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Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society: A Quarterly Journal in American Philosophy. 2013.

49(3):299–321

JSTOR: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/trancharpeirsoc.49.3.299

David W. Agler
Deniz Durmuş

Christine Ladd-Franklin: Pragmatist Feminist


Abstract: Before the early 1990s, accounts of classical American philosophy paid relatively little
attention to the work and intellectual contributions of women philosophers. However, as early as
1991, a number of contemporary feminist philosophers and historians began to devote more
focused attention to women philosophers whose intellectual achievements had been marginalized or
forgotten. One woman philosopher whose contributions have still gone unnoticed is that of
American logician, mathematician, and color theorist Christine Ladd-Franklin. This paper argues
that Ladd-Franklin’s feminist efforts to increase the opportunities for women in professional
academia were influenced not only by her work as a woman scientist and her reading of feminist
literature but also by her understanding of pragmatism and her interaction with Charles Peirce.
Specifically, Ladd-Franklin’s arguments to increase academic research positions for women and her
criticisms of male-only scientific societies (i) point out how discrimination on the basis of gender
violates Peirce’s first rule of reason that one ought not block the road to inquiry and (ii) expose the
unscientific nature of gender discrimination by contrasting the pragmatic meaning of acquiring a
doctorate with the institutional practice of barring women from making intellectual contributions by
denying them professorial positions.

Keywords: Christine Ladd-Franklin; Feminism; Pragmatism; Peirce; Pragmatic Feminism; Women Classical
American Philosophers

Theorists working in both feminism and pragmatism lament that classical American philosophy
appears to be relatively devoid of feminists. 1 Charlene Seigfried (1991a), for example, has pointed
out that historical reconstructions, bibliographies, and indices of classical American philosophy
reveal a striking paucity of female philosophers. As a first step, Seigfried calls for both a feminist
analysis of pragmatism (a detailed study and criticism of the attitudes of classical pragmatists toward
women) and a “rediscovery of women pragmatists” (1991b:2; see 1991a:410). Seigfried’s rallying cry
for a feminist reading and reconstruction of classical American philosophy has not fallen on deaf
ears as theorists have brought those working at the intersection of pragmatism and feminism (what
we call pragmatist feminists) into sharper and more prominent view (e.g. Duran 1993; Rooney 1993;
Seigfried 1996; Sullivan 2001; Hamington 2010; Hamington and Bardwell-Jones 2012). This paper
provides a rediscovery of pragmatist feminist (as well as mathematician, logician, and psychologist)
Christine Ladd-Franklin (1847–1930). While the concern in this paper is less with establishing
priority and more with ushering Ladd-Franklin into the fold of pragmatist feminists, we think there
is evidence supporting the claim that Ladd-Franklin is the first pragmatist feminist even if she is not
America’s first woman public philosopher: Ladd-Franklin’s exposure to pragmatism through Peirce

1 Abbreviations used in this paper include: Abbreviations for Peirce’s work follow these conventions: CP#.# = (Peirce
1960); EP2:# = (Peirce 1998); W#.# = (Peirce 1982-2010); R#:# & L#:# = (Peirce 1963-1970); C#:# = (1882). For
rejected manuscript pages, an ‘x’ is placed after the manuscript page number, e.g. R343:32x.
1
(fall of 1881), and the appearance of pragmatist elements in her writings, antedates that of Jane
Addams (1860-1935), Mary Whiton Calkins (1863–1930), and Frances Rousmaniere’s (1876–1964). 2
Our treatment of Ladd-Franklin’s pragmatic feminism begins by articulating some salient
respects in which Ladd-Franklin was a feminist, most poignantly through her intellectual efforts to
reclaim scientific priority for women scientists (§1). Next, since Ladd-Franklin never used the term
“pragmatic feminism” nor did she write extensive treatises on pragmatism or feminism, our
argument for including Ladd-Franklin in a growing ensemble of pragmatist feminists is indirect. First,
we establish her familiarity with the early beginnings and texts of pragmatism by pointing to her
relationship with arch-pragmatist Charles S. Peirce (§2). Subsequently, we point to two different
ways in which Ladd-Franklin’s endeavors to advance women in academia has a pragmatic tint. In
section 2, we draw a parallel between Peirce’s condemnation of those blocking the way of inquiry
and Ladd-Franklin’s charge that the practice of barring women from scientific societies is not merely
a case of gender discrimination but wholly “unscientific.” In section 3, we articulate Ladd-Franklin’s
criticism of academic institutions for granting doctorates to women but concomitantly denying them
research and professorial positions. Ladd-Franklin’s charge is notably pragmatic as her criticism
involves the unpacking of the meaning of a doctorate in terms of its practical consequences.

1. LADD-FRANKLIN AS FEMINIST
While the history, philosophy, and varieties of feminism are deep, nuanced, and manifold, one way
of defining feminism is as the intellectual and political movement directed at eliminating the
oppression of women. While notable for her work in mathematics, logic, and especially color theory,
Ladd-Franklin was a feminist strongly devoted to scientific research as well as empowering women in
academic settings (cf. Woodworth 1930:307). Much like feminism itself, her efforts to empower
women were multi-dimensional, spanning political, intellectual, academic, and social domains. While
further examples of Ladd-Franklin’s feminism are provided later in this paper, in this section we
offer two concrete examples of how Ladd-Franklin participated in one of the central projects of
feminist scholarship: the project of rewriting the history of science from a feministic perspective. 3
Christine Ladd-Franklin was born ‘Christine Ladd’ on December 1st, 1847 in Windsor,
Connecticut to Eliphalet Ladd and Augusta Niles Ladd. The oldest of three children, Ladd-Franklin
attended Wesleyan Academy in Wilbraham, MA before attending Vassar. Ladd-Franklin’s cross-
cutting feminism is apparent from her early years at Vassar. She was critical both of women who
were consumed with fashion or pursuing traditional domestic roles, of men who blocked scientific
inquiry by denying women entry in academic circles, and with the existing social-political structures
in academic institutions that kept women from acquiring professorial positions. Evidence of Ladd-
Franklin’s incisive attitude toward women who uncritically accepted traditional gender roles can be
found in a 20 September 1866 entry from the diary (1866-1873) she kept while attending Vassar. In
it, the eighteen year old Ladd lamented the social-political climate:

