| This dissertation highlights the intellectual history of women by women by examining their participation in the American Social Science Association (ASSA) between 1865 and 1890. Led by Caroline Dall, who actively worked to ensure their participation, they joined to advance social knowledge, give better intellectual grounding to their reform work, and to advance their own positions as middle and upper-middle class women in the Gilded Age. Although the Association was not feminist and despite gender tensions within the organization, they advanced their own goals and those of other women of their class through changes in higher education, professionalization of occupational fields, and limited political activity. In the 1870s, women like Emily Talbot and Julia Ward Howe coalesced around the issue of coeducation and some like Abby May entered school politics as a first step for suffrage. Professional concerns dominated the 1880s with active involvement by physicians like Emily Pope and Mary Putnam Jacobi, educational administrators like Anna Brackett and Alice Freeman Palmer, and, philanthropic leaders like Josephine Shaw Lowell, Mary Cohen, and Anna Hallowell. All engaged with new forms of knowledge that emerged from social science. They set up surveys, conducted statistical studies, collected data, and participated in discussions of social issues in order to better understand society and to support their work. These efforts provided ground for subsequent knowledge-based reform in the Progressive Era. This dissertation also analyzes the Association from a gender perspective. Male members found some common ground with the women on the basis of shared-class interests but also viewed them as new competitors, especially in higher education, where the men were working to effect changes to expand the power and influence of colleges and universities. The dissertation also shows that the work of the ASSA also became freighted with perceptions of femininity which influenced the formation of separate disciplinary fields as social science broke down into narrower specializations. Viewing the Association both from the perspective of women's participation in its program and through a gendered analysis of its practices and forms revises previous scholarship and suggests the need for new interpretations of the Association. |
