The Education of Sara Howard – Part Three

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View Part One, Part Two, and Part Three of the Education of Sara Howard series.

Today’s final installment in the Education of Sara Howard series moves beyond our hypothetical Sara’s college years to focus on the career choices a young woman of Sara’s social class in New York had available to her in the 1880s and 1890s. As indicated at the conclusion of Part Two, the life choices female college graduates faced in the years immediately following college during the late 19th century could be stressful, with many young women forced to make difficult choices between the family claim and the social claim, the choice between marriage and a career, and the limited number of professions open to women if they did decide to pursue a career. However, a determined minority — of which Sara was one — pushed beyond societal expectations and made choices women earlier in the century would never have dared dream about. These college graduates were known collectively, in America and abroad, as “the new women”, and this is their story.

The Post-College Years

In 1896, a manual for young women was published that discussed common problems faced by female college graduates in America. Entitled “After College, What?“, the manual explained that most young women faced a “blank nothingness” at the conclusion of their college degree that left them feeling a “deep and perplexing unhappiness” until they either got married or were able to find “something [useful] to do”. Having spent four years immersed in an environment that fostered the development of independence and autonomy that was not encouraged in the typical patriarchal family home, these young women completed their college degree with a yearning to go out into the world at large and fulfill their “social claim” — a calling to use their advanced education in the same way that their brothers could; as an independent citizen with a role beyond that of wife and mother. However, upon returning to the family home following graduation, the majority of women found their parents in direct opposition, asserting the “family claim”.

marion-talbotAlthough these middle- and upper-class families had permitted — and even encouraged — their daughter to pursue self-improvement in the form of advanced education, by the time their daughter reached her early-to-mid-20s, she was expected to turn her attention to domestic responsibilities, devoting herself to taking care of parents and siblings until she could find a suitable husband, and filling any spare hours with charity work and sewing circles. For many young women who had for the first time started to think of a world beyond the home being made possible by her four years away at college, these conditions were stifling. Their girlhood friends who saw marriage as the only possible step once they returned from finishing schools, trips abroad to the continent, and formal debuts, did not want to mix with the young college graduate “whose aims were so different from their own”, and the college women faced “what was almost social ostracism”. One young graduate lamented, “We college girls are made to feel that we are different, we feel our separation.” Another, Marion Talbot, who would eventually become Dean of Women at the University of Chicago in 1895 recalled of her own difficult years immediately post-college in the early 1880s, “Here, then, was Marion Talbot with a college degree and an absorbing desire to make herself and her education useful, but with as barren an outlook for such a future as one can imagine.”

However, not all parents during this period were unsupportive or asserted the family claim. As a result of her daughter’s negative experiences, Marion Talbot’s mother founded the Association of Collegiate Alumnae in 1882 for graduates from Oberlin, Vassar, Smith, and Wellesley Colleges, and Michigan, Wisconsin, Cornell, and Boston Universities to provide support that young women often lacked following graduation, and to help them through the anxiety and depression that frequently resulted from their feelings of isolation. In another example, Hilda Worthington Smith’s mother encouraged her daughter to volunteer for mission work following her graduation from Bryn Mawr College in 1910 as she felt that life as a homemaker was “too much to ask” of Hilda, and she went on to encourage her daughter to find a paying position a few years later. On the subject of her mother’s atypically supportive attitude toward entering the workforce, Hilda commented:

This I knew was a great concession, as several of her friends had warned her against letting me venture into the untried world of women’s work. Those women who did it were still thought very “advanced.” Any such excursions from home might lead to a daughter wanting her own apartment and becoming alienated from her family.