2 The relationship between the women pragmatists and male pragmatists has been controversial in feminist literature.
Jane Addams and John Dewey met in 1892 and they have influenced each other intellectually after that time. For a long
period of time, scholars argued that Addams developed her pragmatist ideas after she met Dewey and under his
intellectual influence. Recent feminist studies have reclaimed Jane Addams’ original pragmatist account independent of
her intellectual relation to Dewey and have argued that the influence between Addams and Dewey was mutual (Seigfried
1996; Knight 2005). In addition, Calkins and Rousmaniere—who were lifelong friends have—also corresponded with
James and Royce. We do not make any claim on the influence of their correspondence with Royce and James on their
pragmatism. In our paper we leave the question of influence and originality aside.
3 One example of such a feminist project is the Re-reading the Canon series, a series of texts that offers both feminist

readings of traditional books in the canon of Western philosophy and critiques the absence of certain women
philosophers from said canon (e.g. Hamington 2010).
2
Instead of the independent University my imagination pictured, I find a fashionable Boarding-school;
and instead of the tall intelligent and enthusiastic young women in blue merino that I fancied, I find a
troup [sic] of young girls who wear black chamois and are wholly given up to the tyrrany [sic] of
fashion (cf. Ladd-Franklin 1923).

Two days later (22 September), she would write:

I so despise the idea that woman are not as competent to take care of themselves as men, that they
cannot decide for themselves when to go to bed and when to get up, how much exercise to take,
how much to pray and go to church. Still my greatest objection is to the class of girls who come here
and to the social and political atmosphere of the place.

While Ladd-Franklin’s negative attitude toward Vassar softened as she continued her study, her diary
entries not only quietly expressed her resentment toward women consumed with fashion but also
toward male professors who disregarded (or ignored) her intellectual. In a 9 June 1872 diary entry,
she wrote:

A little problem of mine in quaternions has received the honor of publication in the London
Educational Journal. To illustrate the forgetfulness of my professor he has the paper and he neglects
to gratify me by the sight of it. How is it possible to forgive him?

Upon graduating from Vassar in 1869, Ladd-Franklin taught in a number of girls’ secondary schools,
published in the English Educational Times, attended mathematics courses at Washington and
Jefferson College, and took courses in botany at Harvard. Ladd-Franklin’s ascension into graduate
school required an aspect of trickery and the intervention of famous mathematician James J.
Sylvester. A then “Christine Ladd” wrote to Sylvester in 1876 inquiring about the possibility of being
admitted as a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University. Although Hopkins did not accept
women students at the time, Sylvester encouraged her to apply and so she did under the ambiguous
“C. Ladd.” When the trustees’ realized that the “C” stood for “Christine”, Sylvester was forced to
intervene on her behalf. While at Johns Hopkins, Ladd-Franklin studied mathematics with Sylvester
and logic with Charles Peirce, was a frequent contributor to The Analyst and the American Journal of
Mathematics, and wrote an influential dissertation on the relation of algebra to logic. 4 In 1882 Ladd-
Franklin completed her studies in logic and mathematics, being the first American woman to study
both topics at the graduate level. 5
After a marriage to Fabian Franklin (a mathematician at Johns Hopkins), Ladd-Franklin
began her study of physiological optics. In 1887 she published a paper on binocular vision that
offered a geometrical discussion of the horopter, the locus points in external space where images are
formed on the retinas of both eyes such that they are capable of being seen as a single image in
binocular vision. During 1891–1892 Ladd-Franklin accompanied her husband to Europe, the latter
taking his sabbatical leave from John Hopkins. While in Germany, Ladd-Franklin devoted herself to
research in color vision, working at the laboratory of G. E. Müller in Göttingen, the Helmholtz
laboratory in Berlin, and attending lectures from Arthur König one of Helmholtz’s defenders. Ladd-
Franklin’s research in Europe prompted her to write extensive critiques of the two major color
theories of her time—the Young-Helmholtz three-color theory and the Hering-Müller opponent-
process theory 6—and develop an original theory of color sense that treated it as the result of an
evolutionary development (see Ladd-Franklin 1929:24, 77-80, 48).

4 Bertrand Russell (1948:180) regarded Ladd-Franklin as an “eminent logician.” For more on Ladd-Franklin’s
contributions to symbolic logic, see (Russinoff 1999; Green 1987:124-126; Shen 1927; Hurvich 1971).
5 Ladd-Franklin was denied the PhD as John Hopkins was not among the schools awarding doctorates to women. It was

not until 1926 (at the age of 78) at the 50th anniversary of Johns Hopkins that Ladd would receive her doctorate.
6 For a useful overview of the adherents of the Helmholtz and Hering theories, see (Turner 1993:84-85).

