DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY
MODULE HANDBOOK
DANGEROUS BODIES: WOMEN AND MODERN MEDICINE,
1830-1950
Convenor: Professor Hilary Marland
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Table of Contents
Introduction
3
Intended Learning Outcomes
4
Seminar Format
4
Syllabus:
Seminar 1:
Gender and Medicine: Issues and Context
5
Seminar 2:
Dangerous Childbirth
7
Seminar 3:
The Science of Woman: Frail Bodies and Vulnerable
Minds
Seminar 4:
9
Cleansing and Polluting: Nurses and Domestic
Goddesses
12
Seminar 5:
Sexual Politics: Prostitution and Social Purity
14
Seminar 6:
Dangerous Adolescence
16
Seminar 7:
Race, class and women's health
17
Seminar 8:
Dangerous Mothers: Infanticide to Infant Welfare
18
Illustrative Bibliography
20
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Introduction
The module focuses on women and medicine in the nineteenth century and first half
of the twentieth, exploring the themes of women’s bodies as both endangered and
sources of danger. During this period, women were conceptualised as a new, and
potentially lucrative, client group and a number of special medical fields and services
centring on their health were created, most notably in obstetrics and gynaecology.
These services were increasingly concentrated in institutional settings, thus
representing a move away from the private, domestic sphere where women had
formerly had much control over the health of their families and their own personal
health. The expansion in facilities connected with a wide range of interests: those of
mothers, of doctors, the state, local government, the church, public health
campaigners, feminists, and medical scientists. The module examines how responses
to women’s health issues were influenced by broader social, cultural and political
factors. In the early nineteenth century women’s reproductive bodies became closely
associated with the ideologies of domesticity and motherhood and in the latter part of
the century to their attempts to enter higher education and the professions. Over the
same period heated debates, involving reformers, pressure groups and legislators,
focused on female sexuality, and most particularly the regulation of prostitution. In
the twentieth century the state and medical profession became actively involved in
promoting maternal and infant welfare and scientific motherhood. New interest
groups moved into place as more women qualified in medicine, and as midwives,
nurses and health visitors took on the vestiges of professionalisation. Women were
never merely recipients of these new services; many actively campaigned for them,
and in some cases organised and led them.
Students will be asked to question the impact of prevailing ideologies on women and
medicine, to explore women’s perceptions and actions concerning their own health
issues, and the gap between rhetoric and practice, through exploring select primary
sources and a selection of film material as well as the rich secondary literature. The
focus is particularly on Britain and North America, but students with specific interests
are encouraged to explore different national contexts.
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Intended Learning Outcomes

Further development of seminar participation and presentation skills;

An ability to conduct and critically assess comparative analyses of historical
trends and to engage with interdisciplinary approaches to the study of the
history of medicine and health;

To provide experience of historical research, involving the framing of a
question and writing a 5,000 word assessed essay, the selection of appropriate
material, a discussion of approach and methodology, independent evaluation of
contrasting evidence and scholarly interpretations, and the formulation of
substantial conclusions;

The ability to handle a range of historical sources, and to gain awareness of
the work of scholars in other disciplines, including women and gender studies,
cultural studies, sociology, social policy, social anthropology, literary studies,
and medicine.
Seminar Format
We will follow a seminar format, so the success of the course is largely dependent
upon the amount of reading and preparation undertaken by those participating and
leading the seminars. In Week 1 we will meet briefly to discuss the course outline
and the structure of the course and topics. As many as possible of the items listed
under the weekly topics should be read. Before the first meeting it would be helpful to
dip into the reading listed below under illustrative bibliography.
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Seminar 1: Gender and Medicine: Issues and Context
Over the last two decades feminist and medical historians have directed their research
interests towards the health care of women and children. This session will commence
with a brief overview of a selection of this literature.
The focus on women’s health in the late nineteenth century was largely driven by
what was becoming a highly developed, though often erratic, rationale concerning
their nature and physical and mental make-up. Driven particularly by the workings
and malfunctioning of their reproductive organs, women were depicted increasingly as
‘patients of nature’. Gynaecologists enthusiastically grasped this rationale in their
eagerness to build up a client group, and it was used by midwifery practitioners to
explain women’s diminished ability to give birth naturally (both topics will be covered
in more detail in the next two weeks). Importantly, women (along with children)
were depicted increasingly as a lucrative client group, and a source of income and
expertise not just for specialists in obstetrics and the diseases of women, but also
general practitioners of medicine. Yet women would retain some control in the
domestic sphere of health care in the family.
Readings
Primary source

