English; Zella Allen Dixon, assistant librarian; Alice Bertha Foster, MD, tutor in
physical culture; Alice Freeman Palmer, professor in history; S. Frances Pellett, AM,
reader in Latin; Myra Reynolds, AM, fellow in English; Luanna Robertson, PhD,
tutor in German; Marion Talbot, assistant professor, in sanitary science.
14 Career information about Marion Talbot is from the University of Chicago Library’s
“On Equal Terms” project: https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/collex/exhibits/exoet/mari
on-talbot/.
15 Ella Flagg Young, Isolation in the School (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1900), p. 15.
16 Young, Isolation in the School, p. 15.
17 Ibid., p. 18.
18 Ibid., p. 19.
19 Ibid., p. 25.
20 Ibid., pp. 26–33.
21 Ibid., p. 57.
328 NOTES
22 Ibid., pp. 48, 55–6.
23 Ibid., p. 47.
24 Ibid., pp. 50–2.
25 Ella Flagg Young, Ethics in the School, vol. 6 in the “Contributions to Education”
series (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1902), p. 36.
26 Young, Ethics in the School, pp. 12–14.
27 Ibid., pp. 17–19; 21–2.
28 Ibid., p. 35.
29 Ibid., p. 43.
30 Ibid., pp. 43–4.
31 Biographical information for Clara Millerd is from Who’s Who among North
American Authors, vol. 1 (Los Angeles: Golden Syndicate Publishing, 1921), p. 193,
and from Ancestry.com. Information about Millerd’s father is from the General
Biographical Catalogue of Auburn Theological Seminary, 1818–1918, p. 140, and from
his death notice in The Congregationalist newspaper, vol. 1 (June 5, 1922), p. 29.
32 The title of her dissertation is “Ideas of Future Life among the Algonquins” (1900).
Note that the spelling of Laetitia Moon Conard’s name varies in historical sources.
I have used the spelling of her first name that was used in University of Chicago
documents. Her last name is often rendered “Conrad,” which can present obstacles
to historical research.
33 See Marianne A. Ferber and Jane W. Loeb, Academic Couples: Problems and Promises
(Chicago: University of Illinois, 1997), p. 67.
34 See Harriet Hyman Alonso, The Women’s Peace Union and the Outlawry of War,
1921-1942 (Syracuse, 1997), p. 63. See also Grinnell Stories, March 8, 2017: http://gri
nnellstories.blogspot.com/2017/03/trailblazer.html.
35 Grinnell College Bulletin 1918, p. 118.
36 See Johan Smertenko, “Hitlerism Comes to America,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine

(November 1933), pp. 660–70. Smertenko wrote a number of articles for Harper’s as
well as for The Jewish Daily Bulletin and other publications.
37 Millerd’s career information is from University of Oregon college catalogues.

Uncertain that women would be enlisted to teach at Columbia—an all-male
institution until 1982—I verified that she did indeed teach in the elite university’s
extension program; see the Columbia College catalog for 1920–1, p. 154.
38 News of Millerd’s death was reported in The Grinnell Herald, but there was no
mention of her husband or other family in the notice: “Clara Millerd Smertenko,
Grinnell College graduate and a former member of the college faculty, has been
reported missing from the Japanese liner Taiyo Maru in the Yellow sea, according
to word received the first of the week by . . . Mrs. G.P. Wyckoff, librarian of the
NOTES
329
University of Oregon in Eugene, where Mrs. Smertenko has been professor of Greek
and Latin for a number of years. The message announcing her disappearance . . .
dated July 22, stated that she had been lost overboard. There were no details of the
tragedy.”
39 In chronological order, see references to Millerd or reviews of her book: Arthur

O. Lovejoy, review of Millerd’s On the Interpretation of Empedocles, in Classical
Philology, vol. 4, no. 3 (July 1909), pp. 332–4. Albert Rivaud’s review of Millerd’s
On the Interpretation of Empedocles, in Revue des Études Grecques, vol. 22, no.
98/99 (1909), pp. 353–4. Paul Shorey, review of Paul Hinnenberg’s Die Kultur der
Gegenwart, in Classical Philology, vol. 6, no. 1 (January 1911), pp. 106–8. Paul
Shorey, review of Roy Kenneth Hack’s God in Greek Philosophy to the Time of
Socrates, in International Journal of Ethics, vol. 42, no. 4 (July 1932), pp. 464–5.
Uvo Hoelscher, “Weltzeiten und Lebensyklus: Eine Nachprufung der Empedokles-
Doxographi,” Hermes, vol. 93. Bd., H. 1 (1965), pp. 7–33; Millerd is cited in note #2.
40 Biographical information for Matilde Castro is from U.S. census records and travel
documents available on Ancestry.com as well as college and university catalogues
available in Google Books. Detailed information about the academic positions she
held is from American Educational Review, vol. 34, no 8 (May 1913), p. 410. The date
of her father’s death is estimated, based on information she provided on her passport
application in the 1920s. Castro’s first name was variously spelled Mathilde, Matilde, or
Matilda. I have used the spelling she chose when publishing her dissertation: Matilde.
41 Harriet Eva/Evelyn Penfield is listed with a master’s degree while serving at

Rockford. She returned to the University of Chicago and held a graduate fellowship
there in 1910–11, but had shifted to the sciences at this time. She appears to have
settled into a career as a librarian at Chicago.
42 To their credit, Thomas’s colleagues, Mary Garrett and Julia Rogers, voiced strong
disapproval of Thomas’s racism. For accounts of these incidents, see: Lynn Peril,
College Girls: Bluestockings, Sex Kittens, and Co-eds, Then and Now (W.W. Norton &
Company, 2006), pp. 69–70; Andrea Hamilton, A Vision for Girls: Gender, Education,
and the Bryn Mawr School (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004),
pp. 40–1; Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas
(Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), pp. 342–3; Antero Pietila, Ghosts
of Johns Hopkins: The Life and Legacy that Shaped an American City (New York:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), pp. 69–70.
43 Matilde Castro, letter to James Tufts, February 15, 1913, in James Hayden Tufts
papers, University of Chicago special collections.
44 Cornelia Meigs praises Bryn Mawr’s president, M. Carey Thomas, for selecting
Castro to lead the department of education and the Phebe Anna Thorne model
school. She also indicates Castro retired when she married. Finally she says
Castro’s “career was cut short by early death.” However, Castro lived until 1958. If
her birthyear is correct, she would have been in her late seventies when she died.
See Cornelia Meigs, What Makes A College? A History of Bryn Mawr (New York:
Macmillan Company, 1956), pp. 86, 153.
330 NOTES
45 See Bryn Mawr’s “Alumni Outlook,” 1921, pp. 7–8, 24.
46 Information about the death of Tufts’s first wife, Cynthia Whitaker, and the years
Matilde Castro spent with Tufts is from James Campbell, Selected Writings of James
Hayden Tufts (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992), pp. xvi–xvii,
412.
47 See Edgar Dawson, ed., Teaching the Social Studies (New York: Macmillan, 1927), pp.
186–209.
48 James Campbell reports that James Hayden Tufts was interested in his family
history; see Selected Writings, p. xvii. This fun fact about Tufts helped me discover
Matilde Castro’s death date in a family genealogy: August 22, 1958, in Evanston,
Illinois. See Jay Franklin Tufts, Tufts Family History; A True Account and History of
Our Tufts Families, From and Before 1638-1963 (Cleveland Heights: Allen County
Public Library Genealogy Center, 1963), p. 101A.
49 Matilde Castro, The Respective Standpoints of Psychology and Logic (Chicago:

University of Chicago, 1913), p. 10.
50 Castro, The Respective Standpoints of Psychology and Logic, p. 10.
51 A. K. Rogers, “The Standpoint of Instrumental Logic,” Journal of Philosophy,

Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol. 1, no. 8 (April 14, 1904), pp. 207, 211.
52 Castro, The Respective Standpoints of Psychology and Logic, p. 9.
53 Ibid., p. 10.
54 Both quotes are in Castro, The Respective Standpoints of Psychology and Logic, p. 17.
55 Ibid., p. 19.
56 Castro, The Respective Standpoints of Psychology and Logic, Ibid., p. 21.
57 Ibid., p. 22.
58 Ibid., pp. 28–40.
59 Ibid., p. 42.
60 Ibid., p. 43.
61 Ibid., p. 44.
62 Ibid., pp. 74–5.
63 Ibid., p. 76.
64 Anna Louise Strong, I Change Worlds (Seattle: Seal Press, 1979), pp. 29–30.
65 Strong, I Change Worlds, pp. 32–3.
66 Ibid., p. 32.
67 Anna Louise Strong, “Cheese It,—The Cop,” Journal of Education, vol. 71, no. 24
(June 16, 1910), p. 694.
NOTES
331
68 Anna Louise Strong, “The Children’s Court,” Journal of Education, vol. 73, no. 23
(June 8, 1911), p. 631.
69 Anna Louise Strong, The Psychology of Prayer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1909), p. 17.
70 Strong, The Psychology of Prayer, p. 18.
71 Ibid., p. 21.
72 Strong devotes a chapter to a discussion of “primitive” and “childlike” practices,
but the ground she covers here is so predictably filled with assumptions of western
cultural superiority, I have not discussed them here. See Strong, The Psychology of
Prayer, pp. 30–48.
74 Ibid., pp. 56–7.
75 Ibid., p. 60.
76 Ibid., p. 63.
77 Ibid., p. 64.
78 Ibid., pp. 87–8.
79 Ibid., pp. 27, 82; 95.
80 Ibid., pp. 82–3.
81 Ibid., p. 85. For a sketch of Theodor Lipps on Einfühlung, see: Christine Montage,
Jürgen Gallant, and Andreas Heinz, “Theodor Lipps and the Concept of Empathy,”
American Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 165, no. 10 (October 2008), p. 1261; available
online: https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1176/appi.ajp.2008.07081283.
83 Ibid., p. 101.
84 Ibid., pp. 105–7.
85 Ibid., p. 95.
86 All quotations in this paragraph appear in Anna Louise Strong, “Some Religious
Aspects of Pragmatism,” American Journal of Theology, vol. 12, no. 2 (April 1908),
p. 232.
87 Strong, “Some Religious Aspects of Pragmatism,” p. 235.
88 Ibid., p. 239.
89 Ibid.
90 Ibid.
91 Ibid., p. 240.
332 NOTES
92 Biographical information for Rachel Caroline Eaton is from: Muriel H. Wright,