3
In stark contrast to the young C. Ladd at Vassar who kept her feminist views mostly under
the lock and key of her diary, the academically-seasoned Christine Ladd-Franklin unabashedly
criticized (in print and in person) those who viewed women as failing to influence the development
of science. One of the central ways in which Ladd-Franklin’s later feminism took shape was through
works that write the history of science from a feministic perspective. Such writing or “re-writing” of
the history of science occurred in two different, but importantly related, ways.
First, Ladd-Franklin was committed to reclaiming scientific authority for a variety of
misaligned women scientists. Two examples can be found in her accounts of Sophie Germain, an
18th century French mathematician and physicist, and Maria Mitchell, an American astronomer
responsible for discovering the first “telescopic comet”. In the case of Germain, Ladd-Franklin
(1894:946) remarks that despite corresponding with mathematicians like Legendre, LaGrange, and
Gauss, writing influential pieces on Fermat’s Last Theorem, and being awarded a prize by the
Institute of France in 1816 for her mathematical work that initiated a new theory of elasticity,
Germain’s work and status as a scientist was all but forgotten in the United States. Perhaps even
worse, Ladd-Franklin argues that Germain’s philosophical work, which anticipates Comte’s
philosophical positivism, failed to receive the same emphasis in the philosophical world as that of
Condorcet and Saint-Simon. With respect to Mitchell, Ladd-Franklin points out how Mitchell’s
discovery of the first telescopic comet was initially credited to Francesco de Vico, who had
discovered it two days after Mitchell. For Ladd-Franklin, in order to change the mindset of those
who thought that the primary roles of women are those confined to the home, church, and society,
it is of the utmost importance for women to claim or re-claim authority over their scientific
discoveries. “Miss Mitchell,” Ladd-Franklin writes, “did nothing to urge her own claims, the whole
thing would have fallen through had it not been for the energetic measures pursued by Edward
Everett, who was at the time the President of Harvard College.” According to Ladd-Franklin
(1896:236), Mitchell’s rise to academic prominence as a result of her discovery “has probably done
more to bring about [the betterment of women in academia] than any other single event of the
time.”
Second, Ladd-Franklin’s efforts to restore scientific priority to its rightful hands were not
limited to her female academic counterparts. Earlier we saw that a young Ladd at Vassar lamented
her professor’s failure to acknowledge her publication on quaternions in the London Educational
Journal. Although still ignored by contemporaries, as Ladd-Franklin’s scientific discoveries in color
theory grew in novelty and profundity, she faced a new problem: intellectual dismissal transformed
itself into academic theft. As a feminist and practicing scientist, Ladd-Franklin found that a number
of her fellow male scientists either stole her ideas or pretended that their work had priority over her
own. For example, in 1893 Herman Ebbinghaus published in Zeitschrift fur Psychologie a discovery
concerning the extension of the Purkinje shift (the phenomena that red appears brighter than blue at
high levels of illumination but blue appears brighter than red at low levels of illumination) to
colorless light. Ladd-Franklin was shocked to see this as she had announced the same discovery in
August of 1892 at the Congress of Psychologists in London, where Ebbinghaus was in attendance.
Setting the record straight, Ladd-Franklin published two roughly identical notes—one in Science
(1893a), the other in Nature (1893b)—that criticized a feature of Ebbinghaus’s discovery and argued
that her discovery of this phenomenon was prior to his. A number of years later in her Colour and
Colour Theories, Ladd-Franklin (1929:195-196n) recounted how Ebbinghaus was so incensed by this
that he broke off communication with her until 1908.
As a practicing female scientist, Ladd-Franklin’s life and work offers a concrete example of
why the project of rewriting the history of science from a feministic perspective cannot be directed
only toward classic scientific treatises. If it is to be thoroughgoing, the project must additionally be
directed at scientific advances made in present day. For while Ladd-Franklin was constantly on
guard to ensure that she retain priority over her discoveries, in many cases she was only partially
successful. For example, concerning the Ebbinghaus controversy, Ladd-Franklin remarked that she
ultimately had to share the discovery with him: “Parsons always refers to this [the extension of the
4
Purkinje phenomenon to colorless light] as the work of Ebbinghaus and Ladd-Franklin, in spite of
the fact that my announcement of the fact came out a year before that of Ebbinghaus” (Ladd-
Franklin 1929:196n).
A second instance occurred just two years later, this time involving Arthur König and Ladd-
Franklin’s work on the night-blindness of the fovea (sometimes called the “Night Blind Spot”). In
an 1895 essay titled “The Normal Defect of Vision in the Fovea,” Ladd-Franklin (1895) argued that
rather than positing an undetectable substance that masks our ability to see objects in low light, the
fovea is actually blind at low levels of illumination. This discovery, Ladd-Franklin argued, appeared
to have a number of critical implications for the then-dominant König theory of color. However,
König was less than enthusiastic about Ladd-Franklin’s discovery, choosing not to take it seriously
rather than engage it critically (see Ladd-Franklin 1929:104n). Reflecting on this matter more than
twenty years later, Ladd-Franklin writes,

I gave a detailed account of the circumstances attending my discovery of the “normal night-blindness
of the fovea”. This was by way of claiming priority for a discovery for which König was, by this time,
not giving me sufficient credit—in fact none at all. v. Kries even now attributes this discovery to
“König und seine Genossen”, 1927.

Further examples abound in Ladd-Franklin’s 1929 book Colour and Colour Theories, which Furumoto
(1994:98) contends was a work not published to present some new discovery concerning vision but
“to set the record straight about her empirical contributions to the psychology of vision.”
Unfortunately, much of Ladd-Franklin’s work in color theory appears to have fallen by the wayside.
Despite being one of the first physiologists to consider color from an evolutionary perspective (see
Ladd-Franklin 1929:vii), Ladd-Franklin’s efforts to gain acknowledgment for her color theory as an
alternative to the Young-Helmholtz three-color theory and the Hering-Müller opponent-process
theory appear to have failed since the theory is rarely, if ever, discussed in contemporary textbooks
presenting theories of color vision (Furumoto 1994:100).