*Extracts Pat Jalland and John Hooper, Women from Birth to Death: The
Female Life Cycle in Britain (1986), Part 1.2.

*Nancy M. Theriot, ‘Women’s voices in nineteenth-century medical discourse: a
step toward deconstructing science’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and
Society, 19 (1939), 1-31.

*M. Poovey, ‘”Scenes of an indelicate character”: the medical “treatment” of
Victorian women’, Representations, 14 (1986), 137-68.

*Anne Digby, ‘Women’s biological straitjacket’, in Susan Mendus and Jane
Rendall (eds), Sexuality and Subordination: Interdisciplinary Studies of Gender
in the Nineteenth Century (1989), 192-220.

*Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and Charles E. Rosenberg (eds), ‘The Female
Animal: Medical and Biological Views of Woman and Her Role in NineteenthCentury America’, Judith Walzer Leavitt (ed.), Women and Health in America’,
2nd edn (1999), pp.111-30.

*Anne Digby, Making a Medical Living: Doctors and Patients in the English
Market for Medicine, 1720-1911 (1994), ch. 9.

Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine
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between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1989), esp. chs 2 and 3 but
read as much as possible.

Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud
(1990), esp. chs 5 and 6.

Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of
Womanhood (1989), esp. chs 3 and 4.

Ornella Moscucci, The Science of Woman: Gynaecology and Gender in England,
1800-1929 (1990), ch. 1,

Patricia Branca, Silent Sisterhood: Middle-Class Women in the Victorian Home
(1975), Part II.
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Seminar 2: Dangerous Childbirth
From being a female-directed activity, where midwives had a monopoly over
midwifery practice, male practitioners invaded the lying-in chamber particularly from
the eighteenth century onwards, and became increasingly involved in normal
childbirth. Birth was increasingly depicted as full of risk for mothers. This trend
continued into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Experiences varied throughout
Europe and North America, and seem to have been closely related to midwives’
success in obtaining legal recognition, a licensing system and training. As midwives
strove to gain professional recognition, this also brought them into conflict with their
traditional counterparts, the ‘handywomen’, themselves seen as a source of danger.
The nature of childbirth changed in other ways, principally becoming more
interventionalist, and at the turn of the twentieth century the shift to the hospital
commenced, first steadily and then after the 1930s at an accelerated rate.
We will focus closely on one particular expression of the changes in childbirth practice
and attendance, the richly-documented ‘American midwife debate’. At the turn of the
century midwives still attended over half of all deliveries in most Western countries,
but by 1930 the picture had changed dramatically. In the United States this reached
an apogee: the midwife had been largely squeezed out, due to a vitriolic campaign
waged by many influential medical practitioners, determined to wrest all midwifery
practice away from the midwife, who was depicted as being dangerous, dirty and ‘unAmerican’. Childbirth was defined as ‘pathological’, requiring the attention of the
obstetrician in hospital, with instrumental intervention becoming standard. The
justification was that this form of childbirth assistance would improve conditions and
maternal and infant survival rates. The reverse came to pass, as maternal mortality
rates soared. By 1900 there was nowhere in the western world more dangerous to
give place than the United States. The US was the extreme example, but many
countries were sharing in this trend towards a male takeover of childbirth,
hospitalization and increased medical intervention. We will also view sections of the
1931 film ‘The Forgotten Frontier’, depicting the experiences of the Kentucky Nursing
Service.
Readings
Primary sources

* Extracts Jalland and Hooper, Women from Birth to Death, Parts 3.2, 3.4.

