Institutional Limits: Christine Ladd-Franklin, Fellowships, and American Women's Academic Careers, 1880–1920

Abstract

Christine Ladd-Franklin spent the first forty years of her life becoming one of the best-educated women in nineteenth-century America. She spent the rest of her life devising fellowship programs designed to enable educated women to have the same opportunities as men in their academic careers. “What law of nature is it,” Ladd-Franklin wondered in 1890, “that says that it is fitting for women to be the teachers of young persons of both sexes in preparatory schools, but that it is not fitting that they should teach young persons in college?” This supposed “law” hurt not only women who were qualified to be professors, like the scientist and mathematician Ladd-Franklin, but also the larger number of college-educated American women who turned to teaching in primary and secondary schools after graduation. As Ladd-Franklin explained, the difficulty women had in becoming professors had a profound effect on women who taught at lower levels. Because women were “thought to be not worthy of being college professors,” it was “impossible for them to receive equal pay with men in the secondary schools.” The solution to the problem of inequality in schools and colleges, Ladd-Franklin believed, lay in proving that individual women could perform as well as men; this “entering wedge” would prop open the door for future women. But as Ladd-Franklin's life and work show, there were limits to a strategy that focused on individuals in institutions.