2. DO NOT BLOCK THE WAY OF INQUIRY


In the previous section, we pointed out how Ladd-Franklin’s academic work situates her within the
feminist project of reclaiming scientific priority for women scientists. In the next two sections, we
make the case that Ladd-Franklin is a pragmatist feminist. Similar to other analyses that appropriate
certain figures into the pragmatist fold (see Seigfried 1991b:2-3), we use the term “pragmatist” in a
broad way, one that emphasizes features common to pragmatists (cf. Pihlström 2004:30-31).
The term “pragmatism” refers to a method, originating in the United States beginning with Peirce’s
1877–1878 articulation in “Fixation of Belief” and “How to Make Ideas Clear,” for making a
hypothesis (or idea) clear by detailing what conceivable practical consequences would follow if the
hypothesis (idea) were true. However, “pragmatism” is also used in a broader, more-encompassing
way, one that refers to a constellation of methods and theories that are associated with the founders
of pragmatism, e.g. a pragmatic theory of truth, a pragmatic theory of names, or pragmatic ethics. In
calling Ladd-Franklin’s feminism “pragmatic” our goal then is to stress this more general sense of
the term.
There is strong evidence supporting the claim that Ladd-Franklin was a close reader of much
of Peirce’s work. In the fall of 1879, a forty-year old Peirce began teaching at Johns Hopkins
University. There he taught an assortment of logic course to graduate students, e.g. General Logic,
Advanced Logic, Mediaeval Logic, Mill’s logic, Probabilities, Readings in Logic, Philosophical
Terminology, and Logic of Relatives (see Fisch and Cope 1952a:369-370). Ladd-Franklin was
enrolled in his General Logic course in the fall of 1879 and his Advanced Logic courses in the fall of
1880, the spring of 1881, and the spring of 1882 (Fisch and Cope 1952a:369). Peirce’s 1879–80
General Logic course is described as follows:
5
A general course, treating the foundation of logic and deducing the theory of subject from
physiological facts. Subjects treated: clearness of apprehension; doctrine of limits; syllogistic
(a new analysis); the doctrine of logical breadth, depth, and area; logical algebra and the logic
of relatives; probabilities; theory of errors; induction and hypothesis. (C3:25).

Similar to the 1879–80 description, the July 1882 edition of the Johns Hopkins Circulars indicate that
Peirce’s Advanced Logic course began with a consideration of the “Psychological and Metaphysical
facts upon which the possibility of Logic rests” (C16:234). The assigned texts for this introductory
section included: “Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man,” “Consequences of
Four Incapacities,” “The Validity of the Laws of Logic,” “The Fixation of Belief,” and “How to
Make Our Ideas Clear.” While the quality of Peirce’s instruction may not have been stellar—as
Ladd-Franklin recounts Peirce as the “brooding type” and his lectures on logic and metaphysics as
“devious and unpredictable”—Ladd-Franklin nevertheless read and re-read several key texts that
were key to Peirce’s pragmatism. And, she evaluated these essays favorably. She considered his
1877–1878 essays “The Fixation of Belief” and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” as “a masterly
series of articles” that give “a better idea of “how to make our ideas clear” concerning the methods
of science as he [Peirce] understood them” (Ladd-Franklin 1916:716-717). 7
Over the years Ladd-Franklin and Peirce engaged in correspondence about matters
concerning logic, cosmology, professional development, as well as pragmatism (cf. Ladd-Franklin
1900-1939; Robin 1967). And, in at least one extant letter to Ladd-Franklin, Peirce gives an overview
of the development of pragmatism and sharply distinguishes it from the Jamesian variety. But, of
course, Ladd-Franklin was not simply a pupil of Peirce, she was also his friend, managing editor, and
as Shea Zellweger (1997:336) writes “as much Peirce’s mentor as she was his student.” To provide
just one illustration, from 1901 to 1905, Ladd-Franklin was the Associate Editor for Logic and
Philosophy for Baldwin’s Dictionary (cf. Brent 1993:274-275). In addition to writing a number of
entries, Ladd-Franklin also reined in many of Peirce’s contributions. In a letter written in November
of 1900, Peirce sought Ladd-Franklin’s counsel on his entry “Exact Logic”, an entry for which
Peirce had hoped to spell out in detail some of his most recent advances. Peirce writes that the
purpose of the entry was to “put Exact Logic in its place as a branch of philosophy” but Peirce was
worried it was “too much to ask him [Baldwin] to print it” (Ladd-Franklin 1916:721). Ladd-Franklin,
perhaps more attuned to the audience of the Dictionary, suggested that the Dictionary was not a place
to contribute pioneering work and recommended that Peirce render it more intelligible for the
ordinary, yet properly-equipped reader. In response, Peirce praised Ladd-Franklin for her candid
advice, writing “Would there were more courage between friends! You give me wholesome counsel,
and I shall follow it” (Ladd-Franklin 1916:722). 8
Not only did Ladd-Franklin exercise editorial control over Peirce’s contributions, but she
also offered a number of astute contextualizations of Peirce’s work in relation to his contemporaries
(e.g. Schröder) and leveled a number of criticisms at Peirce’s later philosophy and use of logical
notation (see Ladd-Franklin 1892, 1916; Clark 1997:308). For instance, while claiming that Peirce
was a man of great “originality and productiveness”, she thought he lacked the ability to distinguish
“the wheat and the chaff.” Concerning a series of essays Peirce contributed to the Monist between

7 In addition to being a student of Peirce, Ladd-Franklin also participated in the Metaphysical Club at Johns Hopkins
(Ladd-Franklin 1916:717; Fisch and Cope 1952c:291; cf. W4:xli). While Ladd-Franklin and her husband Fabian Franklin
were not listed as official members of the Johns Hopkins Metaphysical Club (C2:10), Ladd-Franklin attended meetings
of the Metaphysical Club, Peirce read her paper “Non-Euclidean Space” at the first meeting of the group on 28
October 1879 (Fisch and Cope 1952b:371-374), and Ladd-Franklin presented her “Wundt’s Algebra of Logic” at an
1881 January meeting. Concerning the inclusive and diverse nature of various scientific clubs at Johns Hopkins
University, see (Hawkins 1960:116).
8 Zellweger (1997:336, 340, 353) and Clark (1997:307-308) partially credit Ladd-Franklin’s interest in the symmetry of

logical symbols as shaping Peirce’s contributions to iconic logic.


6
1891–1892 (see W8: sels. 23, 24, 27, 29, 30), a series that James thought would be “a rich mine for
the future student,” she claimed would “probably remain forever indecipherable by him [i.e. future
students]” (Ladd-Franklin 1916:720; cf. Brent 1993:291). She humorously recounts:

Once when I was in search of an article of his which had lately appeared in the Monist, entitled, in
Shakespeare’s phrase, “Man’s Glassy Essence,” and could not remember its name, the young
librarian who assisted me said, “Oh yes,—you mean the article on ‘Glacial Man’”—a title which
would doubtless have served as well as the other (Ladd-Franklin 1916:720-721; cf. W8: xcvii).