Film viewing: ‘The Forgotten Frontier’, 1931 (in seminar)

* Judith Walzer Leavitt, Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America 1750-1950
(1986), ch. 2.
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
* Jane B. Donegan, ‘”Safe Delivered,” but by whom?: Midwives and MenMidwives in Early America’, in Leavitt, Women and Health in America, 1st edn,
302-17.

Nancy Schrom Dye, ‘Mary Breckinridge, the Frontier Nursing Service, and the
Introduction of Nurse-Midwifery in the United States’, in Leavitt, Women and
Health in America, 1st edn, 327-43.

* Joan Mottram, ‘State control in local context: public health and midwife
regulation in Manchester, 1900-1914’, in Hilary Marland and Anne Marie
Rafferty (eds), Midwives, Society and Childbirth: Debates and Controversies in
the Modern Period (1997), 134-52.

Ann Oakley, The Captured Womb: A History of the Medical Care of Pregnant
Women (1984), esp. ch. 1.

Ornella Moscucci, The Science of Woman: Gynaecology and Gender in England,
1800-1929 (1990), ch. 2.

Jean Donnison, Midwives and Medical Men: A History of the Struggle for the
Control of Childbirth (1977, new edn 1988), esp. chs 2, 3 and 4.

*Anne Witz, Professions and Patriarchy, Routledge, 1992, ch. 4.

Nicky Leap and Billie Hunter, The Midwife’s Tale: An Oral History from
Handywoman to Professional Midwife (1993).
American midwife debate:

* Judith Barrett Litoff, The American Midwife Debate (1986) (extracts in
box).

* Frances E. Kobrin, ‘The American midwife controversy: a crisis of
professionalization’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 40 (1966), 350-63.

* Irvine Loudon, ‘Maternal mortality: 1880-1950. Some regional and
international comparisons’, Social History of Medicine, 1 (1988), 183-228 or
Loudon, ‘Midwives and the quality of maternal care’, in Marland and Rafferty
(eds), Midwives, Society and Childbirth, 180-200.
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Seminar 3: The Science of Woman: Frail Bodies and Vulnerable
Minds
We will focus in this week’s seminar on how biological interpretations of female
susceptibility and understandings of the apparently treacherous female reproductive
cycle impacted in the fields of gynaecology and psychiatry. Both specialties were
emerging during the nineteenth century and attracting growing numbers of
practitioners, who saw more and more female patients in gynaecological wards,
hospitals and clinics and in asylums. Matters took a particularly sinister twist with
operations to remove the ovaries becoming one of the major developments of internal
surgery in the nineteenth century and the craze for clitoridectomies to ‘cure’ hysteria
and masturbation. However, doctors were ranged on different sides of the debate
concerning the value of these interventions. Many practised conservative
gynaecology, and it is certainly true that women benefited from many of the new
procedures on offer, which improved their reproductive and general health. In
psychiatry it is important too to look for alternative explanations to explain women’s
mental disorder. While ideals of ‘proper’ feminine behaviour shaped the definition and
treatment of female insanity as women were brought into lunatic asylums in
increasing numbers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, asylum
doctors also took the poor health status of women, poverty and stress into account
when reaching a diagnosis. Neurasthenia emerged as a new sickness category in the
late nineteenth century, situated between physical and nervous disorders, and bound
apparently to a particular historical moment and setting.
Readings
Primary sources

* Extracts Jalland and Hooper, Women from Birth to Death, Part 4.4.

* Mary Putnam Jacobi, ‘Do women require mental and bodily rest during
menstruation?’ (1886), in David J. Rothman, Steven Marcus and Stephanie A.
Kiceluk, Medicine and Western Civilization (1995, 2000), 97-102.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper, 1892 (there are many editions
and reprints of this, but one of the most useful is Dale M. Bauer (ed.), The
Yellow Wallpaper (1998), which has an excellent supporting literature).

