Sybil Exposed (7 page)

Once Arthur went hunting with Connie and Oliver, who couldn’t have been more than nine and ten years old, respectively. The trio spotted a deer behind a bush. “There’s a buck,” Arthur whispered. He fired and killed it. But he had erred—it was a doe, a pregnant one. Arthur decided to dump the carcass because he didn’t want to eat meat contaminated with what he distastefully called “pregnancy hormones.” But first, he thought, it would be good to instruct his children about “what reproduction is like” by performing an impromptu abortion. As Oliver and Connie watched, he sliced
the doe open, revealing two fetal fawns covered with spotted fur and still moving. “Daddy, why can’t we keep them?” the children begged. Because the babies, Arthur explained, would very soon be dead. He dumped them along with the doe.
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The Burwells’ Montana adventure ended when Connie was nine years old, after other inventors fashioned cheaper methods than Arthur’s to extract metals from rock, and Arthur’s company went bankrupt. The Burwells went back to Cleveland, then drifted through various cities. By 1921 they were in Poughkeepsie, New York. In some respects their life there was ordinary. Connie and Oliver attended junior high school and spent their spare time at Girl Scout and Boy Scout meetings, earning merit badges. But the family didn’t have a home of its own. Their permanent residence was a hotel.
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Connie was tall and gangly by then. Like her father she had a ruddy face that freckled and burned easily in the sun. She felt ugly. In her imagination she fashioned an alter ego, slender and sinuous, with raven hair and clear white skin. But, though she suffered from insecurities about her body, she did not lack confidence or ambition when it came to the idea of a profession. At age fourteen she told her mother she wanted to be a doctor. Bertie demurred. “Women are not doctors,” she sternly advised her daughter. Women get married and have children, Arthur added. A husband might run off and leave a betrayed wife to earn her children’s keep, Bertie corrected her husband. Girls needed college as a safety net. But they did not need to be doctors.
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To drive the message home, the Burwell parents did something drastic. Bertie had recently taken up with the First Church of Christ, Scientist—better known as Christian Science. Founded in the late nineteenth century, it was a religion whose members were overwhelmingly women, and despite its name, it was extremely hostile to science and scientists. Arthur remained staunchly irreligious. But he went along with his wife’s plan to send their daughter someplace where, they hoped, the desire to be a doctor would be knocked out of her. Connie was packed off to Winnwood, a boarding school in the farmlands of rural Long Island.

Winnwood was a Christian Science school,
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dedicated to the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy. She had grown up in the early nineteenth century in Maine, not far from the earliest home of Ellen G. White, the leader of
Seventh Day Adventism. Like Ellen, Mary was fervently devout as a girl; she was also frail and sick, with symptoms that nineteenth century doctors deemed typical of girls and women. At age eight she heard voices calling her name, and she turned to the Bible for guidance. As she grew to adulthood her health worsened: to her long list of childhood maladies were added gastric attacks, melancholia, and episodes of incoherent babbling and foaming at the mouth.

She was finally cured in the 1860s, by a professional hypnotist, or “mesmerist,” as they were called back then. He treated Mary by discussing her problems with her, rubbing her head, and preaching the power of positive thinking. Mary felt grateful and inspired. Like Ellen G. White, she fell into trances, had visions, and developed a religion. Hers had a special appeal for women like Bertie Burwell because its tenets rescued them from all those nineteenth century medical men who dismissed the female body as a walking, talking disease.

Mary Baker Eddy called her treatment “mind cure.” She believed bodies were illusions, nothing more or less than the thoughts of God. Illness came from lack of faith, and the only cure was Godly thought in the company of other Christian Scientists. People who thought they were coming down with something serious, like tuberculosis or smallpox, were told they could get well by simply “disagreeing” with the symptoms. As soon as they felt fever or pain they were to “shut out these unhealthy thoughts and fears,” since “mind is not sick and matter cannot be.”
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Connie was plied with Mary Baker Eddy’s anti-doctor views at a school in the middle of nowhere, far from her family and friends. We do not know how this banishment affected her. Did it make her furious? Did she attempt to rebel? All we know is that she would later reject Baker Eddy’s hostility toward materialism and sternly describe herself as a “pure scientist.” Yet, not long after that, she would begin to embrace perhaps the biggest “mind cure” of all—American psychoanalysis.