While we could refer to further interactions between Ladd-Franklin and other male philosophers
who belong to the classical pragmatist tradition (e.g. her influence on Royce), our point is that
historically-speaking Ladd-Franklin read, influenced, and was influenced by Peirce. Given her
interaction with Peirce, we contend that Ladd-Franklin’s feminism emerges not only out of her
experience as a female scientist and reading of feminist literature (e.g. Ladd-Franklin 1891a, 1891b,
1894, 1896), but also her immersion in an intellectual climate rife with pragmatist thought. In the
remainder of this section, we point to one salient aspect of Peirce’s philosophy of science and then
consider this in the light of Ladd-Franklin’s reaction to women being excluded from scientific
meetings and societies.
In 21 February 1898, Peirce delivered the fourth of his Cambridge Conferences Lectures entitled
“The First Rule of Logic.” William James, who had read the lecture a month before it was given,
exclaimed that it was “a model of what a popular lecture ought to be” (qtd in Peirce 1998:42). The
lecture begins with various observations that different modes of reasoning (e.g. induction,
deduction, and abduction) are self-corrective of both the conclusions they derive and the premises
that they make use of. Because the property of self-correction is an integral feature of reasoning,
Peirce (EP2:47) contends that “it may truly be said that there is but one thing needful for learning
the truth, and that is a hearty and active desire to learn what is true.” For Peirce since the different
modes of reasoning have a self-corrective power, the key thing that an inquirer must bring to her
inquiry is, echoing James’s “Will to Believe,” a Will to Learn. 9
At the outset, the Will to Learn requires not the whole-hearted conviction that what one
knows is the absolute truth but the deep sense that the present state of knowledge is unsatisfactory
(see EP2:47-48). But Peirce does not mean that one begins in a state of pessimistic skepticism;
rather, out of this felt dissatisfaction with present state of knowledge or affairs, the Will to Learn
requires that we desire to know something and make a concentrated effort to find out about it.
Peirce calls the rule that in order to learn, you must desire to learn, and in order to desire to learn,
you must be dissatisfied with the present state of knowledge, the First Rule of Reason.
Key to our discussion of Ladd-Franklin is that Peirce draws a corollary from the First Rule of
Reason, one that he claimed “deserves to be inscribed upon every wall of the city of philosophy”
(EP2:48):

Do not block the way of inquiry.

In discussing this corollary, Peirce lambasts various philosophical attitudes that stymie the march
towards truth. He writes that while it is not a “positive sin” to randomly investigate theories, “to set
up a philosophy which barricades the road of further advance toward the truth is the one

9 Against William Clifford’s (1879:295) claim that “[i]t is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything
upon insufficient evidence,” James (1896) famously argued that when faced with a “genuine option” (i.e., practical issues
of the living, forced, and momentous nature) whose truth cannot be established on intellectual grounds, one has the
right (or will) to believe. In the first and fourth of his 1898 Cambridge Conference Lectures, Peirce argued, seemingly in
contrast to James, that the ultimate settlement of scientific matters do not require the will to believe, but the will to learn. In
spite of other differences that James and Peirce might have had, there is no real contrast between the two positions as
both Peirce and James thought that scientific matters are not living, forced, and momentous (cf. James 1896:329).
7
unpardonable offense in reasoning” (EP2:48). While most of the attitudes that Peirce objects to are
epistemological attitudes, e.g. that a particular proposition can never be known, earlier in the essay,
Peirce hinted that the Harvard University elite may be blocking the way of inquiry:

I repeat that I know nothing about the Harvard of today, but one of the things which I hope to learn
during my stay in Cambridge is the answer to this question, whether the Commonwealth of
Massachusetts has set up this University to the end that such young men as can come here may
receive a fine education and may thus be able to earn handsome incomes, and have a canvas-back
and a bottle of Clos de Vougeot for dinner,—whether this is what she is driving at,—or whether it is,
that, knowing that all America looks largely to sons of Massachusetts for the solutions of the most
urgent problems of each generation, she hopes that in this place something may be studied which
shall be of service in the solutions of those problems (EP2:50). 10

For Peirce, any philosophical theory or university policy that impeded and discouraged investigation,
effectively barricading the way of inquiry, would, on his account be guilty of “positive sin” or an
“unpardonable offence in reasoning” (EP2:48). The role of the university should not simply be an
institution set up to provide a comfortable mode of living to young men, but a community of
individuals deeply conscious of the inadequate state of knowledge and aflame with a passion to
learn.
Peirce’s articulation of the different ways that inquiry is stymied, especially in professional
academia, closely resembles the way in which Ladd-Franklin argued against the exclusion of women
from certain academic circles. In the spring of 1904 E. B. Titchener (1867–1927)—a British
psychologist, student of Wundt, and professor at Cornell—set up a scientific society known as “The
Experimentalists”. The group was composed of male scientists purportedly committed to
experimental psychology: the study of generalized, adult human mental processes and behavior using a
positivist approach (Boring 1938:411; Goodwin 2005:347). Informal meetings occurred at various
universities in the spring of each year (excluding 1918) where guests gave mostly informal
communications and where graduate students and junior faculty working in experimental psychology
had the opportunity to exchange research and network with established psychologists in the field
(see Boring 1938:410). Women were not permitted at meetings. Edwin Boring (1967:315, 318)
recounts Titchener’s attitude on this policy as follows: “He wanted oral reports that could be
interrupted, dissented from and criticized, in a smoke-filled room with no women present—for in
1904, when the Experimentalists was founded, women were considered too pure to smoke.” In
addition, Lightner Witmer, a psychologist from the University of Pennsylvania, supported barring
women from meetings, writing that women should be excluded since they took academic criticism
too seriously:

The larger and more heterogeneous the organization the more likely is vigorous discussion to be
misinterpreted and to be taken as an offence [sic] by individuals who may happen to be attacked. I
think that the presence of women in the organization adds greatly to this danger, owing to the
personal attitude which they usually take even in discussions. I favor a small association, no invited
guests, and no women members (qtd. in Scarborough and Furumoto 1987:117-118).

