Lucy Sprague Mitchell: The Making of a Modern Woman (review)

REVIEWS 331 Freud's texts. She leaves out the whole series of vital technical papers Freud wrote in the decade from 1910-1920. Finally, Grosskurth's biography suffers from a common failing of our factually obsessed time: Date Mania. This malady reaches absurd proportions when she is dating excursions Klein took with her daughter and son-in-law, Walter Schmideberg; "The exact year can be established by the fact that in 1935 the Schmidebergs bought a Buick" (p. 380). When faced with the abysmal behavior of Klein and her psychoanalytic colleagues, Grosskurth is forced again and again to ask the question that has long haunted the movement, "What good is analysis?" Freud certainly pondered this issue when he found himself buried in innumerable quarrels with his fellow analysts, and like Freud before her Grosskurth never comes up with a satisfactory answer. In trying to explain the petty jealousies, backbiting, and turf wars within the English psychoanalytic group she says that "one must realize that all human beings, even psychoanalysts, are subject to the same pressures; when engulfed in groups, they exhibit envy, anger, and competitiveness, whether the group be a trade union or a synod of bishops" (p. 362). This explanation asserts that those who have been analyzed and who themselves analyze others are no better at being human beings than the rest of us, which is, unfortunately , probably true. But there is a benefit to analysis, and we return to Alix Strachey 's insights about Klein to find it. According to Grosskurth, Strachey regarded Klein "as a walking advertisement for the benefits of psychoanalysis: she would have been intolerable without it" (p. 132). Robert S. Steele Wesleyan University Joyce Antler, Lucy Sprague Mitchell: The Making of a Modern Woman. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. 436 pp. When Elizabeth Hardwick concludes her essay on the Brontes by noting that "The sisters seized upon the development of their talents as an honorable way of life and in this they were heroic,"1 she writes of poor women who sought and found an alternative to teaching. Ironically, Joyce Antler's excellent biography of Lucy Sprague Mitchell leads the reader to a similar conclusion, though her subject is a rich woman who eventually chose the improvement of teaching as a way to channel her plenteous and diverse talents. Despite the important difference that Lucy Sprague Mitchell could fairly well set her own terms, the challenge of the quest and the odds overcome dare to be mentioned in comparison with the Brontë sisters. Three patterns may be observed in this engrossing biography: a Bildungsroman of a woman in whom Antler sees "feminism as life process"; a demonstration of the centrality of both work and love to a rewarding life; and the charting of a romance of quantification. Lucy Sprague was born within a generation of Charlotte Bronte's death in 1855 and lived well into the decade of student activism (1878-1967). Indeed, Berkeley was where her professional involvement with education began when she was appointed first Dean of Women in 1906. Before assuming that position, President Benjamin Ide Wheeler placed her in a two-year post as assistant to the dean of the two lower classes to assess what needed to be done for women. The campus ambience at turn of the century evokes Dodge City more than a future cradle of Nobel Prize winners. On sound advice, Lucy Sprague insisted that her administrative appointment include faculty sta- 332 biography Vol. 11, No. 4 tus, which made her one of the first two women to hold a regular faculty position at the University of California.2 Though Lucy Sprague had been urged to go on for a doctorate after graduating from Radcliffe with honors in philosophy, and had taken graduate work, she had no desire to teach the subject. At her suggestion, she was placed as a reader in economics in 1903. Despite studying "Economic Origins" under Wesley Clair Mitchell in 1904, whom she would later marry, she returned to her early love of poetry and writing as a reader, then as an assistant in English. In 1905 she taught a required freshman composition course; in 1906, the year of her appointment...