“Rachel Caroline Eaton,” Chronicles of Oklahoma, vol. xvii, no. 1, section 2 (March
1939), pp. 508–10 and John Rhea, A Field of Their Own: Women and American
Indian History (Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 2016), pp. 150–6.
93 John Rhea provides a detailed account of the revisions and expansion of Eaton’s
theses and published versions of her work on John Ross and the Cherokees. See A
Field of Their Own, pp. 153–62.
94 Rachel Caroline Eaton, John Ross and the Cherokee Indians (Muskogee: Star Printery,
1921), regarding property in common, pp. 28, 113; “neighborhood communities,” p.
114; no “lazy Indian,” 112.
95 Eaton, John Ross and the Cherokee Indians, on distinguishing Cherokee from “wild”
tribes, pp. 16, 21, 24, 42, 45–6, 120, 144; regarding conservative chiefs, pp. 7, 17;
regarding John Ross, pp. 23, 38, 45, 114–15.
96 Eaton, John Ross and the Cherokee Indians, pp. 9–11, 23.
97 Ibid., p. 104.
98 Ibid., pp. 39–40, 45.
99 Ibid., pp. 54–5.
100 Ibid., pp. 53, 82.
101 Ibid., pp. 83–5.
102 Ibid., pp. 54–6, 85.
103 Ibid., p. 53.
104 Ibid., pp. 50, 54, 81.
105 Ibid., p. 88.
106 Entry on Rachel Caroline Eaton, in Who Is Who in Oklahoma, edited by Lyle H.
Boren and Dale Boren (Guthrie: Co-operative Publishing Company, 1935), p. 145.
107 Eaton, John Ross and the Cherokee Indians, pp. 118–19.
108 See Eaton, John Ross and the Cherokee Indians, p. 118; see also, Mount Holyoke
Historical Atlas: https://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/rschwart/hatlas/mhc_widerw
orld/cherokee/cfs.html.
109 Eaton, John Ross and the Cherokee Indians, p. 146.
110 Biographical information for Georgiana Simpson is from Alcione M. Amos and
Patricia Brown Savage, “Frances Eliza Hall: Postbellum Teacher in Washington,
DC,” Washington History (Spring 2017), p. 49, made available online by the
Smithsonian Institute: https://repository.si.ed and from The Black Past, entry by
Sarah Bartlett: https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/simpson-georgi
ana-1866-1944/ . . .
NOTES
333
111 It is not surprising that Harry Pratt Judson did not make efforts to affirm Simpson’s
right to remain in campus housing. He favored single-sex education, in part so boys
could have more “manly” and “virile” influences in their lives. See Chicago Alumni
Magazine, vol. 1 (1908), p. 55. It seems that he embraced racial segregation as well.
112 Celia Parker Woolley to Harry Pratt Judson, August 16, 1907, in University of
Chicago special collections.
113 Georgiana Rose Simpson, Herder’s Conception of “Das Volk” (Chicago: University of
Chicago, 1921), p. v.
114 See Martin Schütze, “The Fundamental Ideas in Herder’s Thought,” Modern
Philology, vol. 19, no. 2 (November 1921), p. 117.
115 Historical sources do not say how long Simpson stayed with Helen (Pitts) Douglass,
but she is indeed listed in the household in the 1900 census.
116 Georgiana Rose Simpson, Introduction to Toussaint Louverture, by Gragnon-

Lacoste (Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1925), p. vii.
117 Dagmar Sunne’s biographical information is from Marilyn Ogilvie, Joy Harvey, and
Margaret Rossiter, eds., The Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science (New York:
Routledge, 2014), p. 1252, and documents in Ancestry.com.
118 Taft’s biographical information is from John E. Hansan, Social Welfare History
Project, Virginia Commonwealth University: https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/pe
ople/taft-jessie/
119 Waterhouse’s biographical information is from Pacific Coast Journal of Nursing, vol.
17 (January 1927), p. 29. See also Mid-Pacific Magazine, references to Waterhouse in
vol. 36, no. 1 (July 1928), p. 1 and vol. 36, no. 4 (October 1928) pp. 3, 4, 6, 10.
120 Kitch’s biographical information is from the Ethel Kitch Yeaton collection at
Southern Illinois University Special Collections Research Center.
121 Esther Crane’s biographical information is from the Bulletin of the American
Association of University Professors (1915-1955), vol. 31, no. 3 (Autumn, 1945), pp.
509–514.
122 Margaret Daniels’s biographical information is from census records and travel
documents in Ancestry.com. She was married twice, first to Solon DeLeon (1920s)
and then to Frank Safford (1930s), and sometimes appears in census and travel
documents under her married names.
Chapter 5
1 See Women at Yale, timeline and history project: https://celebratewomen.yale.edu/his
tory/timeline-women-yale.
334 NOTES
2 Biographical information for Zehring is from her obituary: Miamisburg News, August
17, 1950, p. 10.
3 William James, letter to George Holmes Howison, May 18, 1898, in Frederick J.
Down Scott, ed., William James: Selected Unpublished Correspondence, 1885–1910
(Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1986), p. 171.
4 See Bruce Kuklick, “Philosophy at Yale in the Century after Darwin,” History of
Philosophy Quarterly, vol. 21, no. 3 (July 2004), pp. 313–36. See also Julie Reuben,
The Making of a Modern University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp.
93–4; 173–4.
5 Other students of color admitted to Radcliffe and Harvard in the 1920s include
Marita Bonner (BA, English 1921), Charles H. Wesley (PhD, history, 1925), and
Caroline Bond Day (MA, anthropology, 1929).
6 Anna Alice Cutler, letter to Henry Norman Gardiner, March 7, 1924, in Anna Alice
Cutler Papers, Smith College archives.
7 William James, letter to H. N. Gardiner [no date], in Henry Norman Gardiner Papers,
Smith College archives.
8 Anna Alice Cutler, “Aesthetical Factors in Kant’s Theory of Knowledge,” Kant-Studien,

vol. 2, no. 1 (January 1899), pp. 419–39.
9 Cutler, “Aesthetical Factors in Kant’s Theory of Knowledge,” p. 420.
10 Ibid., p. 422.
11 Ibid., pp. 424, 426.
12 Ibid., p. 426.
13 Ibid., p. 439.
14 Biographical information for Clara Hitchcock is from the alumni and faculty
information files in the special collections of Lake Erie College. Information about
her family members is from biographical sketches in the Thomas Day Seymour
Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University.
15 See “Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association 1933,” Philosophical

Review, vol. 43, no. 2 (March 1934), p. 188.
16 Clara M. Hitchcock, The Psychology of Expectation (New York: Macmillan, 1903), p.

76.
17 Hitchcock, The Psychology of Expectation, pp. 77–8.
18 See review of The Psychology of Expectation, in Psychological Review, vol. 10, no. 6
(November 1903), pp. 671–3.
19 William Henry Pyle (1875-1956), “Experimental Study of Expectations,” American

Journal of Psychology, vol. 20, no. 4 (October 1909), pp. 530–69; see especially pp.
531–4 and 565–8.
NOTES
335
20 See Kuklick, “Philosophy at Yale, p. 317.
21 See, “Surprise and Expectation,” British Journal of Psychology: Monograph

supplement, vol. 7 (1935), pp. 78–9, 80. This work is out of print and the author not
identified.
22 Anna Alice Cutler, letter to Mary Whiton Calkins, May 18 or 28, 1890, addressed
“Dear Maidie,” sharing information given to her by George Trumball Ladd about
graduate study at Yale, in Mary Whiton Calkins Papers, Wellesley College archives.
23 See Hugo Münsterberg, letter to “the President and Fellows of the College,” in
October 23, 1894, urging them to allow Calkins to be granted a degree, in Harvard
University Archives; Josiah Royce, letter to Mary Whiton Calkins, April 11, 1895,
providing information about her upcoming doctoral defense, in Mary Whiton
Calkins Papers, Wellesley College archives; William James, letter addressed “Dear
Madam,” June 29, 1895, expressing frustration that Harvard would not grant Calkins
a doctorate, in Henry Norman Gardiner Papers, Smith College archives; and letter
signed by Münsterberg, Royce, James, G. H. Palmer, George Santayana, and Paul
Hanus, urging Harvard’s president and trustees to reconsider their decision, May 29,
1895, in Harvard University Archives.
24 Karen Boatwright chronicles campaigns to award Calkins a degree in the twentieth

century: “Mary Whiton Calkins: The Quest Continues,” for a joint session of the
Committee on the Status of Women and the Society for the Study of Women
Philosophers, of the American Philosophical Association, December 2013.
25 Mary Whiton Calkins, “Self and Soul,” Philosophical Review, vol. 17, no. 3 (May,
1908), pp. 272–80.
26 See Dana Noelle McDonald, “Differing Conceptions of Personhood within the

Psychology and Philosophy of Mary Whiton Calkins,” Transactions of the Charles S.
Peirce Society, vol. 43, no. 4 (Fall 2007), pp. 753–68 and McDonald, “Achieving Unity
through Uniqueness: Mary Whiton Calkins’s Proof of Immortality,” Transactions of
the Charles S. Peirce Society, vol. 39, no. 1 (Winter 2003), pp. 113–25. See Mathew
A. Foust, “The Feminist Pacifism of William James and Mary Whiton Calkins,”
Hypatia, vol. 29, no. 4 (September 2014), pp. 889–905. See also Erin McKenna and
Scott L. Pratt, “Naturalism and Idealism, Fear and Conventionality: Mary Whiton
Calkins and Elsie Clews Parsons,” in American Philosophy: From Wounded Knee to
the Present (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 101–10. Alexandra Schuh, “Maidie: The
Life and Work of Mary Whiton Calkins,” Confluence: The Journal of Graduate Liberal
Studies, vol. 25, issue 2 (Fall 2019), pp. 111–22. See also Kris McDaniel, “Freedom and
Idealism in Mary Whiton Calkins,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, vol.
27, issue 3 (May 2019), pp. 573–92.
27 Ellen Bliss Talbot, review of The Persistent Problems of Philosophy: An Introduction

to Metaphysics through the Study of Modern Systems by Mary Whiton Calkins, in The
Philosophical Review, vol. 17, no. 1 (January 1908), pp. 75–84.
28 Talbot, review of The Persistent Problems of Philosophy, p. 75.

