Exclusionary Tactics and the Masculine Codes of Honor: An Examination
of Robert A. Nye’s Analysis of Women’s Admission to the Medical Profession in
the Nineteenth Century
Robert A. Nye’s chapter titled: “The Legacy of Masculine
Codes of Honor and the Admission of Women to the Medical Profession in the
Nineteenth Century,” is an excellent synthesis of recent scholarship in the
field of the history of women in medicine. Nye has noted that the
historiography of women’s exclusion from these professions has often been
interpreted through the lens of the “pipeline” metaphor. Drawing on this
metaphor, (the idea that at all stages of a woman’s education, training, and
practice, women have been forced to cope with obstacles that have put them at a
“cumulative” career disadvantage). Nye argues that this interpretation lacks
solid footing because it has the potential to reintroduce a “friendly version
of essential gender difference.” Thus, because of this interpretation, scholars
do not consider the culture of work practices within male-dominated professions
and their effects on the inclusion of women into their ranks. It is with this
brief synthesis that Nye asserts in his thesis that the exclusionary “masculinization”
of the nineteenth century medical profession was a consequence of the social
practices that were not originally intended to exclude women, but were set in
place to prevent the admission of a “certain kind of man.” (Robert A. Nye, “The
Legacy of Masculine Codes of Honor and the Admission of Women to the Medical
Profession in the Nineteenth Century,” in Women
Physicians and the Cultures of Medicine, eds. Ellen S. More, Elizabeth Fee,
and Manon Parry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 141-159).
Within the
body of Nye’s work, he asserts that aristocratic man’s historical independence
within civilized society, a class based phenomenon, allowed for the exclusion
of men that could not emulate the independence that upper class men asserted in
the secret societies that proliferated throughout the nineteenth century. As
Nye notes, such organizations as the General Medical Council, (created in 1858)
were formed for the purpose of professionalizing the field. However, they also functioned both informally
and surreptitiously as they kept members accountable through “intraprofessional”
regulation. Writes Nye: “There was no written code that might serve as a
statutory benchmark;” moreover, men who had no knowledge of the codes were
unable to be admitted, a telling insight into why women were unable to be
admitted as well (Nye 145).
With the
advent of the twentieth century, the informal organization within medical
societies proliferated. Though women could now gain admission to formerly
all-male state schools, they were often discouraged from participating in the
non-educational facets of the profession, particularly the social networking
aspect. Nye notes that women’s entrance into the medical profession during the
twentieth century was followed by a “hierarchy of disincentives ranging from
brutal to subtle” that were informally instituted within the masculine
sociability of the profession. In Victorian
terminology, the vices of alcohol, smoking and profanity were seen as essential
to male solidarity, excluding women through the traditional rhetoric of
difference (Nye, 148). As a letter to
the editor by the medical practitioner J.H. Crane demonstrates, Crane and a
host of other practitioners deemed women to be unfit for the rigors of the
medical profession. “I allow no man to go further than I do in admiration, love
and esteem for female modesty…but when she steps aside and attempts a role that
she is by nature physically and mentally disqualified for, she forfeits the
claims of a modest woman” (J.H. Crane, “Protest Against Receiving Females as
Members of the State Medical Society,” Pacific
Medical and Surgical Journal 19, no. 1 (June 1876), 22). The central theme
of Crane’s analysis, that female modesty is of the highest virtue for women to
attain contradicts the fraternizing that comprises the core solidarity of the
medical profession. Moreover, as women attempted to participate in these social
functions, they often ran the risk of being subjected by their male peers to
the perception of being “desexed” (Nye 149).
The
contribution of Nye’s work to the abounding scholarship on women and medicine
is crucial in that it broadens our understanding of the patterns of male modes
of sociability within the medical profession. By understanding these modes of
masculinity and their dominance within the medical profession, we now have a
more definitive context by which to understand the causes of women’s exclusion
from its ranks.
