In the 1870s some scientists d theories that endangered the progress of female higher education. Darwinian evolution relegated women to a permanently inferior condition, both physically, and mentally. However, the most famous attack came from retired Harvard Medical School professor Dr. Edward Clarke's Sex in Education (1873), case studies of seven Vassar students. Clarke concluded that if women used up their "limited energy" on studying, they would endanger their "female apparatus.," A girl could study and learn, he believed, only by risking "neuralgia, uterine disease, hysteria, and other derangements of the nervous system." This medical verdict confirmed folk wisdom that the female brain and body simply could not survive "book learning." The book went through seventeen printings and was widely discussed by the educated public. As a result, many women doctors and social scientists began studies that could possibly refute Clarke's findings. Dr. Mary...