In Sex in Education, or, A Fair Chance for the Girls, he argued that while it was certainly possible, in strictly technical terms, for a woman to pursue an education equal to a man’s, it was hardly practical, since the development of the reproductive organs required energy and power that would be sapped away by hard study.

Clarke of Harvard Medical College proposed quite a different answer to the question of the “humanity” of those women who, like Good Queen Bess, seem to pose a “problem” to medical understanding through their active engagement in pursuits previously reserved for men. Sixty-five years before Sayers gave her 1938 speech, Dr. From the diagnosis of social unrest as hysteria to the defense of female murderers as victims of “uterine insanity,” the ambiguous and dangerous qualities attached to the female body in medical history have always reflected concerns about the female body politic. Sayers’s comments on the historical understanding of England’s most beloved monarch hit upon a stubborn theme in medical history: the mystery of the female body as an allegory for deeper mysteries of gender. She was a mystery, and must have some extraordinary solution. She was the tool of Burleigh, she was the tool of Leicester, she was the fool of Essex she was diseased, she was deformed, she was a man in disguise. They invented the most complicated and astonishing reasons both for her success as a sovereign and for her tortuous matrimonial policy.

“It is extraordinarily entertaining,” she told her audience, to watch the historians of the past, for instance, entangling themselves in what they were pleased to call the “problem” of Queen Elizabeth. In 1938, the British crime writer and theologian Dorothy Leigh Sayers addressed a women’s society on the simple question: “Are Women Human?” Adding her voice to the ongoing discourse on the “woman question,” Sayers expressed frustration with the wonder and criticism directed towards those people whose lives divert from the path expected of their gender.

Dorothy l sayers are women human