The Pioneering Female Doctor Who Argued Against Rest

Editor’s Note: Read more stories in our series about women and political power.

For many years, rest was a common recommendation for women for all sorts of ailments, including one that arrived each month: their period. Women must rest not only their bodies during menstruation, but their brains, too. Mental exertion, the reasoning went, drained their energy and diverted it from where it really belonged, in their reproductive system.

Without rest, the minds of women were liable to drift to unacceptable places—like the voting booth. In 1912, Almroth Wright, the immunologist best-known for developing a typhoid vaccine, wrote a letter to The Times of London that laid out a case against women’s suffrage.

“No doctor can ever lose sight of the fact that the mind of woman is always threatened with danger from the