Mrs. Smith’s “advanced” views served her daughter well. Hilda went on to become Acting Dean and Dean of Bryn Mawr College from 1919 until 1922, and then Director of Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers from 1921 until 1933. Fortunately for the clever and independent Sara, it appears as though her parents views were as similarly “advanced” as Hilda’s mother’s, which we get a glimpse of in The Alienist, 78, when John Moore relates one of her post-college activities:

…right after Sara’s graduation from college, her family had gotten the idea that her education might be fully balanced by some firsthand experience of life in places other than Rhinebeck (where the Howards’ country estate was located) and Gramercy Park. So she put on a starched white blouse, a dreary black skirt, and a rather ridiculous boater and spent the summer assisting a visiting nurse in the Tenth Ward.

However, perhaps the most important thing to note, regardless of how supportive or unsupportive families were, is that for almost all of the young women who belonged to the pioneering generation of female college graduates in the late 19th century, parental attitudes and family ties were the key factor in the decisions they made about what to do following graduation. Although there were rare college graduates who decided to find a means of supporting themselves in order to live completely independently immediately following graduating in order to avoid the need to consider the family claim at all, these women were the exception rather than the rule — and given her supportive family and the influence they had on her decision to gain firsthand experience as a visiting nurse in the Tenth Ward, it seems safe to say that Sara would not have been one of them. | Continue reading →

NY Public Library Discussing The Alienist in December

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Courtesy of The New York Public Library - www.nypl.orgThe Reader’s Den at the New York Public Library will be featuring The Alienist as their discussion book this December. As stated in the novel’s introductory post this week, the three parts of the book will be discussed in turn over the coming weeks: next week’s discussion will feature Part I: Perception, the following week’s discussion will feature Part II: Association, and the final week’s discussion will feature Part III: Will. So, with the 20th anniversary of The Alienist’s publication taking place next year, why not take this opportunity to reacquaint yourself with Caleb Carr’s beloved psychological thriller and join the Reader’s Den in their discussion this month?

Don’t forget that aids to enhance your reading experience can be found throughout 17th Street. The complete timeline for The Alienist, with part and chapter numbers, along with a 40-question quiz to test your knowledge of the book can be found in The Alienist section; interactive maps featuring all The Alienist’s settings can be found in the Locations section; and a full character list (currently in the process of being expanded) can be found in the Characters section. Happy reading!

The Education of Sara Howard – Part Two

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View Part One, Part Two, and Part Three of the Education of Sara Howard series.

Late last month, we began an examination of Sara Howard’s historical context in an effort to understand the kind of upbringing, education, and career choices a young woman born in a similar decade and socioeconomic group to Sara would have had available to her in the late 19th century. I termed this woman a “hypothetical” Sara, and today’s post will build upon on last month’s to discuss the pre-college and college educational opportunities our hypothetical Sara would have had during the 1870s and 1880s in New York.

The Pre-College Years

The Alienist, 90-1:

“… My father was an expert marksman. My mother, however, was an invalid, and I had no siblings. I therefore became my father’s hunting and trap-shooting partner.” All of which was perfectly true. Stephen Hamilton Howard had lived the life of a true country squire on his estate near Rhinebeck, and had trained his only child to ride, shoot, gamble, and drink with any Hudson Valley gentleman – which meant that Sara could do all those things well, and in volume.

As described in Part One, our hypothetical Sara was an only child born to an upper-class New York family in the mid-to-late-1860s. Given her father’s ownership of a Hudson Valley estate as well as a city home on Gramercy Park, it seems reasonable to assume that he would have shared some of the values common among old New York gentility such as the importance of “good looks, health, grace, and cleverness” in women. However, as the quote above describes, this particular father seemed to be determined to provide his only daughter with the same advantages he would have offered a son. Although this would have resulted in our hypothetical Sara receiving an education superior to that received by many girls during the same period who were frequently educated in “practical” subjects at home for most of their youth, statistically Sara’s was not an unusual upbringing for girls raised by educated parents in middle- and upper-class families in the Northeast—provided, of course, that their daughters were only children or had few brothers. Even though most of these parents still ultimately desired their daughter enter the respectable sphere of domesticity once she reached her early-to-mid-20s, a good education during her formative years reflected the family’s belief in the value of self-improvement and personal advancement (also see Part One). | Continue reading →

Final Main Character Profile

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I am pleased to report that Dr. Laszlo Kreizler’s character profile has finally been added to the main characters page of the full character list. A copy of the doctor’s profile can be viewed below.