Concrete resistance to the exclusion of women from meetings took a variety of different forms.
Some members like E. C. Sanford and August Kirschmann raised dissent at the outset (see
Scarborough and Furumoto 1987:117). Edwin Boring (1967:322) recounts an event where his then-

10While we take Peirce at his word, several factors are likely to have motivated Peirce’s having a critical attitude toward
Harvard University (although cf. EP2:48). Perhaps the most notable was President Charles W. Eliot’s role in refusing
him membership in the faculty at Harvard, his prohibition on Peirce from lecturing on Harvard’s campus, his efforts to
bring the Harvard Observatory under his control, and various attempts aimed at blocking Peirce from obtaining jobs at
various universities, e.g. the University of Chicago in May of 1892 (see Brent 1993:20, 53, 75, 79, 91, 106-111, 167, 220,
243; Ketner and Putnam 1992:6).
8
fiancé Lucy Day and Mabel Goudge listened in an adjacent room with the door ajar and that they
escaped “unscathed” from the male psychologists. In addition, it was rumored that during a meeting
of the Experimentalists two female graduate students hid under a table covered with a green cloth.
However, the most strident opposition came from Ladd-Franklin. In 1912 before the
meeting of the Experimentalists at Clark University, Ladd-Franklin wrote to Titchener telling him
that she had a paper she wanted to read in front of the Experimentalists. Then a pioneering color-
theorist, respected logician, and lecturer at Clark University, Ladd-Franklin’s request was denied.
Responding with dismay, Ladd-Franklin charged Titchener with being “old-fashioned”, accused him
of violating the principles of his own society by allowing non-experimentalist men but denying
experimentalist women, and undercut his misconception that women were allergic to smoke by
contending that “I for one always smoke when I am in fashionable society” (Scarborough and
Furumoto 1987:125).
While Ladd-Franklin remained academically active her entire life, arguing for her color
theory and staying abreast of recent advances in logic, she never held a permanent professorial
position. Ladd-Franklin did, however, hold a variety of different lecturer positions (usually unpaid,
and untitled), at Johns Hopkins and at Columbia University. The situation with the Experimentalists
thus reached fever pitch before the 1914 meeting as it was held at Columbia University, Ladd-
Franklin’s home institution where she was teaching courses in logic and color vision. It appears as
though Ladd-Franklin was informed that she was not allowed to attend, leading her to accuse
Titchener of being “mediaeval”, discourteous at her own institution, and finally that he was “[s]o
unconscientious, so immoral,—worse than that—so unscientific” (qtd. in Scarborough and
Furumoto 1987:126). While Ladd-Franklin was able to force her way into one session of the
Experimentalists, apparently she was locked out of the remaining sessions (Boring 1967:322). The
Experimentalists were frazzled. Titchener was worried that Ladd-Franklin’s threat to appear at
meetings would cause the society to disintegrate or go underground, while Boring (1967:322; cf.
Woodworth 1930:307) recounts Ladd-Franklin’s presence with a hint of fear and derision:

For many years Mrs. Ladd-Franklin, armed with her color-theory, invaded laboratories, took over the
director’s desk, had the women graduate students manicure her finger-nails, and insisted that
everyone meet her argument for her genetic theory of color. Directors escaped, cowering in their
homes until they heard that the coast was clear again, but at Columbia she did get into one session of
the Experimentalists and the story is that she was kept out of the meetings on another occasion by
being thoughtfully locked into a different room along with Poffenberger, her captive audience for the
nonce.

Ladd-Franklin’s critique is not simply an objection to the existence of gender inequality nor is it the
charge that the Experimentalists’ rely on some faulty essentialist metaphysics in excluding women
from academic circles. Instead, her argument is a pragmatist-feminist critique, one that echoes Peirce’s
claim that if one is to follow the first rule of reason, then blocking the road of further advance in
inquiry is an unpardonable offence. The pragmatic dimension of Ladd-Franklin’s argument is
apparent as she clarifies the meaning of the policies that exclude women from academic circles in
terms of their practical consequences for scientific inquiry. More specifically, Ladd-Franklin’s
argument begins with the (pragmatic) assumption of how real devotees of inquiry would behave (the
habits they would have to have) if they were truly devoted to the goals of science (i.e., it begins by
tracing the practical effects of being a scientist committed to objectivity, truth, discovery). Relying on
Peirce’s notion of the Will to Learn, this would require a desire to learn, a desire not to be satisfied
with what you are already inclined to think, and a willingness to let one’s investigations go forward
unimpeded and undiscouraged. With a more clarified view of what such policies mean, Ladd-
Franklin’s next step is to criticize the Experimentalists, not on the ground that their actions are
wrong simpliciter but on the ground that they have sinned against science, or as Peirce would say, they
are guilty of an unpardonable offence in reasoning.

9
In other words, Ladd-Franklin points out how the behavior of the Titchener and the
Experimentalists runs counter to the definition of a real inquirer. For to exclude women from
academic societies is to put up a barricade on the road toward the truth; it is to adopt a practice that
runs counter to the Will to Learn as it signifies a qualified contentment with what one knows and
strictures on how one acquires knowledge. 11 Thus, while Ladd-Franklin’s opposition to the
Experimentalists policy of banning women took many forms, it is possible to see her feminist
criticisms of the academy in a pragmatic light. Peirce’s indirect call for academic institutions to be
put more in line with the virtues of real scientific inquiry takes a stronger, more gender-sensitive
approach in Ladd-Franklin’s effort against the institutional practice of barring women from
academic meetings or professorships.

