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It is . . . obvious that a girl upon whom Nature, for a limited period and for a definite purpose, imposes so great a physiological task, will not have as much power left for the tasks of the school, as the boy of whom Nature requires less at the corresponding epoch.
Edward H. Clarke, Sex in Education (1873)
When Edward H. Clarke published Sex in Education; or, a Fair Chance for the Girls in 1873, he entered into a long-standing public debate over women's education, a debate that had implications for women's occupational and political opportunities.1 At issue was not just the extent of women's education and where they would be educated (coeducational or single-sex schools), but also their participation in the meaning-making activities of the professions and of the educated citizenry more broadly. The book was immediately controversial: by 1874, one editor claimed that Sex in Education and all the responses it had evoked was "becoming a literature of itself" ("Sex in Education"). Clarke's work joined a wide-ranging public and scientific discussion about the past and future of humanity. Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species had been published in 1859, followed by The Descent of Man in 1871, and social Darwinist Herbert Spencer had published his two-volume Principles of Biology between 1864 and 1867. The ideas in these books captured the public's imagination, tapping into and contributing to an emerging public faith in, or at least curiosity about, what science could reveal about the nature of humanity. Evolution, inheritance, and the concept of health at the level of the species (not just the individual)-fundamental principles in Darwin's and Spencer's books-also featured in Sex in Education. Clarke used the science of physiology to translate those species-level concerns into an argument about individual women's educational choices, decisions that he believed affected reproductive prospects and should therefore be guided by the theories underlying evolutionary science.
In this article, I examine Clarke's medical-scientific construction of gender alongside of his constitution of his audience as committed to scientific epistemology in order to explore some of the ways gender construction is embedded in and reinforced by audience constitution. In the case of Sex in Education, Clarke's reliance on reproductive physiology to identify limits on women's education aligned with...