The U.S. Congress granted women the right to vote in 1920. In 1896, Yale awarded Anna Alice Cutler her Ph.D. Smith College hired her as a faculty member in 1897. In this episode, we consider her story and the changes in the pedagogy of logic over time.
References
Anna Alice Cutler Papers, Smith College Archives, CA-MS-00052, Smith College Special Collections, Northampton, Massachusetts. https://findingaids.smith.edu/repositories/4/resources/353
Reinstein, Gila. “’Brilliant Rebels’: Portrait of Yale’s First Women Ph.d.’s to Be Unveiled.” YaleNews, 18 Nov. 2021, https://news.yale.edu/2016/03/30/brilliant-rebels-portrait-yales-first-women-phds-be-unveiled.
Waithe, Mary Ellen. “Sex, Lies, and Bigotry: The Canon of Philosophy.” Women in the History of Philosophy and Sciences, vol. 3, 2020, pp. 3–17, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44421-1_1.
Suggested Material
Read Anna Alice Cutler’s Review of Charles Renouvier’s work Le Personnalisme Suivi d’une Étude sur la Perception Externe et sur la Force
Investigate primary documents relating to Anna Alice Cutler’s life through the Smith College Archives
Explore the Smith College Circular from 1900, which was featured in our podcast
Transcript
Holly: Welcome to “kNOw women in philosophy”, the podcast which dispels the myth that there are no women in philosophy
Madison: Season 2: Students and mistresses of Philosophy. In this season, we turn to women who studied or taught philosophy at Smith from the 1880s to 1980s. I’m your host Madison Witmore, alongside Holly Dickinson.
Holly: In today’s episode: A Deep Dive into the Cutler Papers, we will be focusing on a Smith College Professor of Philosophy and Smithie: Anna Alice Cutler.
Holly: Today we will be discussing one woman whose work broke the barriers in Philosophy and Logic. Two STEM fields that are heavily dominated and controlled by men.
Holly: In her paper “Sex, Lies, and Bigotry: The Canon of Philosophy,” Mary Ellen Waithe explores the exclusion of women from the historical canon of philosophy.
She states that it was “simple bigotry that led most historians of philosophy to intentionally omit women’s contributions from their histories and that such failure replicated itself in the university curricula of recent centuries and can be remedied only by suspending(for the next two centuries) the teaching of men’s contributions to the discipline and teaching works by women only.” While that proposition comes off as extreme, it illustrates a genuine frustration at the lack of credit women and their work receive.
Madison: This is going to be a recurring theme as we will later examine how the bias against women’s work affects the foundation of philosophical education.
Madison: With Waithe’s words in mind, let’s begin looking at the life and times of Anna Alice Cutler.
Holly: Now you may be asking yourself, who is Anna? Anna was born in 1864 in New Haven, Connecticut and died in 1957 at 93.
Madison: Cutler joined Smith’s Class of 1885 and upon graduating, Cutler taught classics at a private school in New Haven while working on her MA from Yale. This in itself is already pretty impressive considering that during the time period society viewed women as child-bearers or mothers and little more.
Holly: But her achievements didn’t end there. From 1893 to 1895, there are records that indicate Anna was an Instructor of Logic at Smith. Though, as we can tell from the records, this first instance of her career at Smith would only last 2 years. And that is because she left to continue her graduate study, and received a Ph.D. from Yale in 1896. Anna received her Ph.D, only two years after the first woman was ever granted a one.
Madison: After receiving her Ph.D., in 1897 (two years after any woman received a Ph.D) Anna came back to Smith but this time forming part of the English Department. This only lasted two years as in 1899, she would finally land in the department of Philosophy as an Instructor. As the years continued, Anna advanced in positions in the Philosophy Department, and in 1924 Anna would become the Philosophy Department Chair. In 1930, Anna Alice Cutler would retire at age 66.
Holly: With all this background information, we were particularly interested in taking a deeper dive into her career here at Smith by delving into the Smith course catalog from 1900 that described some of the courses that Anna taught, when she was a professor at Smith we found a photograph of her ten years later in 1910 reading in her room in Tyler House. These sources give us insight into what it may have been like to be a woman in academia in the late 19th century, and early 20th centuries. Within this podcast, we hope to leave you with a better understanding of Anna’s experience as a woman academic in an era before women even had the right to vote.
Madison: Now, onto the show!
Madison: Our pursuit to learn more about Anna’s life led us to the Smith College archives, where we found the Official College Circular from the 1900s that is like a course book that contains the selection of courses that are offered to students for the school year.
Holly: When we looked at this book at the Smith College Archives, one of the things that really stood out to me was that this book was almost falling apart. The pages were yellowing and brittle almost with a sort of translucent quality to them. Overall the book is in really good shape considering it’s over a hundred years old.
Madison: I remember one thing that stuck me when we were looking at the Official Circular from 1900 was that in order for students to find the courses they wanted take they had to flip through a course book, and that to me that seems a bit unfathomable as now we can access class registration with just a click of a button.