* Anne Digby, ‘Women’s biological straitjacket’, in Susan Mendus and Jane
Rendall (eds), Sexuality and Subordination: Interdisciplinary Studies of Gender
in the Nineteenth Century (1989), 192-220.

* Ann Douglas Wood, ‘”The fashionable diseases”: women's complaints and
their treatment in nineteenth-century America’, and Regina Markell Moranz
(reply to Wood), ‘The perils of feminist history’, in Leavitt (ed.), Women and
Health in America, 1st edn, 222-38, 239-45.
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
Ornella Moscucci, The Science of Woman: Gynaecology and Gender in England,
1800-1929 (1990), chs 3 and 4.

Judith M. Roy, ‘Surgical Gynecology’, in Apple (ed.), Women, Health, and
Medicine in America, ch. 7.

Lawrence D. Longo, ‘The rise and fall of Battey’s operation: a fashion in
surgery’, in Leavitt (ed.), Women and Health in America, 1st edn, 270-84.

Ann Dally, Women under the Knife: A History of Surgery (1991).

Deborah Kuhn McGregor, From Midwives to Medicine: The Birth of American
Gynaecology (1998).

Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture,
1830-1980 (1985), esp. chs 2-6.

SLC Elaine Showalter, ‘Victorian Women and Insanity’, Victorian Studies, 23
(1979-80), 157-81; reprinted in Andrew Scull (ed.), Madhouses, Mad-Doctors
and Madmen (1981), 313-36.

Jonathan Andrews and Anne Digby (eds), Sex and Seclusion, Class and
Custody: Perspectives on Gender and Class in the History of British and Irish
Psychiatry (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004).

Vieda Skultans, Madness and Morals: Ideas on Insanity in the Nineteenth
Century (1975), ch. VIII ‘Feminine Vulnerability’ (useful extracts on women
and insanity).

Vieda Skultans, English Madness: Ideas on Insanity 1580-1890 (1979), ch. 6
‘Femininity and Illness’, 77-97.

Wendy Mitchinson, The Nature of their Bodies: Women and their Doctors in
Victorian Canada (1991), chs 10 and 11, ‘Women and mental health’ and
‘Insane women: their symptoms and treatment’.

Nancy Theriot, ‘Diagnosing Unnatural Motherhood: Nineteenth-Century
Physicians and “Puerperal Insanity”’, American History, 26 (1990), 69-88,
reprinted Leavitt (ed.), Women and Health in America, 2nd edn, 405-21.

* Hilary Marland, ‘Disappointment and desolation: women, doctors and
interpretations of puerperal insanity in the nineteenth century’, History of
Pyschiatry, 14 (2003), 303-20.

Barbara Sicherman, ‘The Uses of a Diagnosis: Doctors, Patients, and
Neurasthenia’, Journal of the History of Medicine, 32 (1977), 33-54.

SLC David G. Schuster, ‘Personalizing Illness and Modernity: S. Weir Mitchell,
Literary Women, and Neurasthenia, 1870-1914’, Bulletin of the History of
Medicine, 79 (2005), 695-722.

Janet Oppenheim, “Shattered Nerves”: Doctors, Patients, and Depression in
Victorian England (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), esp.
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ch. 6 ‘Neurotic Women’.

Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra and Roy Porter (eds), Cultures of Neurasthenia: From
Beard to the First World War (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2001), esp
chapters by Tom Lutz, Mathew Thomson and Michael Neve).