When Connie graduated from Christian Science high school in 1926, her parents were living in Niagara Falls, New York. The banks of the Niagara River were jammed with factories all the way south to Buffalo in those days. They churned out tons of industrial chemicals, including lubricants
for axles, gears, and metal grinding machines, which Arthur invented and manufactured in his own company. He oversaw the firm’s research activities, and Bertie was his secretary.

They sent Connie to a nearby women’s college, William Smith, where she studied mostly liberal arts subjects, including English. But after her sophomore year she decided to transfer. She told her parents she wanted to be a chemist, like Arthur. The chemistry courses at William Smith college were too easy, she said, so she applied to the University of Michigan. In 1928 she matriculated there as a junior.

Connie threw herself into things traditionally considered masculine and heroic. There was chemistry, as she had planned, but she also discovered flying. The university’s Aeronautical Society was a pioneering new club with a women-only section, but Connie ignored it and joined about a dozen young men who flew a glider. Their sport was ridiculously daredevil. One club member would play the role of pilot, and others launched the fragile machine by tying rubber ropes to it, grabbing them, then sprinting down a hill and quickly releasing the ropes. Crashes were common, and one male pilot was killed. In literature about the club, the other members listed themselves as engineering students. One would have expected Connie to announce chemistry as her specialty. Instead she called herself an English major. She seemed conflicted about what she wanted to do with her life.
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When it came to sexist work environments, chemistry was one of the worst fields Connie could have chosen. Four percent of American chemists had been women at the end of World War I, but a decade later that ratio had plummeted. Employment ads asked for “Christian males only,” and chemical plant managers blithely rationalized their refusal to hire the second sex. Women doing laboratory experiments were “inferior to men in interpretation of results,” pontificated an editorial in the
New York Times.
Besides, women were too delicate to gather samples in the plant.

Connie graduated in 1930 with a bachelor of science degree. She went back to Niagara Falls and joined her parents at the hotel. She got work, but she didn’t do experiments. Instead, she was hired as a librarian—a position that must have disappointed and humiliated her. Chemical librarian jobs in the 1930s were dead end, low paying, and reserved strictly for females.
But many young women accepted librarian work because their women professors told them such jobs might eventually lead to something better. In the meantime, they were told, women who accepted the work should act pleasant so as not to discredit themselves and their sisters in chemistry.
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Connie did try to be pleasant. She volunteered with the Northwestern New York section of the ACS—the American Chemical Society, the nation’s most prestigious association for professionals in the field. ACS membership was so overwhelmingly male that some meetings in the 1930s were still called “smokers”—a word implying cigars, beer, half-naked girls, and pornographic movies. Few women chemists attended these meetings, but few women were ACS members anyhow. Even fewer took an active role in the organization.
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Connie attempted to be the exception. At her father’s company, which was just down the block from where she worked, Arthur Burwell was running oxygen through petroleum and coming up with soap. This was something new, because soap traditionally had been made with animal fat, not industrial chemicals. Connie started spending free time at Arthur’s lab, and soon she came up with an idea.

“Discover new soap to cure skin disease,” the
Syracuse Herald
trumpeted in a headline in June 1932. The American Association for the Advancement of Science was meeting in upstate New York, and “woman chemist” Cornelia Burwell—as the
Herald
dubbed her—used the occasion to announce that her sticky substance was “one of the most important cures yet devised” for athlete’s foot.

For decades people had treated their itchy feet by soaking them in herbal tinctures and mild chemicals that painlessly removed the topmost level of the dermis, taking the pesky fungus with it. But now, Connie declared, she could attack the very root of the problem—the fungus itself.