336 NOTES
29 Talbot, citing Calkins, p. 149, in review of The Persistent Problems of Philosophy, p. 78.
30 Talbot, in review of The Persistent Problems of Philosophy, p. 76.
31 Ibid., p. 82.
32 Ibid., p. 83.
33 Ibid., p. 84.
34 Calkins, “Self and Soul,” pp. 272–4.
35 Ibid., pp. 276–7.
36 Ibid., p. 280.
37 Mary Whiton Calkins, “Psychology as Science of Self: I. Is the Self Body or Has it
Body?” The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol. 5, no. 1
(January 2, 1908), pp. 12–13.
38 Calkins, “Psychology as Science of Self: I. Is the Self Body or Has it Body?” p. 14.
39 Ibid., p. 15.
40 Mary Whiton Calkins, “Psychology as Science of Self: II. The Nature of the Self,” The
Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol. 5, no. 3 (January 30,
1908), p. 67.
41 Calkins, “Psychology as Science of Self: II. The Nature of the Self,” p. 68.
42 Mary Whiton Calkins, “Psychology as Science of Self: III. The Description of

Consciousness,” The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol. 5,
no. 5 (February 27, 1908), p. 118.
43 Calkins, “Psychology as Science of Self: III. The Description of Consciousness,” pp.

121.
44 Mary Whiton Calkins, “The Personalistic Conception of Nature,” Philosophical

Review, vol. 28, no. 2 (March 1919), p. 127.
45 Calkins, “The Personalistic Conception of Nature,” p. 128.
46 Ibid., p. 118.
47 Ibid., p. 125.
48 Ibid., p. 127.
49 Elizabeth Scarbourough and Laurel Furumoto, Untold Lives: The First Generation of
American Women Psychologists (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), pp.
79–81.
50 Seelye to Ethel Puffer Howes, April 29, 1908, Morgan-Howes papers, Schlesinger
Library, Radcliffe archives.
51 See Magdalena Nowak, “The Complicated History of Einfühlung,” in ARGUMENT

(Pedagogical University of Cracow), vol. 1, no. 2 (2011), p. 303. www.argument
-journal.eu.
NOTES
337
52 Ethel Dench Puffer Howes, “The Study of Perception and the Architectural Idea,” The
Philosophical Review, vol. 19, no. 5 (September 1910), p. 509.
53 Ibid., p. 511.
54 Ibid., p. 508.
55 Ethel Puffer Howes, “Criticism and Aesthetics,” The Atlantic, June 1901, pp. 87, 845.
56 Perry Miller, “I Find No Intellect Comparable To My Own,” American Heritage, vol. 8,
no. 2 (February 1957); available online: https://www.americanheritage.com/i-find-no
-intellect-comparable-my-own.
57 Ethel Puffer Howes, “Accepting the Universe,” The Atlantic, April 1922, p. 444.
58 Biographical information for Eva Dykes is from Marina Bacher, Pioneer African
American Educators in Washington, D.C. (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2018), pp. 193–242;
and Eva Dykes file at Digital Howard: https://dh.howard.edu.
59 The name of Central Tennessee College had been changed to Walden University
when Dykes taught there. It was struggling financially at the time and closed in 1925.
I use the original name of the institution to avoid confusion with today’s Walden
University, which was founded in 1970 and is located in Minnesota.
60 Alain Locke was one of the first African American males to earn a PhD in philosophy
at Harvard, in 1918. He was preceded by W. E. B. DuBois (history, 1895) and Carter
G. Woodson (history, 1912). Charles H. Wesley may have been the fourth male to
have earned this distinction at Harvard (history, 1925).
61 Biographical information for John Livingston Lowes is from Encyclopedia Britannica:

https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Livingston-Lowes.
62 Coleridge authored a number of works in these areas of inquiry—philosophy,

political theory, and theology. In a letter to John Thelwall in 1796 he declared his love
for metaphysics, facts of mind, and philosophy, calling them his “darling studies.” See,
Lowes, Road to Xanadu (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 210–11.
63 John Livingston Lowes, Convention and Revolt in Poetry (New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 1919), p. 4. Clearly valuing breadth of thought and doing his best to establish
how widely he had read, Lowes makes a good number of allusions and establishes his
familiarity with thinkers like the transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82),
p. 42; the expert in Sanskrit and Indian thought, Edward Byles Cowell (1826–1903),
p. 89; the philosophe and friend of Diderot, Joseph Joubert (1754–1824), pp. 182–3;
the philosopher and literary critic, George Henry Lewes (1817–78), pp. 335, 336; and
the philosopher, Michel de Montaigne (1533–92), p. 337.
64 Lowes, Convention and Revolt in Poetry, pp. 6–7. Toward the end of the work,
Lowes quotes Keats, saying, “I hope I am a little more of a Philosopher than I was
consequently a little less of a versifying Pet-lamb,” p. 319.
65 Lowes, Convention and Revolt in Poetry—regarding poetry’s “virility,” see pp 312–13.

For references to women writers: Dorothy Wordsworth (pp. 9, 10, 325); Madame
du Scudery (pp. 78, 306); Amy Lowell (pp. 128, 256, 278, 284–6); and Edith Sichel
338 NOTES
(pp. 332–3). Let me note that Lowes disagreed with Lowell’s understanding of
free verse, but he discusses her views with respect. He approves of and echoes
Sichel’s criticism of sentimentality in literature, but in doing so, reiterates extremely
derogatory comments about attempts to express the emotions of people outside the
dominant culture: attempts to express “the emotions of colored races on large natural
phenomena [involves] any amount of woolly thoughts, facile emotions, and false
possibilities.” If such attempts “were confined to musings on the emotional reactions
of the untutored but sensitive savage, it would not be so bad.” While Lowes was
attempting here to express his distaste for overly sentimental writing and reliance
on cultural stereotypes, it is difficult to ignore his sense of white superiority in this
passage.
66 Otelia Cromwell, Eva Dykes, and Lorenzo Dow Turner, “Preface,” in Readings from
Negro Authors for Schools and Colleges (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1931), citing a
statement by the National Joint Committee on English, p. iii.
67 Eva B. Dykes, The Negro in English Romantic Thought (Washington, DC: Associated
Publishers, 1942), p. 1.
68 Dykes, The Negro in English Romantic Thought, p. 2.
69 Ibid., p. 142.
70 Ibid., pp. 144–5.
71 Ibid., p. 145.
72 Ibid., p. 146.
73 Ibid., p. 155.
74 Biographical information for Benedict is from “Five Fierce Women Leaders at Sweet
Briar College History,” Sweet Briar College website; Connecticut College News, vol.
9, no. 23 (May 16, 1924), p. 1; and Connecticut College Alumnae News, vol. 24, no. 2
(March 1956), p. 13.
75 Biographical information for Park is from: Ruth Neely, ed., Women of Ohio; A Record
of their Achievements in the History of the State, vol. I (Springfield. Clarke Publishing,
1937), p. 253; One Hundred Year Biographical Directory of Mount Holyoke College
1837–1937, Bulletin Series 30, no. 5, available online: https://www.mtholyoke
.edu/~dalbino/photos/women4/mpark.html; Janice Joyce Gerda, “History of the
Conferences of Deans of Women, 1903-1922,” doctoral thesis, Bowling Green State
University (December 2004), p. 297; Ancestry.com document searches, including
census records and a passport application in 1914.
76 Biographical information for Bacheler is from her profile in Alumnæ, Graduate

school, Yale University, 1894-1920, p. 51; and her brother’s obituary, “Rev. Theodore
Bacheler Dies in Vermont at 74,” Manchester Evening Herald, Manchester,
Connecticut, June 26, 1968, p. 20.
77 Biographical information for Rowland is from: Radcliffe College, “Women Who

Received the Ph.D. from 1899 to 1939,” in Schlesinger Library archives; Encyclopedia
NOTES
339
of Cleveland History online: https://case.edu/ech/articles/w/wembridge-eleanor-h

arris-rowland See also Bruce Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy, Cambridge,
Massachusetts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 592.
78 Biographical information for Rousmaniere is from: Radcliffe College, “Women Who

Received the Ph.D. from 1899 to 1939”; Elissa Rodkey, “Frances Rousmaniere,”
Psychology’s Feminist Voices, 2010: http://www.feministvoices.com/frances-rousman
iere/and Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy, p. 592.
79 Biographical information for Marshall is from: Radcliffe College, “Women Who
Received the Ph.D. from 1899 to 1939”; Harvard/Radcliffe catalogues during her
years of attendance and Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy, p. 592.
80 Biographical information for Patterson is from: Radcliffe College, “Women who

received the Ph.D. from 1899 to 1939”; Wellesley Alumnae Quarterly, vol. 5, no. 1
(October 1920), p. 49.
81 Source: list of doctoral degree recipients, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute at

Harvard University. Between 1900 and 1930, forty-four women earned PhDs in
philology, thirty in history and social sciences, twenty-five in the natural sciences,
and twelve in philosophy.
Chapter 6
1 Agnes Scott College alumni magazine, Fall 2006, p. 3; available online: https://ar
chive.org/details/agnesscottalumna8283agne/page/2/mode/2up?q=sydenstricker.
2 Frances Richardson Keller, “The Perspective of a Black American on Slavery and

the French Revolution: Anna Julia Cooper,” introduction to Cooper’s Slavery and
the French and Haitian Revolutionists, translated and edited by Keller (New York:
Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), p. 20.
3 Biographical information about Christine Ladd-Franklin is from Kelli Vaughn,

“Psychology’s Feminist Voices,” online: http://www.feministvoices.com/christine-
ladd-franklin.
4 Lauren Furumoto, “Joining Separate Spheres: Christine Ladd-Franklin, Woman-

Scientist (1847–1930),” American Psychologist, vol. 47, no. 2 (1992), pp. 175–82.
5 See Vaughn, “Psychology’s Feminist Voices.”
6 Christine Ladd-Franklin, “Charles S. Peirce at the Johns Hopkins,” Journal of

Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol. 13, no. 26 (December 21, 1916),
pp. 715–22.
7 On Titchener’s strangely juvenile hostility toward Ladd-Franklin as well as her

response, see Scarborough and Furumoto, Untold Lives: The First Generation of
340 NOTES
American Women Psychologists (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p.