Thomas Lutz, American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History (Cornell
University Press, 1991).
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Seminar 4: Cleansing and Polluting: Nurses and Domestic
Goddesses
This session will focus on women’s traditional health role, nursing, and its dramatic
evolution. Changes in nursing practice and education during the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries took place against the backdrop of hospital reform, and the
typology of the nurse shifted from the Sairey Gamp imagery of drunken old hag to a
new image of a virginal, malleable young girl, an angel in white. While nursing
offered new opportunities to women, work in an institutional context dominated by
doctors brought its own problems of hierarchy and restriction. At the kernel of reform
were debates on hygienic practices and standards, as the nurse became an agent of
cleanliness, yet at the same time women’s bodies were themselves framed as polluted
and dangerous. Domestic hygiene also became the focus of reformers in the late
nineteenth century, and lack of cleanliness in the home firmly attributed to women,
especially mothers. At the turn of the twentieth century women reformers used the
germ theory of diseases to urge ever higher standards of hygiene in the home.
Readings

Alison Bashford, Purity and Pollution: Gender, Embodiment and Victorian
Medicine (1998), esp chs 1-3.

* Rima D. Apple, ‘Image or reality? Photographs in the history of nursing’, in
Anne Hudson Jones (ed.), Images of Nurses: Perspectives from History, Art,
and Literature (1988), 40-62.

* Nancy Tomes, ‘”Little world of our own”: The Pennsylvania Hospital Training
School for Nurses, 1895-1907’, in Leavitt (ed.), Women and Health in America,
1st edn, 467-81.

Joan Lynaugh, ‘Institutionalizing women’s health care in nineteenth- and
twentieth-century America’, in Apple (ed.), Women, Health, and Medicine in
America, ch. 10.

* Anne Witz, Professions and Patriarchy (1992), ch. 5.

* Perry Williams, ‘The laws of health: women, medicine and sanitary reform,
1850-1890’, in Marina Benjamin (ed.), Science and Sensibility: Gender and
Scientific Enquiry 1780-1945 (1991), 60-88.

Celia Davies, ‘The health visitor as mother’s friend: a woman’s place in public
health, 1900-14’, Social History of Medicine, 1 (1988), 39-59.

* Nancy Tomes, ‘Spreading the germ theory: sanitary science and home
economics, 1880-1930’, in Leavitt (ed.), Women and Health in America, 2nd
edn, 596-611.

Nancy Tomes, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in
American Life (1998).

B. Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the
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Experts’ Advice to Women (1978), ch. 5 (Microbes and the Manufacture of
Housework).

Judith Walzer Leavitt, Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public’s Health (1996).

* Judith Walzer Leavitt, ‘Gendered expectations: women and early twentiethcentury public health’, in Leavitt (ed.), Women and Health in America, 2nd edn,
612-33.

There are also a number of websites on Typhoid Mary.
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Seminar 5: Sexual Politics: Prostitution and Social Purity
This week’s seminar continues with the theme of purity and pollution, exploring
medico-moral systems of knowledge and power as related to the surveillance of
sexuality and mapped on to attitudes towards birth control, prostitution and venereal
disease.
The focus will be mainly on primary sources and film material, try to look briefly at
the Margaret Sanger papers (accessed through the NLM site: go to history of medicine
collections, on-line catalogues, locater plus, then search under Margaret Sanger,
Margaret Sanger Papers Project (electronic resource) – you need to register which is
straightforward)
Readings
Primary sources

* Jalland and Hooper, Women from Birth to Death, Parts 3.3, 4.1 and 4.5.

* Eleanor S. Riemer and John C. Fout (eds), European Women. A Documentary
History, 1789-1945 (1983), selected extracts from Part 4.

* Extracts from Lesley Hall (ed.), Outspoken Women: An Anthology of
Women’s Writing on Sex, 1870-1969 (2005).

* Extracts from Postwar Venereal Disease Control. Proceedings, National
Conference, St. Louis, Missouri, November 1944 (Washington, 1945).
In the session we will view three films around the topic of venereal disease control in
the US during and immediately after World War II: ‘Venereal Disease Rapid Treatment
Center (1944, 10 mins), ‘Easy to Get’ (1947, 22 mins) and ‘The Miracle of Living’
(1947, 39 mins)
Key Seminar Reading

Allan Brandt, No Magic Bullet: A Social History of VD in the United States since
1880 (1985).