As a roomful of overwhelmingly male scientists gazed at her flaming red hair, Connie described her invention in ways that recalled a predatory animal or a femme fatale: “The penetration power of the soap is so great,” the
Herald
reported, “that when an oily broth of it is deposited in a test tube, the small active molecules creep up the glass and render cotton plugs completely useless.” The substance in the tube attracted fungi and bacteria
“just as a spider fascinates a fly.” After this seduction, it took only ten minutes for the miracle goo to wreak destruction on microbes.

Months later Connie did an encore presentation in Washington, D.C., before the big-city press and the American Chemical Society’s most prominent members. Her name and news of her invention made it into
Time Magazine.
She was poised for fame and fortune: Her new substance was easy to make, and she was using chemicals to improve people’s health. So much for Christian Science. And so much for Arthur and Bertie Burwell, who had not wanted their daughter to dream. Her parents be damned, she was dreaming anyway.
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Then everything fell apart. Connie’s first patent application for the athlete’s foot soap was filed by her father. It was lengthy, filled with instructions for running oxygen through petroleum, and with tables outlining the death rates of various strains of bacteria when exposed to the product in test tubes. But a year after this optimistic material was so confidently submitted, Connie filed a bleak, spare addendum—just a half page. It noted that, unless it was greatly diluted with an oil or salve such as Vaseline, the substance she had invented could not be applied “to mammals, including man, without irritation or detrimental effects.”
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It appears Connie had jumped the gun on her soap’s miracle properties. In the lab she’d proved it quickly killed fungus inside a test tube. But she hadn’t tried it on people. It was a strong acid, and when applied to skin, it burned. Adding Vaseline may have made the soap too expensive to sell profitably, or rendered it no more effective than athlete’s foot medicines already on the market. Either way Connie’s invention turned out to be a dud.

She was twenty-five years old and she must have felt exhausted and humiliated. Of this period of her life, the only thing she ever said publicly was, “I became very bored with chemistry.” “Bored” seemed to be a euphemism for darker emotions. “I felt that if I had to deal with any more test tubes,” she elaborated, “I would deal with them by dropping them on the floor and breaking them.”
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Well then, Arthur said. Now it was time to do what women do—get married, have children. Her mother, Bertie, did not disagree.

Connie wanted to go back to school and finally fulfill her dream of becoming a doctor. But tuition was expensive and Arthur refused to foot the bill. It was money down the drain, he said. Connie was not smart enough
for medical school. Enraged, she defied him, returning to the University of Michigan in fall 1934. But to bankroll this endeavor, she got married.

At twenty-three, Henry Marsh Wilbur was two and a half years Connie’s junior. He had just finished a degree in dentistry, and despite his youth he already had a steady income that would pay for Connie’s studies. They were married in 1934. Much later in life, she reminisced to her brother and her nieces and nephews that she had married for money and never loved her husband.
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She did not say whether Henry knew about her true motives and feelings. Did she try to muster feelings of romance for her new husband?

Shortly after the wedding, Connie developed Graves’ disease, the thyroid condition with the mood swings, heart palpitations, hand shaking, and other disturbing symptoms. She had to drop out of medical school for almost a year before her doctors arrived at the correct diagnosis. Even then, they may have continued to blame her emotions for her illness. In the 1920s, psychiatrists had attributed high thyroid levels in women to “incestuous fixation upon the father.” As late as 1934, the same year Connie got sick, Graves’ disease was being blamed on “extreme dependence on the mother” and on fear of “assuming the maternal role.”
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When she returned to school Connie chose psychiatry as her specialty, and she became fascinated by patients with hysteria: girls and young women who twitched, grimaced, lost their sight, fainted, forgot how to walk, and had pains for no reason that doctors could detect. Connie, too, had suffered from symptoms that her male doctors could neither see nor measure. Maybe that is why she was drawn to these patients, and why, by the time she finished medical school, she was concentrating on their treatment.