1876

Mary Putnam Jacobi’s The Question of Rest for Women during Menstruation (her anonymous entry in Boylston Prize competition) used survey data with 268 participants as “a performance that inscribes the relentlessly lay voices of women within the discourses of medicine” (Wells, 175), and “destabilized medicine’s understanding of the male body as normal and the female body as fragile” (176). It was “both a systematic argument against Clarke’s Sex in Education and a performance of her expertise . . . an essay designed to satisfy an audience of Harvard physicians who valued science above sentiment (Bittel, 126, 127). Jacobi found that “Although 35% of her participants had never suffered any pain, the remaining women reported having some type of discomfort during menstruation. But, of those who suffered, two-thirds had inherited ‘physical defects’ that caused forms of uterine disease or weakened their constitutions; others had serious ‘organic defects’ that rest could not cure. Based on her numbers, Jacobi believed that immunity from menstrual suffering did not depend on rest but, instead, on a healthy childhood, a sound family history, marriage at a ‘suitable’ time, a steady occupation, exercise during school life, and ‘the thoroughness and extension of the mental education’ . . . [she held that] menstruation was a time of increased vitality by explaining that women had a ‘reserve of nourishment’ in their bodies that was used for reproductive functions” (129). An extended version of Jacobi’s essay was published in 1877 by G. P. Putnam’s Sons.