Frank Mort, Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England since 1830
(1987, new edn 2000).

Linda Gordon, The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics
in America (2002).

* Linda Gordon, ‘Voluntary motherhood: the beginnings of feminist birth
control ideas in the United States’ in Rima D. Apple and Janet Golden (eds),
Mothers & Motherhood: Readings in American History (1997), 423-43 and
Judith Walzer Leavitt, Women and Health in America, 2nd edn, pp.253-68.

* Andrea Tone, ‘Contraceptive consumers: gender and the political economy of
birth control in the 1930s’, in ibid., pp.306-325.

Roy Porter and Lesley Hall, The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual
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Knowledge in Britain, 1650-1950 (1995), esp. chs 8-11.

Mary Spongberg, Feminizing Venereal Disease: The Body of the Prostitute in
Nineteenth-Century Medical Discourse (1997).

Maria Luddy, Prostitution and Irish Society 1800-1914 (2007).
Additional Reading

Sheila Jeffreys, ‘Women and sexuality’, in June Purvis (ed.), Women’s History.
Britain, 1850-1945 (1995), 193-216.

Lucy Bland, English Feminism & Sexual Morality 1885-1914 (1995).

F.B. Smith, ‘The Contagious Disease Acts reconsidered’, Social History of
Medicine, 3 (1990), 197-215 (and responses in subsequent issues).

Susan Kingsley Kent, Sex & Suffrage in Britain 1860-1914 (1987), esp. chs 2
and 4.

M. Sigsworth and T.J. Wyke, ‘A study of Victorian prostitution and venereal
disease’, in Martha Vicinus (ed.), Suffer and be Still: Women in the Victorian
Age 1972), 77-99.

Paula Bartley, Prostitution: Prevention and Reform in England, 1860-1914
(2000), esp. Part IV.

Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the
State (1980).

Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in
Late-Victorian London (1992).

Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexual Attitudes (1994).

Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870-1918 (1993),
ch. 4.

* Patricia Knight, ‘Women and abortion in Victorian and Edwardian England’,
History Workshop Journal, 4 (1977), 57-68.

Patricia Branca, Silent Sisterhood: Middle-Class Women in the Victorian Home
(1975), ch. 7.

Angus McLaren, Twentieth-Century Sexuality: A History (1999), esp. chs 3 and
4.
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Seminar 6: Dangerous Adolescence
Returning to the themes of the impact of biology on women’s physical and mental
health, this week we will focus on ‘disorders’ associated with female adolescence, a
time of particular danger for women. Adolescence was associated with menstrual
problems, chlorosis, anorexia nervosa, and hysteria, and was represented as a
cultural and medical turning point for women.
I will bring some illustrative material and extracts from advice literature for women to
the seminar, to open up the issue of how responses to female adolescence might have
shifted around 1900.
Readings
Primary source

* Pat Jalland and John Hooper, Women from Birth to Death: The Female Life
Cycle in Britain 1830-1914 (1986), Part 2.1-2.4.

Helen King, The disease of virgins: green sickness, chlorosis and the problems
of puberty (2004).

* Elaine and English Showalter, ‘Victorian women and menstruation’, in Martha
Vicinus (ed.), Suffer and be Still: Women in the Victorian Age (1980), 38-44.

* Vern Bullough and Martha Voight, ‘Women, menstruation, and nineteenthcentury medicine’, in Leavitt (ed.), Women and Health in America, 1st edn, 2837.

* Irvine Loudon, ‘Chlorosis, anaemia and anorexia nervosa’, British Medical
Journal, 281 (20-27 Dec. 1980), 1669-75.