126.
8 On Titchener as a mentor to female students, see Robert Proctor and Rand Evans,
“E. B. Titchener, Women Psychologists, and the Experimentalists,” American Journal
of Psychology, vol. 127, no. 4 (Winter 2014), pp. 501–26.
9 Christine Ladd-Franklin, “On Some Characteristics of Symbolic Logic,” American

Journal of Psychology, vol. 2 (1889), p. 545.
10 Ladd-Franklin, “On Some Characteristics,” p. 553.
11 Ibid., p. 549.
12 Ibid., p. 554.
13 Ibid., p. 550.
14 See Christine Ladd-Franklin, “The Foundations of Philosophy: Explicit Primitives,”

Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol. 8, no. 26 (December 21,
1911), pp. 708–13; and “Explicit Primitives Again: A Reply to Professor Fite,” Journal
of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol. 9, no. 21 (October 10, 1912),
pp. 580–5.
15 Mary Whiton Calkins, “The Idealist to the Realist,” The Journal of Philosophy,
Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol. 8, no. 17 (1911), pp. 449–58.
16 Christine Ladd-Franklin, “Epistemology for the Logician,” delivered at III Kongress

fur Philosophie, Heidelberg (1908), p. 665. Available via Hathi Trust.
17 Ladd-Franklin, “Epistemology for the Logician,” p. 666.
18 Ibid., pp. 667–8.
19 David W. Agler and Deniz Durmuş, “Christine Ladd-Franklin: Pragmatist Feminist,”

Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, vol. 49, no. 3 (Summer 2013), pp.
299–321.
20 Ladd-Franklin, “Epistemology for the Logician,” p. 670.
21 Ibid.
22 Christine Ladd-Franklin, “Intuition and Reason,” Monist, vol. 3, no. 2 (January

1893), pp. 214.
23 Ladd-Franklin, “Intuition and Reason,” pp. 214.
24 Ibid., pp. 215.
25 Ibid., pp. 219.
26 Julia Gulliver, “The Psychology of Dreams,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy,

vol. 14, no. 2 (April 1880), pp. 204–18.
27 Quotes in this paragraph are from Gulliver, “Psychology of Dreams,” p. 210.
28 Gulliver, “Psychology of Dreams,” p. 209.

NOTES
341
29 Ibid., p. 218.
30 Julia Gulliver, “The Ethical Implications of Determinism,” Philosophical Review, vol.

3, no. 1 (January 1894), p. 64.
31 John Dewey, “The Ego as Cause,” Philosophical Review, vol. 3, no. 3 (May 1894), pp.
337–41.
32 Julia Gulliver, letter to James Creighton, June 2, 1894, in Department of Philosophy

collection, Cornell University archives.
33 Julia Gulliver, letter to James Creighton, June 27, 1894, in Department of Philosophy
collection, Cornell University archives.
34 Julia Gulliver, Studies in Democracy (New York: Putnam, 1917), p. 9.
35 Gulliver, Studies in Democracy, p. 18.
36 Ibid., pp. 21–2.
37 Ibid., pp. 7, 48.
38 Ibid., p. 8.
39 Ibid., p. 36–7.
40 Ibid., pp. 49, 55.
41 Ibid., p. 51.
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid., p. 52.
44 Ibid., pp. 65–8.
45 Ibid., p. 71.
46 Ibid., p. 78.
47 Ibid.
48 Rochester Female Academy, later Seminary, operated until 1903 under various
names, such as Miss Doolittle’s School and Mrs. Nichols’ School. See Michael Leavy,
Rochester’s Corn Hill: The Historic Third Ward (Arcadia Publishing, 2003), p. 17. and
yearbooks online: https://www.libraryweb.org/rochimag/yearbooks/academies.htm
49 Emma Rauschenbusch, A Study of Mary Wollstonecraft and the Rights of Woman

(New Delhi: Facsimile Publishers, 2019; originally published in 1898), p. 75.
50 Rauschenbusch, Study of Mary Wollstonecraft, pp. 73–4.
51 Ibid., pp. 88–9.
52 Ibid., p. 94.
53 Ibid., pp. 98–9; 102–3.
54 Ibid., pp. 116–17.

342 NOTES
55 Martha Bolton, Wendy Gunther-Canada, Sarah Hutton, and Catherine Gardner

were among the Gardner published academic articles about Mcaulay as a
philosopher just before and after the year 2000. Since then, roughly two dozen
articles about her life and thought have appeared in print. Books about Mcaulay
have also been published in the past two decades: Karen Green, Catharine
Macaulay’s Republican Enlightenment (New York: Routledge, 2020); Kate Davies,
Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005); Connie Titone, Gender Equality in the Philosophy of Education: Catherine
Macaulay’s Forgotten Contribution (New York: Peter Lang, 2004).
56 Ibid., p. 95.
57 Ibid., p. 104.
58 Ibid., p. 110. For research that has essentially debunked matriarchies as a myth, See
Cynthia Eller, The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001).
59 Rauschenbusch, Study of Mary Wollstonecraft, p. 111.
60 Ibid., pp. 116–17.
61 Ibid., p. 120.
62 Ibid., p. 128.
63 Ibid., p. 134.
64 Ibid., pp. 135, 136.
65 Ibid., p. 139.
66 Ibid., p. 48.
67 Ibid., pp. 52–3.
68 Ibid., citing Godwin, p. 61.
69 Rauschenbusch, Study of Mary Wollstonecraft, Ibid., p. 63.
70 Ibid., pp. 57, 58.
71 Ibid., p. 195.
72 Ibid., p. 199.
73 Ibid., pp. 198–9.
74 Ibid., pp. 206–7. Rauschenbusch recognizes that a claim of this sort is controversial.
To support her hypothesis, she discusses von Hippel at some length in this chapter,
pp. 206–17. He was an author whose writings were published anonymously, and he
may also have borrowed from Kant and Rousseau—perhaps unconsciously.
75 Biographical information for Cooper is from Vivian May, Anna Julia Cooper,
Visionary Black Feminist: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp.
1–12, and from alumni reports in Oberlin College archives.
NOTES
343
76 See Vivian M. May, “Thinking from the Margins, Acting at the Intersections: Anna
Julia Cooper’s ‘A Voice from the South,’” in Women in the American Philosophical
Tradition, 1800-1930, a special issue of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy,
eds., Therese Boos Dykeman and Dorothy Rogers, vol. 19, no. 2 (Spring 2004), pp.
74–91; Keller, “The Perspective of a Black American on Slavery and the French
Revolution,” pp. 11–26; May, Anna Julia Cooper, Visionary Black Feminist.
77 Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 2–3.
78 Cooper, Voice, pp. 7, 8.
79 Ibid., p. 8.
80 Ibid., pp. 20–1.
81 Ibid., pp. 28–9.
82 Ibid., p. 31.
83 Ibid., p. 21.
84 Ibid., pp. 61–2; 66–7.
85 Ibid., p. 26.
86 Ibid., p. 9.
87 Ibid., pp. 41–2.
88 Ibid., pp. 27–8; 40–1.
89 Ibid., pp. 65–6.
90 Ibid., pp. 10–11.
91 Ibid., pp. 50–1; emphasis in original.
92 Cooper, Voice, p. 43.
93 Ibid., p. 62.
94 Ibid., p. 33.
95 Ibid., p. 63.
96 Ibid.
97 This speech and Cooper’s response are discussed at length by Teresa Zackodnik,
“Reaching Toward a Red-Black Coalitional Feminism: Anna Julia Cooper’s ‘Woman
versus the Indian,’” in Cheryl Suzack, et al, eds., Indigenous Women and Feminism:
Politics, Activism, Culture (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010),
pp. 109–25.
99 Ibid.
344 NOTES
100 Ibid., p. 57.
101 Ibid., p. 54.
102 Ibid., pp. 9–10.
103 Ibid., pp. 22–3.
104 Ibid., pp. 86–7.

105 Ibid., pp. 89–90.
106 Ibid., p. 96. For a contemporary discussion of Tourgée and his work, see Carolyn
L. Karcher, “Imagining Reparations for African American Slavery: Albion W.
Tourgée’s Pactolus Prime,” presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Studies
Association, Baltimore, MD (November 2014); available online at: http://citation
.allacademic.com/meta/p508567_index.html. Also see Karcher, “Passing for Black
in Pactolus Prime,” in her book length study: A Refugee from His Race: Albion W.
Tourgée and His Fight against White Supremacy (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2016), pp. 54–90.
108 Ibid., p. 93.
109 The quotes in this paragraph are from the same page: Cooper, Voice, p. 91.
110 Ibid., p. 92.
111 Ibid., p. 97.
112 Ibid., pp. 102–3.
113 Ibid., p. 98.
114 Ibid., pp. 96–7 for mention of Douglass, Crummell, Arnett, Blyden, Scarborough,
Price, and Fortune; p. 109 for mention of Harper and Whitman.
116 Ibid., pp. 113–15.
117 Ibid., pp. 117, 119, 121–3.
118 Ibid., pp. 125–6.
119 Ibid., p. 127.
120 Ibid., p. 122.
121 Ibid., p. 123.
122 Ibid., pp. 122–5; 130–1.
123 Ibid., pp. 133–6.
124 Ibid., p. 76.

NOTES
345
125 Ibid., pp. 72–3; 77.
126 Ibid., p. 141.
127 Ibid., p. 142.
128 Ibid., pp. 142–3.
129 Ibid., p. 144.