3. A PRAGMATIC EFFORT TO INCREASE ACADEMIC CAREERS FOR WOMEN


In an 1885 contribution to Lippincott’s Magazine, Ladd-Franklin commented on the recent report in
Nature that twice as many girls as boys enter high school and three times as many finish. Ladd-
Franklin noted that an increasing number of educated women—along with the reduced demand for
traditional domestic activities (e.g. brewing, baking, soap-making, stitching)—meant that while
women were being trained to tackle important intellectual and social problems, they were
nevertheless expected to take on traditional gender roles:

The woman who is fresh from reading Gauss and Pindar, and who has taken sides in the discussion
between the adherents of Roscher and of Mill, cannot easily content herself with the petty economies
that result from doing her own cutting and fitting and dusting and table-setting. […] Her education
has fitted her for something better than to save the wages of an upper servant. Again the question is
forced upon her, where can she find a fitting field for the exercise of her powers? (1885:415)

The “fitting field” for which educated women should direct their powers was, for Ladd-Franklin,
academic fields. In addition, despite an increasing (yet still small) number of women entering higher
education in the 1880s and 1890s, women had very few options for post-graduate research and even
fewer opportunities for acquiring professorships, especially if married. A key feature of Ladd-
Franklin’s feminism was to rectify this problem by increasing the number of professional and
academic opportunities for women. The issue was quite personal as many of her own efforts to
advance in the academic world were blocked by not being the “right” sex (Ladd-Franklin 1904:56).
In what follows, we point to Ladd-Franklin’s efforts to increase the number of professional
research roles for women in academia. While Ladd-Franklin’s argumentative tactic was attuned to
the discriminatory social-political structures that marginalized women from professorial positions,
there is something distinctly pragmatic about the way in which she argued for changing the social-
political structure. Specifically, Ladd-Franklin argument for increasing professional roles for women
in academia uses the pragmatic maxim to clarify what a “doctorate” means. In so doing, Ladd-
Franklin is able to more clearly expose how women who obtain doctorates are denied research
opportunities, not for any intellectual or scientific reason, but simply due to gender biases. While
Ladd-Franklin neither explicitly calls herself a pragmatist nor does she cite the pragmatic maxim in
the course of her argumentation, we contend that Ladd-Franklin’s pragmatic perspective on what it
means for women to obtain doctorates allowed her to better depict the gender inequalities present in

11We are not committed to the claim that Ladd-Franklin was solely influenced by Peirce alone. In fact, we think that
Ladd-Franklin’s argumentative point also received substantial influence from Mary Wollstonecraft. In an unsigned
review of a new edition of Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Ladd-Franklin writes “Her
[Wollstonecraft’s] main plea is that women should be allowed to cultivate their understanding, and that men should be
content with rational fellowship instead of slavish obedience. She urged that women should be placed in a station where
they would advance instead of retarding the progress of the human race” (Ladd-Franklin 1891b:163; see also Ladd-Franklin
1891a:53).
10
academia. To see this point more clearly, we turn to two moments in Ladd-Franklin’s involvement
with the Association of Collegiate Alumnae (ACA).
The first occurred in 1890 when Ladd-Franklin petitioned the ACA to establish a fellowship
for American post-graduate women to study in Europe, which led to the institution of the Sarah
Berliner Fellowship (see Ladd-Franklin 1890; Ladd-Franklin 1911; Milar 2000; cf. Spillman
2012:198-199; Rossiter 1982:31-32). In her petition, Ladd-Franklin advocated for the urgency of
collecting funds to send some women to Europe for further research as it would provide an
opportunity that many academic women did not otherwise have, namely the chance to position
themselves as top researchers in various academic fields. Since it was somewhat customary for
students to spend time abroad in Europe before taking a professorial appointment, Ladd-Franklin
argued that establishing such a fellowship for women would provide a needed step toward
increasing the number of women professors at universities in the United States. In addition, Ladd-
Franklin (1890:1) argued that opening college professorships to women would have the added
benefit of improving the overall economic status of women in education. With respect to the
unequal distribution of payment among genders even for the same jobs, Ladd-Franklin claimed that
it is impossible for female and male teachers of secondary school to get paid equally, as long as
women are believed to be not “worthy of being college professors” (1890:4). Therefore, opening
college professorships positions is “doubly important” for “increasing the dignity and happiness of
our sex” (1890:4). Ladd-Franklin even makes use of some sexist myths in an ironic way to argue for
the necessity of college professorship positions for women. She writes “if it be true that men have
more vigorous minds than women, then it is of the utmost consequence, for the good of the world,
that men should be set free from the drudgery of the more unimportant college positions, and be
enabled to devote their time to higher tasks” (1890:3). If not, she continues, and if women have the
same mental capacity, then there is no reason for holding them back from such positions either.
The second occurred in 1904. Between 1890 and 1900, there was a sharp increase in the
number of doctorates awarded to women: 25 before 1890, 204 through 1900 (Rossiter 1982:35).
However, despite this sharp increase, there remained resistance to hiring woman as research faculty
as the faculty of colleges in the eastern part of the United States. Concerning this resistance, Ladd-
Franklin (1904:54) wrote that “the exacting positions are filled to too large an extent by the highly
trained of one sex only; the women have not as yet been given a representation in proportion to
their attainments. It is this discrepancy that we are anxious to see removed.” Her tactic for
increasing the number of women faculty involved petitioning the ACA to fund what she called a
“peripatetic professorship” (essentially a privatdozent or research faculty position except that the
woman awarded the position would have the opportunity to work at the university of her choosing).
The stratagem motivating Ladd-Franklin’s petition was that adding a female faculty member to all-
male research faculty would serve as an “entering wedge” for future female researchers. Initially,
universities composed primarily of male professors couldn’t object to adding a woman to their
research faculty for budgetary reasons as the position was externally funded by the ACA.
Subsequently, with a female researcher embedded into the faculty, the university could no longer say
that hiring women would break the long tradition of male-only faculty (Ladd-Franklin 1908:145).
Thus, rather than adopting a radically progressive policy, Ladd-Franklin’s approach to obtaining
gender equality in the academy was conservative, incremental, and deeply sensitive to the existing
political structures resistant to such change.
Ladd-Franklin’s case to the ACA to fund her peripatetic professorship is found in her 1904
essay “Endowed Professorships for Women.” In this essay, Ladd-Franklin (1904) unleashed a
barrage of argumentative and rhetorical strategies in support of the position, e.g. she argued that
women are capable of making scientific discoveries by providing a brief history of exceptional
women scientists who made a number of signature discoveries with limited resources (1904:58).
However, one such argument is strikingly pragmatic in nature:

