In Scholarly Pursuits (now available), I set the mystery on the University of California campus at Berkeley during the spring term of 1881. The university, first opened in 1863, didn’t enroll any women until 1870, and between 1874 and 1881, only ten percent of the bachelor’s degrees granted by the university went to women. This is not surprising, given that one of the decade’s most popular books was Sex in Education (1873), a book by Edward Clarke, a Harvard medical school physician, who argued that women who were educated in the same fashion as men would face an inability to conceive and produce healthy children, life-long illness, and possible death. Clarke only produced anecdotal evidence to support his claims, nevertheless, his views gave a veneer of science to already held prejudices against women attending institutions of higher education, particularly co-educational institutions Read more…