130 Ibid.
131 Ibid., p. 147.
132 Ibid.
133 Toussaint’s full name was François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture. Cooper makes
a point of saying that Toussaint himself spelled his surname “Louverture,” not the
common form “L’Ouverture.”
134 See David Walker’s “Appeal,” p. 2; available online: http://nationalhumanitiescente

r.org/pds/triumphnationalism/cman/text5/walker.pdf; Maria Stewart, “Religion
and the Pure Principles of Morality,” in Marilyn Richardson, ed., Maria Stewart:
America’s First Black Political Writer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987),
p. 39; Frederick Douglass, speech published by Theodore Stanton, “Frederick
Douglass on Toussaint L’Ouverture and Victor Schoelcher,” The Open Court, vol.
1903, Issue 12, Article 7; available online: https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/cgi/viewcon
tent.cgi?article=1700&context=ocj; and W. E. B. DuBois, The Suppression of the
African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870 (1896; reissued:
Mineola: Dover Press, 1970), pp. 70–93.
135 Anna Julia Cooper, Slavery and the French and Haitian Revolutionists, edited and
translated by Frances Richardson Keller (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), p. 31.
136 Cooper, Slavery and the French and Haitian Revolutionists, p. 77.
137 Ibid., p. 57.
138 Ibid., pp. 48, 70, 73–4, 76.
139 Ibid., p. 97.
140 Ibid., p. 114.
141 See Sandra Singer, Adventures Abroad: North-American Woman at German-Speaking

Universities, 1868-1915 (London: Praeger, 2003), pp. 56–60. Publication information
is from WorldCat Identities.
142 See Lynn Peril, College Girls: Bluestockings, Sex Kittens, and Co-eds, Then and Now
(New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), pp. 69–70.
143 See Andrea Hamilton, A Vision for Girls: Gender, Education, and the Bryn Mawr
School (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), pp. 40–1.
346 NOTES
144 See Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas
(Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), pp. 342–3. Jessie Fauset wrote a novel,
There Is Confusion (1924), which is generally considered to be a metaphorical
portrayal of her experience at Bryn Mawr.
145 See Antero Pietila, Ghosts of Johns Hopkins: The Life and Legacy that Shaped an
American City (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), pp. 69–70.
146 See Hamilton, A Vision for Girls, p. 37.
147 See Singer, Adventures Abroad, p. 144.
148 Ibid., pp. 145–6.
149 Ibid., p. 147.
150 Ibid., pp. 147–8.
151 Ibid., pp. 148–9.
152 Ibid., p. 149.

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INDEX
abolition, abolitionists 230, 231 anthropology 47, 150, 189, 226, 258,
absolute 26, 33, 43, 64–6, 89–91, 132, 261, 292
136, 212, 214, 218, 219 Antonelli, Etienne 95
Adams, Elizabeth Kemper 145, 146 Aquinas, Thomas 192
Adams, Henry Carter 100–3, 115 archaeology 196, 261
Addams, Jane 121, 129–32, 142, 149, Archibald, Edith 32
150, 156, 161, 191, 249, 255, 293, Aristotle, Aristotelianism 18, 24, 147,
296 158, 192
aesthetic(s) 19, 60, 71–3, 84, 94, 143, Armstrong School 187
145, 148, 172–4, 222, 223, 264, 273 Arnett, Rev. Benjamin W. 277
in Cutler 198, 199, 201–3, 232, 298 Ascher, Margaretha 143
in Howes 8, 221–3 Astell, Mary 257
in Miles Hill 125, 129 atheism, atheists 37, 44
in Ritchie 46, 47 Augustine 192
in Slosson 12, 23–5
African American issues and Bacheler, Muriel 232, 234
culture 196, 228, 229, 239, 253, Bachofen, Johann Jakob 261
267, 268, 270–80, 283, 285, 286 Bakewell, Charles 197
Agnes Scott College 237 Baldwin, Mark 167
Albee, Ernest 18 Barnard College 289
Alcott, Amos Bronson 123 Barr, Nann Clark 92, 94, 95
Alexander, Sadie Mossell 5, 186 Bastable, Charles F. 24, 52
Alison, Archibald 24 Baudelaire, Charles 86
Altruism 48, 99, 106–9, 113–18, 142, beauty 23–5, 72, 96, 174, 202, 222, 223, see
292, 293 also aesthetics
American Association of University Bebel, August 261
Women (Association of Collegiate Beecher, Catharine 140
Alumnae) 22, 151, 201, 221, 240 Behaviorism 163
American idealism, see St. Louis idealism Benedict, Georgia 92
American Philosophical Association 2, Benedict, Mary K. 233
12, 13, 17, 57, 61, 80, 93, 94, 162, Bennington College 235
196, 199–201, 203, 204, 206, 208, Bentham, Jeremy 230
239, 245, 249 Berea College 183
American Psychological Association 12, Bergson, Henri 96, 211
196, 206, 208 Berkeley, George 24, 165, 212, 287
Ames, Edward Scribner 149, 151 Bethany College 119, 121
Andover Theological Seminary 101, 248 Bibb, Grace 139
Angell, James B. ix, 102, 149, 151, 166 biblical studies 198, 249, 289
Anthony, Susan B. 271 Blackett, Florence Watson 237
356 Index
Bloomingdale Academy 119, 121 Case Western Reserve (Western Reserve

Blow, Susan 108, 136, 172, 210, 268, 281, College) 203, 204
293 Cassirer, Ernst 96
Blydon, Edward Wilmot 277 Castro, Matilde 4, 5, 7, 145, 147, 148,
Boggs, Grace Lee 4 160–8, 191, 210, 244, 257, 297,
Boggs, Lucinda Pearl 286, 288 299, 300
boniform faculty 82, 83 Catt, Carrie Chapman 22
Bonner, Marita O. 187, 225, 226 Central Tennessee College 224
Borden, Sir Robert 32 Channing, William Ellery 230
Boston University 150, 237 Chapone, Hester 261
Bowne, Borden Parker 220 Cheney, Ednah Dow x, 105
Brackett, Anna 108, 133, 139, 153, 156, Cherokee Female Seminary 7, 178
172, 209, 210 Chicago Kindergarten College 204
Bradley, F. H. 233 Chicago Normal School 152
Breckinridge, Sophonisba ix, 151, Chicago race riots 186
185–6 Chicago World’s Fair 134, 137, 140
Brentano, Franz 88 Christianity 109, 137, 138, 177, 183, 258,
Briarcliff School 12, 50, 51 275
Briggs, Martha 271 Christian Science 173
Brontë Sisters 129 Christian Socialist movement 110, 254,
Brown, Hallie Quinn 271 258, 294, see also Social Gospel
Brown University 94 Civil War (US) 180, 182, 185, 266, 275,
Bryn Mawr College x, 4, 7, 93, 95, 119, 278, 280
120, 146, 147, 160–2, 168, 191, 197, Clarke, Samuel 251
287 Clark University 120, 146, 205
Buck, Gertrude 142, 143 Clough, Harriet (Sunderland) 258
Buck, Pearl S. 238 Clough, Rev. John 258
Burke, Edmund 24, 25, 230, 259 Cobb, Sarah Maxon 237
Burns, James Alexander 179 coeducation 2, 9, 27, 146
Busbee, Charles 266 cognition 34, 90
Butler, Joseph 230 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 125, 126, 226
Butler, Nathaniel 149 Colorado College 103, 104
Butler University 2, 103, 105 Colored Social Settlement (Washington,
DC) 266
Cable, George Washington 274–7 Columbia University 3, 146, 149, 151,
Calkins, Mary Whiton ix, 2, 8, 20, 29, 159, 208, 239, 241, 267, 301
32, 61–3, 93, 94, 96, 120, 196, 198, communism 159, 170
199, 206–21, 234, 235, 240–2, 245, Community of St. Mary
248, 249, 296, 297, 299, 302 convents 80, 81
Cannon, Harriet Starr 81 Comte, Auguste 137, 280, 281
Capetillo, Luisa 170 Conard, Laetitia Moon 158
Carlyle, Thomas 223, 274 Concord Summer School of
Carnegie Mellon (Carnegie Institute of Philosophy 100, 104, 105, 126,
Technology) 146, 161 136
Carson, Lewis Clinton 102 Connecticut College 94, 233
Cary, Mary Ann Shadd 229 conscience 54, 82, 182, 273, 275
Index 357
consciousness 33–5, 39, 65, 171, 177, determinism 36–8, 69, 70, 251–3, see
205, 214, 218 also free will/determinism
Cook, Joyce Mitchell 4 Dewey, John ix, 2, 60, 78, 100–3, 123, 128,
Coolidge, Mary 236 141, 148–53, 159, 163, 164, 166, 167,
Cooper, Anna Julia 2, 3, 5, 8, 61, 147, 191, 193, 208, 241, 252, 288, 301
179, 187, 229, 237, 238, 266–84, Dewing, Arthur 235
286, 294, 299, 301 Diderot, Denis 24
Coppin, Fanny Jackson 133, 153, 267, Dilthey, Wilhelm 77
271 Diotima 293
Cornell University 6, 11–97, 101, 102, diversity 4, 5, 14, 44, 123, 131, 132, 156,
118, 145–7, 150, 167, 171, 192, 195, 234, 280
197, 201, 208, 210, 241, 249, 287, Dix, Dorothea 270
288, 299, 300 Dolson, Grace Neal ix, 2, 6, 12, 13, 17,
Corson, Hiram 14, 15 80–6, 91, 187, 195, 201, 292, 299
Crane, Esther 192 domestic, domesticity 130, 150
Crane, Marion D. 92, 95 Domna, Julia 142
Creighton, James E. ix, 2, 15, 16, 18–20, Donnelly, Ignatius 275, 276
29, 30, 39, 42, 49, 50, 60, 61, 77, 81, Douglass, Frederick 186, 187, 228, 266,
95, 208, 249, 252 277, 282
Cromwell, Otelia 5, 226, 228 Douglass, Helen (Pitts) 187
Crummell, Alexander 228, 267, Dow, Mary Elizabeth 50–1
270, 277 Drury College 178, 179
Cudworth, Ralph 82, 83 DuBois, W. E. B. 190, 225, 228,
Cutler, Anna Alice 2, 8, 81, 195, 266, 279, 282
197–204, 208, 232, 248, 249, 292, Duke University 94
298, 299 Dunbar High School 7, 147, 184–7, 224,
Cutting, Starr W. 186 226, 266
Dykes, Eva Beatrice 2, 5, 8, 59, 186, 187,
Dalhousie University 12, 15, 16, 196, 198, 224–31, 266, 274, 294,
26–31, 49 295, 299
Daniels, Margaret 192
Davidson, Thomas 2 Earlham College 119, 120
Davis, Katherine Bement 255 Early, Sarah 271
Dawkins, Edgar B. 234 Eaton, Rachel Caroline 5, 7, 145, 147,
Day, Caroline Bond 226 152, 178–84, 192, 282, 294, 299
Deaf education 58–9 economics (study of) 1, 52, 56, 102, 120
de Bey, Cornelia 122, 129 education, educational theory 6, 130,
deLaguna, Grace Andrus 92–4 134, 145–9, 153, 172, 191, 204, 249,
deLaguna, Theodore 93 278, 288, see also pedagogy
Delaney, Clarissa Scott 229 Eells, Walter Crosby 50
democracy 155, 156, 192, Egalitarianism 102, 140, 150
253–6, 285, 293 ego, egoism 34, 54, 64, 79, 85, 86, 108,
Dennis, Agnes 32 111
Descartes, Rene 34, 82, 166, 211, 212, Eliot, George 129, 274
251, 262 Elmira College 13
Dessior, Max 60, 288 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 24, 25, 123–6
358 Index
Emma Willard’s School 57, 59 Franklin, Fabian 240

