Scientist with an imaginary friend
May 30, 2012 9:05 AM Subscribe
Who was this lonely woman scientist with an imaginary friend?
I read an article or blog post several years back profiling an early woman scientist. It may have been on one of the popular feminist blogs, perhaps linked from the NPR website? I want to say she was American, active in the first half of the 20th century, maybe 1920's to 1940's, and achieved some prominence in her field. I also want to say her work involved outdoor data collection, but could be anything from wildlife surveys to groundwater or soil sampling to archaeology, paleontology or anthropology. Whatever I read included a photo of her, perhaps in a Tilley hat. I believe the article mentioned that she never married.
The key detail I remember is that after her death, her papers were archived and it was discovered that she'd written numerous letters in her diary to an imaginary friend, to whom she confided how lonely she was and how much she longed for a companion. It was just so heartbreaking and humanizing.
I read an article or blog post several years back profiling an early woman scientist. It may have been on one of the popular feminist blogs, perhaps linked from the NPR website? I want to say she was American, active in the first half of the 20th century, maybe 1920's to 1940's, and achieved some prominence in her field. I also want to say her work involved outdoor data collection, but could be anything from wildlife surveys to groundwater or soil sampling to archaeology, paleontology or anthropology. Whatever I read included a photo of her, perhaps in a Tilley hat. I believe the article mentioned that she never married.
The key detail I remember is that after her death, her papers were archived and it was discovered that she'd written numerous letters in her diary to an imaginary friend, to whom she confided how lonely she was and how much she longed for a companion. It was just so heartbreaking and humanizing.
Response by poster: I saw the Ruth Benedict article too and wondered for a moment, but it notes that she fell in love with and married Stanley Benedict. The woman I'm thinking of had her imaginary friend during the height of her career, which is what made it so striking to me.
posted by Dixon Ticonderoga at 9:45 AM on May 30, 2012
posted by Dixon Ticonderoga at 9:45 AM on May 30, 2012
Response by poster: Holy crap, (alice), thank you, that's her. I was off a bit on the time frame, and totally wrong about the field, but I remembered the photo with the hat. Turns out Clelia Mosher was a completely bad-ass feminist hero, MD, Stanford professor, and pioneer in women's health and sexuality. For posterity I want to quote from her Wikipedia entry:
Her Master's degree thesis disproved the then widely held belief that women were physically inferior to men because they could only breathe costally, showing instead it was only women’s fashionable corset clothing of the time that prevented diaphragmatic breathing. She found that women would breathe with their diaphragm with enough exercise. Her next research was on menstruation, gathering data from 2,000 women over 12,000 menstrual cycles.[2] She revealed unhygienic habits that caused painful menstruation[3] and created the Mosher breathing exercise,[4] making her possibly the first American physician to advocate core-body-strength-increasing exercises to reduce the pain of menstrual cramps.And the bit about her imaginary friend is in the Stanford article you linked:
Her most famous work, published posthumously, was a survey that she began in 1892 as an undergraduate when preparing to lecture on the "Marital Relation" before the Mother's Club of the University of Wisconsin,[5][6] and continued throughout her career. It is the only known existing survey of Victorian women's sexual habits,[5] and was initially controversial because of its frankness and the overwhelmingly sex-positive views of the participants, even including the use of "male sheaths" (now called condoms) and "rubber cap over the uterus" (either a diaphragm or cervical cap) birth control.[7][8] All this stands in high contrast to other existing historical literature of the time which holds that women have no sexual desires and sex should only be used for reproduction.
Some archival scraps hint at her longing for connection: an unfinished novel whose heroine chooses career over the man she loves, musings on the mother-daughter bond and, the most poignant, a series of letters to an imaginary friend. "I get the sense of companionship and you are spared the boredom of reading them," Mosher wrote impishly in 1921. But in 1926, her tone was more despairing. "Dear 'Friend who never was,'" she wrote, "I have given up ever finding you. I have tried out all my friends and they have not measured up to my dreams."posted by Dixon Ticonderoga at 10:50 AM on May 30, 2012 [15 favorites]
« Older Does this registration security procedure for my... | How to entrance toddlers over videochat? Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by logicpunk at 9:28 AM on May 30, 2012