I was poking around the Library of Congress’s image database and came across this image from around 1899 of a Washington DC classroom. The room is filled with women studying electrogmagnetism. The image is really quite amazing. You see women drawing pictures of circuits. You also see the notes on the board, which I’ve cropped as the header of my banner. You can see “electric telegraph” and “telegraph” pretty clearly. I get excited everytime I look at it. I wonder what kind of classroom this was. Were these women scientists? Were these girls in highschool? Was this a “normal” part of nineteeth-century female education?

Since Cima’s paper, I’ve become more and more interested in just how much science nineteenth-century women were exposed to. Margaret Fuller talks about women’s heightened electrical compositions; Lydia Maria Child, as mentioned before, is also very much aware of this kind of scientific discourse. My outline and notes on how to take my paper for Cima’s paper further will be posted. Eventually.

On a side note, I’m reading Sister Carrie for Merish’s class now and it’s startling just how much electromagnetic language Dreiser uses. I could definitely see myself writing an analysis of this for a chapter of my thesis.