Emmanuel Movement 173 freedom 96, 110, 176, 256
Empedocles 159 free will/ determinism debate 33, 36, 38,
English (area of study) 11, 14, 100, 224, 44, 68–70, 92, 249–53
225 Freiberg, see University of Freiberg
Episcopal Theological Seminary 63 Frelinghuysen University 2, 266
epistemology 18, 35, 39, 63, 89, 123, 163, French Revolution, see Haiti, Haitian
164–6, 190, 202, 205, 215, 217, 244, revolution
246, 291, 297, 301 Fuller, Margaret 223
equality 239, 285, 295 functionalism, see psychology,
Erasmus 32 functional 163, 214
Erdmann, Johann Eduard 41, 88
ethics 8, 16, 18, 39, 49, 50, 60, 61, 82, Gamble, Eleanor Acheson
84, 86, 88, 89, 104, 106, 108, 109, McCulloch 11, 12, 29, 146
113, 118, 125, 157, 172–4, 176, 209, Gardiner, Henry Norman ix, 2, 200, 201,
248, 249 249
experimental psychology, see psychology, Garrison, William Lloyd 228, 231
experimental 8, 19, 60, 93, 127, Gates, Ellen Starr 150
146, 163, 199, 205, 207, 232, 297, gender issues 30, 31, 105, 107, 130, 183,
301 239, 246, 254, 262, 263, 265, 299
German philosophy and thought 18, 23,
faith 198, 264, 281 26, 100, 145, 147, 150, 184, 255
Falconer, James William 32 Giddings, Frank H. 120
Fauset, Jessie Redmon 229, 287 Gilbert, Katherine Everett 17, 20, 92, 94
Fechner, Gustav 288 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, feminist views
Felicite, Caroline Stephanie 261 of 129–31
feminism, feminists 33, 106, 129, 130, God 43, 54, 63, 65, 66, 82, 90, 136, 176,
141–3, 159, 209, 223, 224, 230, 239, 177, 219, 253, 254, 262, 263
240, 247, 250, 256, 257, 260, 262, Godwin, William 259, 262, 296
266, 285, 295 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 125
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 6, 12, 41, 62–6, good, goodness 88, 96, 113
77–80, 90, 125, 163, 211, 212, 292, Gordon, Kate, see Moore, Kate Gordon
296 Gore, Willard Clark 149
Field, William 154 Gottingen, see University of Gottingen
Fisher, Anthony 97 Goucher College 287
Fisk University 225 grace 106, 107, 109, 113, 115, 117, 118
Fitch, Florence C. 286, 288 Gragnon-Lacoste, Thomas P. 188
Fite, Warner 245 Greek philosophy and thought 13, 18,
Fordyce, James 261 21, 142, 145, 146, 150, 158, 159,
Fortune, Thomas 277 183, 204
Fouillee, Alfred 95 Gregory, John 261
Foust, Mathew 209 Grenfell Mission 51
Fox, George 230 Grimke, Angelina 231
Francis of Assisi 228 Grimke, Charlotte Forten 271
Franklin, Christine Ladd, see Grimke, Sarah 231
Ladd-Franklin Grinnell (Iowa College) 7, 101, 158
Index 359
Grove, Frederick Philip 32 Hillsdale School (Washington, DC) 184,

Gulliver, Julia 8, 20, 32, 39, 105, 161, 185
200, 201, 207, 237, 238, 248–56, Hindu thought 193
285, 286, 293, 299 Hinman, Alice (Hamlin) 11, 12, 50
Guyau, Jean-Marie 235 Hippel, Theodore Gottlieb von 265
history (study of) 4, 14, 15, 64, 147, 183,
Hadley, Arthur Twining 198 236
Haiti, Haitian revolution 179, 188, 261, Hitchcock, Clara 2, 8, 195, 197, 198,
267, 282–4, 295 203–6, 232, 298, 299
Haldane, Richard B. 55 Hitchcock, Clara Delano 204
Haley, Margaret 129 Hitchcock, Henry 203, 204
Hall, Frances Eliza 185 Hitchcock, Peter Marshall 203
Hall, Granville Stanley 94, 146, 205 Hitchcock, Rev. Henry Lawrence 203
Hammond, William (1862-1938) 18 Hobart College 63
Hammond, William (1828-1900) 251 Hobbes, Thomas 52, 83, 212
Hampton Institute 233 Holderman, Elisabeth 142
Hannum, Louise 11, 60 Howard University 2, 14, 147, 184, 187,
Hanover College 226 192, 198, 199, 224–6
Harlem Renaissance 188, 287 Howells, William Dean 105, 276, 277
Harper, Frances Watkins x, 228, 229, Howes, Ethel Dench Puffer 3, 8, 196,
271, 277–8 198, 220–4, 232, 235, 296, 301
Harris, Marjorie Silliman 92, 96 Howison, George Holmes x, 2, 63, 105
Harris, William Torrey 2, 63, 104, 105, Hull House 3, 119, 121, 132, 142, 149,
108, 123, 250 191, 296
Hartman, Edith Cooper 50–1 Hume, David 24, 52–4, 165, 174, 212,
Hartmann, Eduard von 88, 137 230, 280, 281
Harvard University 7, 63, 105, 120, 129, Hunter College 159
195–236, 241 Husserl, Edmund 77, 88, 167
Hasbach, Wilhelm 52 Hutcheson, Francis 24, 52–3
Hastings College 12, 21 Hyslop, James H. 253
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 62, 102,
136, 137, 164, 210, 211, 292 Ibsen, Henrik 86
in Dolson 86 idealism, idealists (see also St. Louis
in Kies 106, 108, 109, 111–16 idealist movement) 6, 7, 41, 71,
in Miles Hill 126 73, 77, 78, 89–92, 104, 122, 123,
in Ritchie 33, 39, 41, 44 125, 136, 141, 153, 172, 201, 209,
in Slosson 23, 26 210, 219, 220, 222, 226, 244, 292
in V. Moore 87, 90–1 identity 33, 69, 205, 251, 273
Heidelberg, see University of Heidelberg imagination 204, 250, 251, 281
Heinze, Maximilian 257 individualism 106, 108, 110, 114
Held, Virginia 294 individuality 33, 70, 74, 76, 89, 215, 253,
Helmholtz, Hermann von 240 259
Herder, Johann Gottfried 58, 189, 190, Ingersoll, Robert 280
222, 288, 292 Institute for Colored Youth 153
Hill, William 120, 121 intuition 125–6, 202, 214, 246–7
Hillsdale College (Michigan) 20, 104 Iowa Institution for the Deaf 57, 58
360 Index
Irons, David 18 Kies, Marietta x, 2, 6, 7, 21, 32, 50, 56, 59,

Irvine, Julia 28 63, 99–102, 103–19, 120–1, 141, 142,
Islam 137, 138 187, 210, 233, 249, 254, 258, 292–4
Kitch, Ethel May 192
Jackson, Andrew 180 Klemm, Gustav 265
Jackson, Helen Hunt 270 knowledge 163, 245, 247, 262
James, William 2, 61, 63, 78, 123, 157, Knox, Mary Alice 50
163, 166, 177, 197, 200, 207, 208, Knox College 248
226, 289 Kroeger, A. E. 62
Janssen-Lauret, Frederique 97
Jefferson College 226 La Caze, Marguerite 97
Jeffery, Francis 24 laboratory Schools (Chicago) 149
Jewish issues and culture 138, 159, 161, Ladd, George Trumbull 8, 67, 88, 205
177, 273, 287, 289, 328 n.36 Ladd-Franklin, Christine 3, 8, 62, 208,
Johns Hopkins University 3, 8, 100, 101, 237–48, 285, 296, 297, 299
233, 237, 238, 240, 241, 285, 301 Lagerlof, Selma 255
Johnson, Pauline 268, 273 Laird, Elizabeth 120
Johnson, Samuel 230 Laird, John 29
Jones, E. E. C. 61, 88 Lake Erie College 8, 12, 51, 198, 203, 204
Jones, Jenkin Lloyd 139 Langer, Susanne 236
Journal of Speculative Philosophy 62, 63, Lathrop, Julia 122, 129
100, 126, 141, 250 Latin 158, 159, 183
Journalism 159, 169–70, 192 law, legal theory 1, 102, 106, 110, 111,
judgment 251, 289 138, 141
Judson, Harry Pratt ix, x, 185 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 36, 37, 39,
justice 106, 107, 109, 110, 115, 192, 212, 233
117, 295 Leighton, James A. 63
Leveque, Jean Charles 25
Kant, Immanuel (Kantianism) 60, 61, Lewis, Edmonia 280
92, 93, 102, 163, 176, 292 Lincoln Institute 266
in Calkins 211, 212 linguistics, 59, 292
in Castro 165 Lippert, Julius 262
in Creighton 16–17 Lipps, Theodor 167, 174, 222
in Cutler 198, 201–3, 298 literature, literary theory 8, 27, 61, 102,
in Dolson 86 143, 279, 288, see also philology
in Miles Hill 99, 123–6 Lloyd, Alfred Henry 100, 102, 135
in Muir 55–6 Locke, Alain 187, 198, 225–8
in Ritchie 34–5, 42 Locke, George H. 149
in Slosson 24 Locke, John 165, 211, 264, 288
in Sunderland 136–7 Logan, John Daniel 30
in Talbot 62–5 logic 15, 17, 19, 145, 163–6, 210, 240,
in V. Moore 87–9 242–4, 285, 296, 297
Katzav, Joel 97 Lotze, Hermann 6, 13, 18, 87–91, 137,
Kendrick, Anne 233 163, 167, 222, 288
Kent State University 204 Louverture, Toussaint 188, 191, 231,
Keyes, John Neville 243 282–4, 295
Index 361
love 131, 138 Mill, John Stuart 94, 280, 326 n.1
Lovejoy, Arthur 159 Miller, Kelly 228
Lowell, Amy 129, 227 Millerd, Clara 7, 145, 147, 158–9, 299
Lowes, John Livingston 226 Millerd, Norman Alling 158
Lowrey, Charles Emmet 102 Millikin College 95
Lyall, William 27, 49 Mills College 103, 105
Lyon, Mary 270 mind 33, 124, 125, 163, 198
Miner Normal School 184
Macaulay, Catherine 261 Mitchell, Ellen 18, 209, 210
Macaulay, Thomas Mitchell, Maria 240
Babbington 280 Montesquieu, Baron de 24
McDaniel, Kris 209 Moore, Addison W. 149, 151
McDonald, Dana Noelle 209 Moore, John G. 87
McDowell, Mary 122, 129, 131 Moore, Kate Gordon 145,
McFee, Janet Donalda 286–8, 146, 161
McGill University 287 Moore, Vida Frank 2, 6, 11–13, 17, 50,
McKenna, Erin 209 87–91, 210, 292, 299
McMaster University 235 moral development 71, 198
MacMechan, Archibald 32 moral philosophy, moral theory 15, 38,
Maeterlinck, Maurice 86 55, 71, 76, 104, 105, 172, 198
Magill, Helen 13 morality 44, 47, 83, 128, 137, 189, 201
Magill, Robert 29 Morata, Olympia Falvia 270
Mahin, Helen Ogden 143 More, Hannah 230
Malebranche, Nicolas 13, 96 More, Henry 6, 13, 82–5
Mann, Rowena Morse 286, 288 Morgan, Lewis Henry 261
Marshall, Grace Eiler 234, 235 Morris, George Sylvester 2, 100–2, 114,
Martineau, Harriet 16, 137, 230, 231 141, 241, 300
Massachusetts Institute of Mossell (see Alexander, Sadie Mossell) 5
Technology 63, 150 Moten, Lucy 185
Mavity, Arthur Benton 94 Mott, Lucretia 270
Mead, George Herbert 2, 100, 135, Mount Holyoke College 12, 13, 50, 57,
149–51, 300 59–61, 96, 103, 104, 119, 120, 132,
Mead, Lucia Ames 102, 131, 170 133, 146, 160, 183–4, 204, 208,
memory 35, 74, 173, 204, 251 233–5, 299
Mencken, H. L. 84 Muir, Ethel Gordon 6, 11, 48–56, 60, 91,
Menzer, Paul 61 118, 171–2, 292–4, 299
Mercer, Margaret 117, 124 Muller, G. E. 240
metaphysics 12, 18, 19, 32, 34, 41, 49, Munro, Barbara 27
64–7, 88, 123, 124, 163, 176, 201, Münsterberg, Hugo 120, 197, 207, 220,
202, 211, 212, 217–19, 233, 301 221
Miami University of Ohio (Western Murray, Elsie 92–4
College) 94, 192, 288 Murray, Walter C. 29, 49
Michigan Female Seminary 203
Miles Hill, Caroline x, 3, 6, 7, 21, 32, 33, nationalism 189, 190
50, 59, 99, 100, 102, 119–32, 135, Native American issues and culture 145,
141, 142, 210, 233, 292, 296 147, 158, 179–84, 272–4
362 Index
Nerlich, Brigitte 97 philology 5, 143, 158, 236