* Joan Jacobs Brumberg, ‘From psychiatric syndrome to “communicable”
disease: the case of anorexia nervosa’, in Charles E. Rosenberg and Janet
Golden (eds), Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History (1997), 134-54.

* Joan Jacobs Brumberg, ‘Chlorotic girls, 1870-1920: a historical perspective
on female adolescence’, in Leavitt (ed.), Women and Health in America, 1st
edn, 186-95.

‘”Something happens to girls”: menarche and the emergence of the modern
American hygienic imperative’, in Leavitt (ed.), Women and Health in America,
2nd edn, 150-71.

Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a
Modern Disease (1998).

Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls,
(1998).

* Ann Chisholm, ‘Incarnations and practices of feminine rectitude: nineteenthcentury gymnastics for U.S. women’, Journal of Social History, 38 (2005), 73763.
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Seminar 7: Race, class and women’s health
This week we will explore the complex intersections between race, class and women’s
health issues in North America. The literature around this subject is rich and diverse
and in recent years has included material on black nurses, midwives, particularly in
the Southern States, and the experiences of black patients. Several of the themes we
have touched upon reappear in this context – inadequate provision of services, poor
health status and discriminatory attitudes – but we need to question how far these
were experiences solely linked to race, or also class and gender.
Readings
Primary Sources

Extracts from Margaret Charles Smith and Linda Janet Homes, Listen to me
Good: The Life Story of an Alabama Midwife (Columbus, Ohio, 1996).

The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment http://thetalkingdrum.com/tus.html

* Susan L. Smith, ‘Neither Victim nor Villain: Nurse Eunice Rivers, the
Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, and Public Health Work’, Journal of Women’s
History, 8 (1996), pp.95-113.

* Molly Ladd-Taylor, ‘“Grannies” and “Spinsters”: Midwife Education under the
Sheppard-Towner Act’, Journal of Social History, 22 (1988), pp.255-75.

* Darlene Clark Hine, ‘“They Shall Mount up with Wings as Eagles”: Historical
Images of Black Nurses, 1890-1950’, in Leavitt, 2nd edn, pp.475-88.

* Susan L. Smith, ‘White Nurses, Black Midwives, and Public Health in
Mississippi, 1920-1950’, in Leavitt, 2nd edn, pp.444-58.

* Diane Price Herndl, ‘The Invisible (Invalid) Woman: African-American
Women, Illness, and Nineteenth-Century Narrative’, Leavitt 2nd edn, pp. 13145.

Susan Smith, Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired: Black Women’s Health
Activism in America, 1890-1950 (1995).

Darlene Clark Hine, Black Women in White: Racial Conflict and Cooperation in
the Nursing Profession 1890-1950 (1989).
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Seminar 8: Dangerous Mothers: Infanticide to Infant Welfare
This week’s seminar explores issues around mothers as a source of danger to their
infants, ranging from the outcry about the high levels of infanticide in the 1860s to
national anxiety about the survival of infants in early decades of twentieth century as
expressed in the infant welfare campaign. Infanticide flew in the face of the
idealisation of motherhood, and linked to anxieties about milk supply, high infant
mortality and baby-farming scandals. Increasing concern about the health status and
physical shortcomings of servicemen during the Boer War and First World War led to
stepped up activity to save babies’ lives and improve the health of young children, to
prevent the numerical decline and physical and mental deterioration of the race.
Starting with a focus on the welfare of infants, emphasis only slowly shifted to
maternal health in the twentieth century. The health of mothers and babies became a
source of concern for governments, with efforts being made primarily to reform
mothers and improve their mothering skills and encourage breast-feeding, and to
encourage ‘scientific motherhood’.
Readings
Primary sources

Margaret Llewelyn Davies, Maternity: Letters from Working Women, 1915
(Virago ed. 1978).

Document on ‘Infantile Mortality. The Huddersfield Scheme’, 1908.

* Meg Arnot, ‘Infant death, child care and the state: the baby-farming scandal
and the first infant life protection legislation of 1872’, Continuity and Change,
9 (1994), 271-311.