11
But for the women [who have received their doctorates], the teaching positions that are at all worthy
of their powers are few in number. The proportion of those who, after their brilliant preparation for
the highest work, find that there is nothing in the world for them to do save the drudgery teaching in
the public schools is large, and is constantly becoming larger. Some, of course, find openings in the
women’s colleges, but the women’s colleges are few in number, and it is not even desirable that all of
the teachers in them should be women. For most, as far as consequences are concerned, the
certificate of their doctorate is but an empty honor. It is related in my family that, when I was two
years old, I was allowed one day to go to school. I had heard it said that school was a place to which
one went in order to get one’s education, and when the teacher gave me a little printed “reward of
merit,” such as the good children were in the habit of receiving in those days, I brought it home, and
I said with the utmost satisfaction, “I went to school to get my education, and I got it.” That is the
case with our clever girls—they go to Germany and get the parchments, beautifully signed and
sealed, that proclaim them to be doctors of philosophy, but no further consequences follow. They have
nothing but the empty satisfaction of exhibiting their “tickets”; the pleasurable work and the
adequate emoluments that ought to follow are not forthcoming (1904:54, emphasis added).

Earlier we mentioned Ladd-Franklin’s deep familiarity with pragmatism (see §3). If pragmatism is a
method of making ideas clear by appealing to their practical consequences, then clarifying the
meaning of a doctorate can be spelled out in terms of its concrete practical effects for that individual
(James) or awardees’ future dispositions to act (Peirce). As James (1987:509) contends “if you follow
the pragmatic method, you cannot look on any such word as closing your quest. You must bring out
of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience.” Thus, to
clarify what it means a doctorate, we should look to how it transforms an individuals’ practical
situation, i.e. look and see what habits it engenders.
In applying the pragmatic maxim to the notion of a doctorate (in a sort of rough way), we find
that when a doctorate acquired by a male, it potentially provides him the means to acquire
fellowships, post-doctoral positions, and professorships, which effectively supply him the means to
advance pursue future inquiries and advance science. In contrast, when a doctorate is acquired by a
woman, nominally it signifies that she has undergone the requisite training to make intellectual
contributions within an academic sphere, but practically it is an unsigned check (or a mere ticket)
incapable of being cashed out in terms of future research projects, effectively barring her from the
means to advance inquiry. Now, on the one hand, Ladd-Franklin’s criticism might simply be
interpreted as the straightforward charge that higher academia during her time engaged in rampant
discrimination on the basis of gender. On the other hand, Ladd-Franklin’s charge can be understood
in a more pragmatic light. The pragmatic feature of her critique is more encompassing as she can
justifiably state that awarded doctorates are (to some degree) worthless, pointless, or meaningless. This
requires some caveat and contrast.
As a caveat, Ladd-Franklin’s point is not that a woman’s doctorate is worthless simpliciter for
obtaining a doctorate had important practical consequences for acquiring teaching positions at
universities. Rather, Ladd-Franklin’s claim is that the doctorate is practically worthless in terms of
her capacity to contribute to scientific knowledge. As a point of contrast, the pragmatic dimension
of Ladd-Franklin’s criticism is biting in ways that the more straightforward criticism is not. First, the
pragmatic criticism provides a clearer picture of how social-political structures in academia can run
counter to certain ideals of scientific inquiry. By barring women from research positions, universities
and colleges cuts themselves off from their primary purpose, to advance knowledge. Such a practice,
as we have seen earlier from Peirce and Ladd-Franklin (see §3), was thought to be unpardonable
from the standpoint of reason. Second, by revealing the pointlessness of a doctorate within the
overall advancement of science, the pragmatic criticism also puts universities and colleges on the
defensive concerning their overall purpose. What is the university attempting to do in setting up a
system of higher education? Ladd-Franklin’s charge that a doctorate is a mere “ticket”, beautifully
signed and sealed, lends credence to Peirce’s query about whether Harvard University was simply set

12
up to help young men earn hefty incomes and “have a canvas-back and a bottle of Clos de Vougeot
for dinner.”
Thus, Ladd-Franklin levels a pragmatist feminist critique at universities that, on the one
hand, bestow upon a student its highest academic honor, but on the other, create policies that
effectively make the doctorate an empty honor: the social-academic situation is designed in such a
way that acquiring a doctorate does not lead to any real consequences (relating to research) for the
woman who has acquired it. 12 Such an argument does not merely point to gender inequalities but
clarifies the ways in which gender discrimination within academia hinders rather than promotes
scientific research.

4. LADD-FRANKLIN: FEMINIST PRAGMATIST


Ladd-Franklin does not extensively evaluate or articulate pragmatism as a philosophical doctrine (or
method), and her sparse reflections and applications of pragmatic ideas are certainly not on par with
her work in logic, mathematics, or color-theory. Nevertheless, there is strong indirect evidence that
Ladd-Franklin’s feminist efforts were inspired by her reading and interaction with Peirce and that
these efforts are pragmatic in flavor. Undoubtedly, further research is needed on the extent to which
pragmatism guided Ladd-Franklin’s other scholarly contributions, to what extent these contributions
shaped the thought of other pragmatists, and whether Ladd-Franklin’s latent pragmatism is
distinctive from that of Peirce, 13 James, Dewey, and other pragmatist feminists.

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15

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