neuropsychology 34, 155 Philosophical Review 14–15, 17, 20, 32,
New York University 96 38, 40, 42–4, 63, 82, 84, 94, 95, 208,
Nietzsche, Friedrich 6, 13, 84–6, 245, 292 209, 221, 249, 251, 252, 300
Niles, John Milton 239 philosophy of religion 12, 16, 19, 32, 44,
Nowata Cherokee Nation public 45, 92, 102, 145, 147, 280
schools 7, 178, 179 Pickens, William 228
Piozzi, Hester Lynch 261
Oakwood College 199, 224 Plato, Platonism 18, 24, 54, 82, 123–5,
Oberlin College 168–9, 183, 192, 234, 176
238, 266, 268, 289 Plotinus 123, 124
Ohio Institution for the Deaf 57 Plymouth Summer School of Ethics 102
Ohio State University 57, 63, 95 Poe, Edgar Allen 24, 274
Olen, Peter 97 political economy 15, 50, 100
Oncken, August 52, 55 political philosophy, theory 15, 50, 102,
ontology 12, 35, 65, 88, 190, 205, 211, 106, 107, 110, 226, 254, 267, 291,
217, 297 293, 294
Oswego Normal School 288 political science 1, 151, 195, 199
Oxford University 18, 29, 192 Pope, Alexander 225, 227
pragmatism, pragmatists 7, 77–80, 101,
pacifism, peace 159, 168, 211, 254 118, 146, 164, 175–7, 192, 246, 291,
Paine, Thomas 259 296
Paley, William 183, 230 Prairie Weir Farm Summer School 119
Palmeiri, Patricia 28 Pratt, E.J. 32
Palmer, George Herbert 197, 335 n.23 Pratt, Scott 209
Park, Andrew 233 Price, Joseph Charles 277
Park, Mary Isabel 232, 233 Price, Langford L. 52
Pascal, Blaise 46 Price, Richard 259, 261, 263
Patterson, Eleanor 234, 235 Princeton University 19
Paulsen, Friedrich 60, 288 psychology
Pearce, Trevor 97 as a new discipline 1, 50, 120, 129,
pedagogy, pedagogical theory 6, 7, 19, 130, 134, 140, 151, 153, 155, 157,
59, 61, 146, 149, 153, 191, 229, 265, 166, 196
278, 288 and disciplinary boundaries 5–6, 7,
Peirce, Charles Sanders 240, 242, 246 8, 11, 15, 18, 19, 34, 61, 64, 67–68,
Pembroke College 94 77, 92–93, 101, 122, 143, 145–9,
Penfield, Harriet 161 190–1, 195, 198, 201, 204, 232,
Penney, Mark Embury 95 234–5, 244–5, 249, 288, 291, 297
Pennsylvania College for Women 12, 50 in Calkins 209–20
Perry, Ralph Barton 61 in Castro 162–7
personalism, personalists 91, 136, in Hitchcock 205–6
211, 220 in Ritchie 34–5
personhood, personality 12, 33–6, 70, in Talbot 67–8
210, 218, 253, 254 psychology, experimental 8, 19, 29,
Pfleiderer, Otto 88 60, 93, 127, 146, 163, 199, 205–7,
phenomenology 65, 73, 77, 167, 171, 216 232, 240, 297, 301
Index 363
psychology, functional 162–6, 214 Russell, Channing 14

psychology of religion 168–75
Puffer, Ethel Dench, see Howes, Ethel Sabine, George Holland 95
Dench Puffer Sage, Henry and Susan 13, 18
Putnam High School 104 St. Augustine’s Normal School 266
St. John, Clara Hitchcock Seymour 204
Radcliffe College 5, 7, 14, 63, 187, 196–9, St. Louis Idealist movement 41, 63, 104,
206, 208, 220, 221, 224–6, 232, 234, 122, 123, 136, 152–3, 210
235, 299, 301 Salmon, Lucy Maynard 120
Randolph-Macon Women’s College 96 Salzmann, Christian Gotthilf 265
Rauschenbusch, Emma 3, 8, 32, 105, Sanford, Edmund 120
237, 238, 249, 254, 256–65, 285–7, Santayana, George 88
289, 292, 295 Scarborough, William Sanders 228, 277
Rauschenbusch, Walter 257, 258, 286 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph
realism, realists 125, 173, 182, 211, 244 von 212, 222
reality 88, 89, 164, 177, 245 Schiller, Ferdinand Canning Scott 18,
reason 85, 123, 124, 251, 262, 263, 285 78, 79, 167, 176, 177
Rebec, George 102, 103, 135 Schiller, Friedrich 24, 25
Reed College 234 Schopenhauer, Arthur 18, 137, 202, 211
religion (study of) 1, 4, 46–8, 84, 134, Schubert, Johannes 55
158, 171, 176, 191, 193, 197, 237, Schuh, Alexandra 209
248, 256, 262, 281, 289, 291 Schurman, Jacob Gould 2, 15, 16, 18–20,
Renouvier, Charles 92 27, 28, 49, 81
rhetoric 14, 102, 105, 142, 143 Schutze, Martin 150, 186–7
Ritchie, Eliza 6, 11–13, 16, 20–2, 26–49, science 134, 183, 202, 223, 240, 244, 297
62, 68, 91, 92, 105, 210, 244, 249, Scripture, Edward 198, 205
251, 292, 297, 299 Scudder, Vida 255
Roberts, Charles G. D. 32 Scudery, Madame du 227
Robin, Richard 61 Seelye, Clark 221
Rochester Female Seminary 256, 257 self, selfhood 69, 70, 72, 74, 77, 85, 92,
Rockford College 20, 160, 161, 199–201, 108, 172, 174, 211, 213–18, 220,
238, 248, 249, 285 244, 251
Rogers, Arthur K. 61, 79 self-sacrifice 109, 112, 131
Rogers, Julia 287 Seneca 142
Romanticism 222, 230, 231 Seth, Andrew 18–19, 61
Romero, Francisco 96 Seth, James 18–19, 27, 49
Rosenkranz, Karl 108 Sewall, Hannah Robie 52
Rosetti, Christina 129 Seymour, Charles 204
Ross, James 49 Seymour, Thomas Day 204
Ross, John 179, 180, 182, 183, 282 Shackford, Charles Chauncy 14, 15
Rousmaniere, Frances 234, 235 Shaftsbury, Earl of 52
Rousseau, Jean Jacques 260, 261 Shannon, M. Josephine 32
Rowland, Eleanor 234, 235 Sharp, Stella Emily 11, 12
Royce, Josiah 2, 63, 88, 177, 197, 207, Shaw, Anna Howard 271–2
208, 211, 241 Shelley, Mary 262
Russell, Bertrand 211 Shorey, Paul 149, 150, 159
364 Index
Shubin, Joel 169 Strong, Anna Louise 3, 7, 145, 147,

