Final answer:
Catherine Zell was criticized for both her gender and her ideas, much like other intellectual women of her time, such as Simone de Beauvoir and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Critiques of their work often combined gender bias with ideological disagreement, demonstrating the complex nature of cultural attitudes towards women's intellectual contributions.
Step-by-step explanation:
The criticism of Catherine Zell was rooted in both her gender and her ideas. Zell, like other women thinkers such as Simone de Beauvoir and Catharine Beecher, faced opposition due to the cultural expectations of women in their respective eras. De Beauvoir's ideas, for instance, were criticized by those scandalized by her frank discussion of women's bodies and attacks on myths about inherent female characteristics. Such criticisms often conflated her gender with her ideological stance, suggesting that critiques of women's ideas were not entirely separable from their gender. Similarly, critics of the women's suffrage movement, as faced by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, veered towards personal attacks on the basis of femininity, rather than countering the movement's ideas directly. Discussions on gender bias in psychology, as highlighted by Naomi Weisstein, show that women's ideas were distorted by male cultural biases. The navigation through these biases and criticisms necessitated a complex balancing act of asserting both intellectual validity and rightful gender identity—challenges that Zell and her contemporaries contended with culturally, socially, and politically.