- AMERICAN WOMEN 101
Christine Ladd-Franklin. The first of the two American women we shall discuss was
induced by prevailing prejudice to abandon mathematics for psychology, a field in
which she also encountered firm exclusion. Christine Ladd was born in New York
in 1847. Her mother and aunt were advocates of women's rights. Her mother died
when she was 12, and she was sent to live with her father's mother. Education for
girls had come to be seen as a necessity by the American middle class, and so she was
enrolled at Wesleyan Academy along with boys her age who expected to be admitted
to Harvard. She herself could have no such expectations, but she did dream of
attending Vassar. Her father encouraged her in her studies at Wesleyan Academy,
but the grandmother she was living with was opposed to Vassar. Nevertheless,
she prevailed and her mother's sister supported her financially for the first year.
At Vassar she was particularly encouraged by Maria Mitchell (1818-1889, the first
American woman astronomer of note). After obtaining a bachelor's degree in 1869,
she spent nine years as a teacher of science and mathematics, writing articles on
mathematics education that were published in England. Burnout, that familiar
phenomenon among those who teach adolescents, finally set in, and she began to
cast about for other careers.
Such an opportunity came along at just the right time. In 1876 Johns Hopkins
University opened in Baltimore, the first American university devoted exclusively
to graduate studies. Moreover, it managed to hire one of the greatest European
mathematicians, James Joseph Sylvester, who, being Jewish, could not obtain a po-
sition at Cambridge or Oxford.^19 By great good fortune, the name Christine Ladd
was familiar to Sylvester from her articles on education. On his recommendation
the university agreed to allow her to attend lectures, but only lectures by Sylvester.
This restriction was lifted after the first year, and she was able to attend lectures
by William Edward Story and by Charles Sanders Peirce (1839 1914, described by
the British philosopher Bertrand Russell as "the greatest American thinker ever").
While working at Hopkins, she married Fabian Franklin (1853-1939), a young pro-
fessor of mathematics who was born in Hungary but whose parents had moved to
the United States when he was 2 years old. They were to have two children in
rapid succession, one of whom died in infancy. After her marriage, she wrote her
name with a hyphen as Ladd-Franklin. Under the influence of Peirce she wrote a
dissertation bearing the title The Algebra of Logic, which was published in 1883
in the American Journal of Mathematics, the new journal founded by Sylvester at
Story's suggestion. In fact, she published several papers in that journal, and was,
by any objective standards, one of the best-qualified mathematicians in the United
States. Nevertheless, Sylvester and Peirce together could not fulfill the mentoring
role that Weierstrass performed for Kovalevskaya, Cayley for Charlotte Angas Scott
and Klein for Grace Chisholm Young. She was unable to obtain either the Ph. D.
degree or an academic position. Although she had overcome the first obstacle, get-
ting her family's support for an education, the second and third stymied her for
the rest of her life.
She had always been interested in areas of science other than mathematics, and
her choice of mathematics as a major at Vassar had been partly the result of being
excluded, as a woman, from the physics laboratories. In the mid-1880s she began
to take an interest in psychology, especially the psychology of color perception.
(^19) An earlier stay at the University of Virginia in 1841, when slavery still existed, had ended in
disaster for Sylvester.