Sichel, Edith 227 168–77, 191–2, 298
Sidgwick, Henry 16, 55 structuralism (in psychology) 163, 214
Simmel, Georg 60, 61 Stumpf, Carl 288
Simpson, Georgiana ix, 2, 5, 7, 59, 147, subjectivism, subjectivists 83, 166, 223
152, 184–90, 266, 283, 292, 295, 300 substance 41, 43, 68, 244
Skidmore College 159 Sunderland, Eliza ix, x, 3, 6, 7, 59,
Slosson, Edwin Emery 21, 22 99–103, 106, 120, 121, 132–42, 152,
Slosson, May Preston 3, 4, 6, 11–15, 20–6, 153, 187, 210, 258, 292, 295
31, 33, 40, 67, 91, 120, 298, 299 Sunderland, Jabez 103, 133, 139
Smertenko, Johan 159 Sunne, Dagmar 192
Smith College 8, 12, 80, 81, 95, 146, Sutter, Bertha von 255
198–201, 204, 206–8, 220, 221, 235, Swabey, Marie Collins 92, 96
237, 238, 248, 249 Swarthmore College 226
Smith, Adam 12, 50, 52–6, 230, 292 Sweet Briar College 93, 233
Smith, Amanda 271 Sydenstricker, Alma Willis 237
Smith, Elizabeth Oakes 239 Sylvester, James 240
Smith, Margaret Keiver 286, 288 sympathy 53, 54, 56, 217
Snell, Ada F. 142 Syracuse University 95, 237
Snyder, Alice D. 143 Szold, Henrietta 287
socialism 100, 109, 110, 159, 169, 254 Szold, Sadie 287
social science 5, 11, 40, 49, 129–31, 149,
150, 221, 236 Taft, Julia Jessie 192
sociology 1, 4, 158, 172, 298 Talbot, Benjamin 57–9
Socrates 24, 293 Talbot, Ellen Bliss 2, 6, 11–13, 17, 20, 32,
Sorbonne 5, 8, 237, 239, 266, 285, 301 50, 57–80, 91, 92, 96, 160, 167, 187,
soul 34, 123, 131, 209–11, 213–15, 217, 208–13, 240, 242, 244, 292, 296,
244, 251, 255 299, 302
Soule, Anna 50 Talbot, Marion ix, 150, 151, 185–6
Spencer, Herbert 16, 25, 137 Talbot, Mignon 57, 58, 80
Spinoza 6, 12, 18, 28, 32, 33, 36, 37, Tanner, Amy Elizabeth 145, 146
39–44, 61, 212, 252, 292 Tanner, Henry Ossawa 229
spirit, spirituality 33, 35–7, 125–7, 212 Taylor, Elmer Manville 102
Stael, Madame de 261 Teachers College, Columbia
State College for Women University 204
(Mississippi) 178 Terrell, Mary Church 238
Stein, Ludwig 257 Thayer Academy 63
Stettheimer, Henrietta 286, 289 theology 183, 197, 226, 262, 263
Stewart, Dugald 251 Theosophy 258
Stewart, Herbet Leslie 29, 31 Thilly, Frank 19
Stewart, Maria 228, 268, 282 Thomas, Martha Carey 161, 286
Stirner, Max 86 Thompson, Anna Boynton 63
Stokes, Ella Harrison 192 Thompson, Helen Bradford 145
Stone, Lucinda Hinsdale ix, 135 Thompson, Maurice 277
Story, Joseph 181 Thorne, Alma Rose 92, 95
Stowe, Harriett Beecher 129, 274 Thorne, Phebe Anna 162
Index 365
Titchener, Edward 17, 19, 93, 241 utilitarian, utilitarianism 18, 108, 111
Tourgee, Albion W. 274, 275
transcendentalism, transcendentalists 7, Vaesen, Krist 97
41, 45, 64, 85, 96, 99, 122–7, 141 Van Buren, Martin 239
Trendelenburg, Friedrich 41 Vassar College 7, 26, 28, 93, 160, 161,
truth 45, 46, 72, 79, 164, 245, 246, 253, 233, 239, 240
270, 281, 288 Vaughan, Agnes 142
Truth, Sojourner 271 Verlaine, Paul 86
Tufts, James Hayden 2, 64, 100, 135, Voltaire 280, 281
149–51, 161, 162, 249, 300 von Baader, Franz 265
Turner, Geneva (Townes) 225, 226
Turner, Lorenzo Dow 225, 226, 228 Wald, Lillian 255
Twain, Mark 276, 277 Walker, David 282
Ward, Nancy (Williams) 178
Union Theological Seminary 100 Ware, Robert C. 63
universe 36, 66, 78, 126 Warren, Arletta 142
University of Berlin 288 Washburn, Margaret Floy ix, 11, 12, 19,
University of Bern 237, 238, 256, 301 146, 217
University of California x, 105, 146, 162 Washington College 226
University of Chicago ix, x, 2–7, 14, 57, Washington, Booker T. 228, 279
101, 119, 121, 129, 145–93, 197, Waste, Henry, see Henrietta Stettheimer
203, 249, 257, 288, 300 Waterhouse, Melicent 192
University of Colorado 96 Webber, George 248
University of Edinburgh 18 Wellesley College 2, 12, 20, 26, 28, 29,
University of Freiberg 77, 289 32, 94, 119, 120, 127, 128, 150, 198,
University of Gottingen 77, 239, 240, 199, 204, 206, 208, 210, 220, 221,
286 234, 235, 256–8, 299
University of Halle 61 Wells-Barnett, Ida B. 156, 170, 187, 229,
University of Heidelberg 233 268, 270, 277
University of Illinois 93 Wells College 8, 12, 80, 81, 92, 96, 198,
University of Jena 8, 288 201, 232
University of Kansas 96 Wembridge, Henry A. 234
University of Leipzig 8, 238 Wergeland, Agnes M. 120
University of London 16, 233 Wesley, Charles Henry 187, 225, 226
University of Michigan 3, 22, 32, Wesley, John 230
99–143, 148, 150, 210, 291, 300 Western College for Women, see Miami
University of Minnesota 101 University
University of Missouri 19 Wheatley, Phillis 280
University of North Carolina 94 White, Andrew 13
University of Oregon 7, 159 White, Horatio Stevens 15
University of Pennsylvania 186, 237 Whitman, Albery Allson 278
University of Perugia 233 Whitmire, Ellen 183
University of Saskatchewan 49 Wilberforce University 2, 266
University of Vermont 18 will 67, 71, 86, see also free will/
University of Wyoming 21 determinism
University of Zurich 286 Williams, Fannie Barrier 186, 229
366 Index
Williams, Mary G. 142 Wordsworth, Dorothy 227

Wilson College 12, 51, 93, 146, 193 Worthington School 233
Wilson, William Dexter 14, 15 Wright, Frances 230
Wollstonecraft, Mary 238, 257–65, 285, Wundt, Wilhelm 16, 163, 247, 249, 287
292, 295
Women’s College of Alabama 192 Yale 4–6, 8, 57, 67, 195–236,
women’s political rights 22, 100, 130, 248, 300, 301
134, 139, 140 Yost, Mary 142
Wood, Francis A. 186 Young, Ella Flagg 2, 7, 133, 145, 147,
Woodson, Carter 190, 198, 225, 228 150, 152–9, 191, 267, 296, 299
Woolley, Celia Parker ix, 186
Wooster College 237 Zehring, Blanche 8, 195, 197, 198, 201,
Worcester, Sarah 183 232, 299

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WOMEN PHILOSOPHERS

Women Philosophers Volume I: Education and Activism in Nineteenth-Century

1 Introduction: Women and Early Academic Philosophy

The book cover was designed by Charlotte Daniels, Bloomsbury Publishers.

colleges, and became active in professional networks, like the Association of

discussion taught at secondary schools for up to ten years after completing

doctoral studies there, and the influence of German idealism is apparent

Eleven women completed doctoral degrees in philosophy at Cornell between

Hinman, Gamble, Sharp, and Hannum became members of the American

on Henry More, Malebranche, and Bergson and her dissertation on Nietzsche.

This commitment to equity was matched with major funding by Henry

Faculty and the Academic Climate at Cornell

The philosophy department changed considerably in the span of time during

Channing Russell, professor of history; and Hiram Corson, professor of

philosophy, but also facilitated women’s entry into the discipline as it

Philosophy’s First Female Doctorate

Dissertation: “Different Theories of Beauty”

Career: Hastings College (1880–91); Wyoming State Penitentiary, chaplain

May Preston Slosson’s Philosophical Work

embellishment of Plato’s view, as she understands it, that beauty is an expression

It appears that German idealism, which was so dominant within philosophical

Scholarship Set Aside

Eliza Ritchie (1856–1933)

Dissertation: “The Problem of Personality”

Career: Vassar (1889–90); Wellesley (1890–1899); Study in Leipzig and Oxford

Life and Career

Mary Whiton Calkins’s reference to Ritchie in a letter to James Creighton

Living as I do at present in complete isolation from every one [who is]

Whatever the circumstances leading to her departure from Wellesley,

Eliza Ritchie’s Philosophical Work

The Problem of Personality

If philosophical study is to be a living force, leading [thinkers] to new truths

purpose—not by ignoring the results of modern scientific research . . .

This is what Ritchie sets out to do in this work—draw on scientific research,

one that it consciously participates in fulfilling. Yet it is difficult to see

The work of a moral philosophy is to establish such general principles as

This statement forms the foundation of Ritchie’s discussion in this article. In

by making use of social science to study behavior, we can anticipate social

What should be done is to introduce [a wrong-doer] into such new

concepts of substance, attributes, and modes of existence to her readers. She

At this point, Ritchie addresses other misinterpretations of Spinoza.

It is not without interest to compare these somewhat shadowy conceptions

however, that Spinoza is not hereby positing the existence of an ultimate

the dawn of the twentieth century, outlining as it does emerging approaches to

Religion is the intimate and vital apprehension, by the individual, of what is

The more knowledge increases, the more do we recognize . . . the essential

If the world should cease to be regarded as the work of a supremely good

religious belief has also contributed to producing altruism and beneficence—

Education and Community Development

Ethel Gordon Muir (1857–1940)

Dissertation: “The Ethical System of Adam Smith”

Career: Mount Holyoke College (1897–1900); Pennsylvania College for

Life and Career

a businessman who became prosperous in the shipping industry in the

In 1918, Dow began preparations to retire from Briarcliff, so appointed an

principal in 1920. Hartmann added domestic science programs to the Briarcliff

Muir’s Philosophical Work

both to the person principally concerned, and to the spectator.”114 The

called forth by the utility of the consequences, or the merit of an

In Smith’s characterization of sympathy, both the feelings of compassion that

To Smith, as to Kant, conception without perception is empty, and

An Academic Success Story

Ellen Bliss Talbot (1867–1968)