“You don’t want to mess with Mrs. Sidgwick!”. No Victorian has ever written a statement like this, though it is certainly along the lines of what many contemporaries of Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick were thinking.
Born on 11 March 1845 into one of the most politically and intellectually influential families in Britain, Nora (as she was called by her friends and family) was one of the most brilliant and hardnosed intellectuals of her age. One of her brothers was the future Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, another was the biologist Francis Maitland Balfour, whose early and tragic death was lamented as a severe loss to British science by the likes of Darwin and Thomas H. Huxley.
But Nora was not exactly a scientific lightweight herself. Impossible to pigeonhole in terms and categories of our present time, she was a rigorous investigator of controversial psychological phenomena from the 1870s, a gifted mathematician and co-worker of a future physics Nobel Laureate in the 1880s, a Principal of Newnham College in Cambridge from 1892, and in 1915 she was elected President of the Educational Science Section of the British Association.
Long before women were permitted to take degrees at Cambridge University, she was an indispensable collaborator of Lord Rayleigh in the famous Cavendish Laboratory. In the mid-1880s, her calculations helped Rayleigh re-specify the Ohm, the Ampere and the Volt, and the results established modern standards for commercial electrical units.
Even less widely known is the fact that Nora represented British psychologists at the early International Congresses of Experimental Psychology.
With her husband, the Cambridge philosopher and founding president of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) Henry, Nora and other SPR members in fact collaborated with the ‘father’ of the American psychological profession, William James, in an international study of veridical or ‘telepathic’ hallucinations. Moreover, she presented papers on experiments in telepathy at the second session of the International Congress of Experimental Psychology at University College London in 1892, and on hallucinations in mentally ‘healthy’ persons at the third session in Munich in 1896.
Like Lord Rayleigh and her husband Henry (whom she first met at a séance she visited in the 1870s with her brother Arthur), Nora believed that spiritualism and other reported occult phenomena, which were more often scoffed out of intellectual discourse than investigated, called for serious research. After years of experiments, she became convinced that telepathy was an elusive yet genuine fact of nature. She remained highly sceptical of the physical phenomena of mediumship (levitations, materializations, spirit photography, etc.), which brought her in conflict with the ‘other Darwin’, Alfred Russel Wallace and other sincere but not always critical spiritualists.
William James, whose open-minded yet rigorous studies of trance mediumship and other controversial phenomena that were shunned and derided by many of his psychological colleagues, was by far the most active American collaborator of the Sidgwicks. Like her co-workers in the SPR, Nora refused to engage in polemical disputes and rarely responded to blatant misrepresentations of their work by critics, who included psychologists such as Hugo Münsterberg.
Imported from Germany by William James to run his psychology laboratory at Harvard, Münsterberg irritated his mentor more than once by openly conflating psychical research with gullible spiritualism and finally, in 1910, with James’s philosophical Pragmatism. Dogmatically rejecting spiritualism along with its impartial investigation, Münsterberg believed ‘occult belief’ was a specifically female hazard. For example, in a chapter named ‘Woman’, he wrote in one of his books that ‘the’ female proved her supposed inferiority by jeopardizing “moral philosophy through her rushing into spiritualism and every superstition of the day”.
Another German psychologist, Wilhelm T. Preyer, attacked the SPR head on by asserting:
“That a strict scientific spirit [Wissenschaftlichkeit] cannot be considered a motto of the Society in the first place is already evident from the large number of female members and participants”.
James often defended his English colleagues against newspapers defamations and polemical assaults by fellow psychologists, which continue to inform the standard historiography of psychical research. For instance, in his essay “What psychical research has accomplished” (1897), after praising Henry Sidgwick’s intellectual rigour and courage, James expressed his view that Nora was
“a worthy ally of her husband in this matter, showing a similarly rare power of holding her judgment in suspense, and a keenness of observation and capacity for experimenting with human subjects which are rare in either sex.”
While James was the most distinguished psychologist to take office as President of the SPR (other Presidents included physicists like Balfour Stewart, William Crookes, Oliver Lodge, William Barrett and Lord Rayleigh), Nora was the Society’s first female President from 1908 to 1909 and again four years before her death, in 1932.
Together with her husband Henry, Nora stood for a cause that was perhaps as unpopular as open-minded yet rigorous research into the ‘occult’: the furthering of rights for women. Many of Henry’s peers who felt embarrassed over his psychical research were also outraged when he privately rented a house in Regent Street in 1871 for the purpose of providing accommodation for female students. Females still wouldn’t be permitted to take degrees for decades to come, but this was a first step in the creation of the all-female Newnham College, and the Sidgwicks also actively supported the foundation of Girton, another Cambridge college for women.
While Nora Sidgwick may not be widely remembered today, Newnham College’s now well-known female scientist alumni include physical chemist Rosalind Franklin and primate researcher Jane Goodall.
Nora Sidgwick’s no-nonsense approach to biased opinions on controversial issues was admired by some, and perhaps a little feared by many of her mostly male opponents. Her characteristic level-headedness is also illustrated, for example, by her response in 1890 to an article by Grant Allen, who in the Pall Mall Gazette asserted that academic education exhausted women and made them unfit for motherhood. Instead of engaging in rhetorical debate, she refuted Allen by conducting and publishing the ‘Health Statistics of Women Students’, which compared the health of female students with that of their non-student sisters.
The same matter-of-factness characterized her work in psychical research, yet her numerous publications in the Proceedings of the SPR are not usually studied by historians, let alone by scientists.
Both Nora and Henry Sidgwick still enjoy a reputation as some of the most progressive and independent-minded thinkers of their time as evidenced, for instance, by the naming of Sidgwick Avenue and Sidgwick Site in the University ‘bubble’ of Cambridge.
However, not many intellectuals in- and outside Cambridge like to talk or even know about Nora’s (and Henry’s) unorthodox scientific work. Measured by her output, however, attempts to make scientific sense of the occult – a project that was scorned by orthodox religious and naturalistic scientists alike – was the thing which most occupied that formidable mind of hers.
Bibliography
Fowler, Helen, “Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick, 1845-1936.” In Edward Shils & Carmen Blacker (Eds.), Cambridge Women. Twelve Portraits (pp. 7-28). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Gauld, Alan, The Founders of Psychical Research. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968.
Gauld, Alan, “Eleanor Sidgwick,” in Psi Encyclopedia. London: The Society for Psychical Research, 2018. https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/eleanor-sidgwick
James, William, Essays in Psychical Research (The Works of William James). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986.
Münsterberg, Hugo. American Traits. From the Point of View of a German. Boston, MA: Houghton, Miffline and Company, 1902.
Oppenheim, Janet, “A mother’s role, a daughter’s duty: Lady Blanche Balfour, Eleanor Sidgwick, and feminist perspectives.” Journal of British Studies, 34 (1995), 196-232.
Preyer, Wilhelm T., “Telepathie und Geisterseherei in England.” Deutsche Rundschau, 46 (1886), 30-51.
Sidgwick, Ethel, Mrs. Henry Sidgwick. A Memoir by Her Niece. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1938.
Sommer, Andreas, “Psychical research and the origins of American psychology: Hugo Münsterberg, William James and Eusapia Palladino.” History of the Human Sciences, 25 (2012), 23-44.
Sommer, Andreas, Crossing the Boundaries of Mind and Body. Psychical Research and the Origins of Modern Psychology. PhD thesis, University College London, 2013.