Holly: It is curious to reflect upon how much innovation has occurred since 1900, as this book is essentially a form of record keeping for the college that documents the changes in the curriculum. I wonder how such records are going to be depicted 100 years from now.
Madison: I had the same thoughts, and it makes me wonder how much has actually changed since 1900, and whether logic has become more accessible today. We’ll get answers to this with some later material
Holly: Our search to find more about Anna did not just end at the course catalog! We also found photographs of Anna as she grew up, starting from when she was a child to her college graduation. It was honestly very interesting to see Anna grow up throughout the years through these photographs. However, one that really stood out to me was one of Anna in approximately 1910 in Tyler House. In this photograph, we see Anna reading a book in her room, which appears to be very organized and with a nice interior.
Madison: That reminds me! We actually found another archival material dated to 1929 of a song that Anna’s friends had written for her in news of her retirement which was spreading quickly among her other friends, both Smith faculty and students alike!
A line that resonated with me was “She has a penchant for criminal books. She’s a crime addict in spite of her looks. Give her detective stories…” and then it continues with “In place of rest she has confessed she eats up the latest thriller..”. I wonder if she is reading a thriller mystery in that photograph?
Music Ends
Holly: Now we will hear from Professor Adriane Rini, who is a professor of philosophy and logic at Massey University in New Zealand. We met with her over Zoom in the evening to account for the difference in time zones, as it was a sunny morning there in New Zealand. And after introducing ourselves and where we were zooming in from, she proceeded to discuss the treatment of women philosophers and logicians today, as well as the accessibility of logic.
Adriane Rini : It’s becoming a question in my mind, did the women’s colleges present logic differently, because one thing I have found is that the women involved in logic in the early 20th century are sometimes portrayed badly as though they weren’t the movers and shakers themselves, they were the ones writing Principia Mathematica. But what in fact they did was write the introductory textbooks that you could use to teach principia mathematica because it’s not a text you want to give to undergraduates. It’s something you want to give to torture PhD students, it’s not friendly. The women seem to have seen this and said, this is too important, we can’t have it taught in a way that presents obstacles. Let’s teach it in a way that makes logic accessible. So there’s something that the women may have been doing that quite a number of the men weren’t stepping.
Madison: Thank you, Professor Rini! I find it interesting how this information has been, perhaps unintentionally, omitted from being distributed to the public. I personally find it inspirational that women involved in logic in the early 20th century were the ones behind introductory textbooks that actually were catered to beginners in logic, students. Even now, some introductory level textbooks that are meant to help students learn something new are far from being introductory level so I understand the frustration in seeing this and wanting to take initiative to help ease what many students were facing at this time.
Madison: In 1900, Professor Cutler taught a class on logic, psychology, aesthetics, and the history of philosophy. It was really interesting to see the breadth of classes that she taught.
Holly: I really thought that it was interesting to see that Psychology was taught once as a philosophy class. As a potential psychology major myself, it was really interesting to see that Psychology was once considered to be philosophy when Psychology and Philosophy are incredibly discernible now.
Madison: One thing that I thought was interesting about the course book was that Professor Cutler was listed as teaching both the classes of history of philosophy and aesthetics by herself and with the aid of a teaching assistant for the other three classes.
Holly: Another thing that I noticed within the course descriptions, was that there weren’t any work by women listed on the syllabus.
Madison: I wonder what it must have been like for women professors and students to read work by men only in the philosophical canon, and not have their voices represented.
Holly: I definitely feel like that’s something we are grappling with today as well.
Madison: Interestingly enough, we obtained a fall 2021 syllabus from the Smith logic department for the Philosophy 102 class, which is Smith’s introduction to logic class. One of the observations I made is that textbooks used in courses now generally have more graphics and a friendlier tone. Whereas in the 1900s textbooks were more formidable looking without the integration of graphic or bright colors.
This difference may be due to either costs of the printing press, or changes in pedagogical methods throughout the years. One similarity between the two is that there weren’t any women contributors to either of the main guiding texts for the class, and representation is really important. I think it’s vital that women are able to see themselves represented in the texts that they are learning from.
Holly: Although harking back to season one, our old friend Alice Ambrose did write a textbook on the introduction of logic. But you are right in a sense that there ought to be more funding for women logicians and philosophers to be able to produce more work, and introductory textbooks are important so the next generation can finally see themselves reflected in logic and philosophy.
Holly: That’s all the time we have. Thank you for listening to Know Women in Philosophy. This episode was narrated by Holly Dickinson and Madison Whitmore and was edited by Vanessa Pliego and Ashley Moxo.
Madison: Special Thanks to our guest Adriene Rini, as well as Professor Theresa Helke, Nanci Young and the Smith College Archives, and Dan Bennett and Meridith Richter with the Smith College Media Production Studios. You can find more episodes of Know Women in Philosophy and Students and Mistresses of Philosophy on our website.