Meg Arnot, ‘The murder of Thomas Sandles: meanings of a mid-nineteenthcentury infanticide’, in Mark Jackson (ed.), Infanticide: Historical Perspectives
on Child Murder and Concealment, 1550-2000 (2002), 249-69.

Tony Ward, ‘Legislating for human nature: legal responses to infanticide,
1860-1938’, in above, 249-69.

Christine L. Kreuger, ‘Literary Defenses and Medical Prosecutions:
Representing Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Victorian Studies, 40
(1997), 271-94.

* George K. Behlmer, ‘Deadly Motherhood: Infanticide and Medical Opinion in
Mid-Victorian England’, Journal of the History of Medicine, 34 (1979), 403-27.

Lionel Rose, Massacre of the Innocents: Infanticide in Great Britain 1800-1939
(1986).

* Ann R. Higginbotham, ‘”Sin of the Age”: Infanticide and Illegitimacy in
Victorian London’, in Kristine Ottesen Garrigan (ed.), Victorian Scandals:
Representations of Gender and Class (1992), 257-88.
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
Josephine McDonagh, Child Murder and British Culture, 1720-1900 (2003).

Patricia Branca, Silent Sisterhood: Middle-Class Women in the Victorian Home
(1975), chs 5 and 6.

* Elizabeth Peretz, ‘The costs of modern motherhood to low income families in
interwar Britain’, in V. Fildes, L. Marks and H. Marland (eds), Women and
Children First: International Maternal and Infant Welfare, 1870-1945 (1992),
257-80.

Lara Marks, ‘Mothers, babies and hospitals: “The London” and the provision of
maternity care in East London’, in above, 48-73.

* Jane Lewis, ‘Mothers and maternity policies in the twentieth century’, in Jo
Garcia, Robert Kilpatrick and Martin Richards (eds), The Politics of Maternity
Care (1990), 15-29.

* Elizabeth Peretz, ‘A maternity service for England and Wales: local authority
maternity care in the inter-war period in Oxfordshire and Tottenham’, in
above, 30-46.

* Hilary Marland, ‘A pioneer in infant welfare: the Huddersfield Scheme 19031920’, Social History of Medicine, 5 (1993), 25-49.

* Alisa Klaus, ‘Depopulation and race suicide: maternalism and pronatalist
ideologies in France and the United States’, in Seth Koven and Sonya Michel
(eds), Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Policies and the Origins of Welfare
States (1993), 188-212.

* Rima D. Apple, ‘Constructing mothers: scientific motherhood in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries’, in Rima D. Apple and Janet Golden (eds),
Mothers & Motherhood: Readings in American History (1997), 90-110.

* Lyubov G. Gurjeva, ‘Child health, commerce and family values: the domestic
production of the middle class in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century
Britain’, in Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra and Hilary Marland (eds), Cultures of Child
Health in Britain and the Netherlands in the Twentieth Century (2003), 103-25.
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Illustrative Bibliography
Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870-1918 (1993).
Alison Bashford, Purity and Pollution: Gender, Embodiment and Victorian Medicine
(1998).
L. Brockliss and A. Hardy (eds), Women and Modern Medicine (2001).
Ornella Moscucci, The Science of Woman: Gynaecology and Gender in England, 18001929 (1990).
Judith Walzer Leavitt (ed.), Women and Health in America (1984, 2nd edition, with
new essays 1999).
Rima D. Apple (ed.), Women, Health, and Medicine in America (1990).
Pat Jalland and John Hooper, Women from Birth to Death: The Female Life Cycle in
Britain (1986).
Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 18301980 (1985).
Joan Jacobs Brumberg, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls
(1997).
Mary Spongberg, Feminizing Venereal Disease: The Body of the Prostitute in
Nineteenth-Century Medical Discourse (1997).
Maria Luddy, Prostitution and Irish Society 1800-1914 (2007).
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