Kreizler, Doctor Laszlo

Appears in The Alienist and The Angel of Darkness


laszlokreizlerDr. Laszlo Kreizler, the leader of the investigative team in The Alienist and The Angel of Darkness, is a specialist in child and criminal psychology. He is a pioneer in the theory of “context,” the idea that personality and behaviour is determined by an individual’s childhood experiences, and he applies this theory to the creation of psychological profiles of the killers being pursued by the investigative team. In this way, Caleb Carr has stated that he wanted to create Dr. Kreizler as a character who would be able to “solve all the crimes [Sherlock] Holmes couldn’t, in which there’s little or no physical evidence and no apparent motive — the product of aberrant criminal psychology.”1 In keeping with this, Dr. Kreizler is described as one of the foremost experts on criminal insanity in New York, and when he is not involved in the team’s investigations, he works as an expert witness on criminal cases as well as running the Kreizler Institute for Children, a centre he founded for the study and treatment of children with psychological disorders brought about by environmental factors.

Dr. Kreizler’s drive to understand the origins of criminal behaviour and to help children with troubled backgrounds originates in his own childhood. Although the doctor’s parents were popular socialites in upper-class New York society, we learn midway through The Alienist that behind closed doors Dr. Kreizler’s father was an abusive alcoholic. The elder Kreizler frequently beat his son, with the worst confrontation permanently disfiguring the younger Kreizler’s arm, and he was also emotionally abusive, leaving his son “full of doubts about his own judgment and abilities.” Dr. Kreizler’s mother appears to have offered little solace. Even though she was not abusive, she turned a blind eye to the abuse taking place in the household. This, too, influenced the younger Kreizler; within The Angel of Darkness, we learn that as a young man he formed an attachment to a woman who reminded him of his mother because, on an unconscious level, he had wanted to be able to change her.

Although these dark elements of the doctor’s past help to drive him professionally, they also cause him to stumble occasionally during the team’s investigations. Due to his troubled childhood, Dr. Kreizler is quite emotionally distant and prefers to analyse his emotions in an objective manner rather than confronting them. Although this ability to objectively analyse emotions helps to make the doctor highly perceptive of the emotions of others, his tendency to avoid his own emotions makes it difficult for him to think rationally on the occasions when emotions overwhelm him. One noteworthy incident occurs during The Alienist when, after discovering a number of parallels between the killer’s early life and his own, Dr. Kreizler makes additional inferences about the killer’s past based solely on his own personal experience, a phenomenon known as “the psychologist’s fallacy.”

The protagonist of both Alienist books, Dr. Kreizler’s role as a psychological profiler is essential to both investigations. He is responsible for initiating the investigation within The Alienist in collaboration with Theodore Roosevelt, and although it is Sara Howard who is first presented with the child abduction case in The Angel of Darkness, she knows that without Dr. Kreizler’s help, the investigative team will be unlikely to solve the case. Nevertheless, Dr. Kreizler knows that hunting for the killers in both investigations is not a one-man job, and early in The Alienist he is responsible for determining what additional expertise the investigative team requires for him to be able to successfully perform his role as a profiler. Without the forensic expertise of the Isaacson brothers, John Schuyler Moore’s knowledge of New York’s criminal underground, Stevie Taggert and Cyrus Montrose’s knowledge of life on the streets, and Sara Howard’s skills as a private detective, the doctor would be unable to construct the profiles necessary for pre-empting the next move of the killers in both novels; profiles that eventually result in their identification and apprehension.

References

1. Naparstek, Ben, “Carr Trouble”, The Age 6 November 2005. Link.