Bodies and Lives in Victorian England: Science, Sexuality, and the Affliction of Being Female (2020)
Pamela K. Stone (Author)
Lise Shapiro Sanders (Author)
Routledge
Physical Details: 105
Language: English
This volume offers an overview of what it was like to be female and to live and die in Victorian England (c. 1837-1901), by situating this experience within the scientific and social contexts of the times. With a temporal focus on women’s life experience, the book moves from childhood and youth, through puberty and adolescence, to pregnancy, birth, and motherhood, into senescence. Drawing on osteological sources, medical discourses, and examples from the literature and cultural history of the period, alongside social and environmental data derived from ethnographic and archival investigations, the authors explore the experience of being female in the Victorian era for women across classes. In synthesizing current research on demographic statistics, maternal morbidity and mortality, and bioarchaeological evidence on patterns of aging and death, they analyze how changing social ideals, cultural and environmental variability, shifting economies, and evolving medical and scientific understanding about the body combined to shape female health and identity in the nineteenth century. Victorian women faced a variety of challenges, including changing attitudes regarding appropriate behavior, social roles, and beauty standards, while grappling with new understandings of the role played by gender and sexuality in shaping women’s lives from youth to old age. The book concludes by considering the relevance of how Victorian narratives of womanhood and the experience of being female have influenced perceptions of female health and cultural constructions of identity today.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Thesis
Michael Pfeiffer;
(2016)
Whose Gender? Whose Identity? Trans Medicine, Psychiatry, and the Symbolic Order
(/isis/citation/CBB729191686/)
Article
Cryle, Peter;
(2009)
“A Terrible Ordeal from Every Point of View”: (Not) Managing Female Sexuality on the Wedding Night
(/isis/citation/CBB001030577/)
Chapter
Pauline Mortas;
Alain Giami;
Sharman Levinson;
(2021)
Popular Medical Books and Defloration: Shaping Femininity and Masculinity in the Nineteenth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB783675380/)
Article
Segrest, Mab;
(2014)
Exalted on the Ward: “Mary Roberts,” the Georgia State Sanitarium, and the Psychiatric “Speciality” of Race
(/isis/citation/CBB001201824/)
Thesis
Eder, Sandra;
(2011)
The Birth of Gender: Clinical Encounters with Hermaphroditic Children at Johns Hopkins (1940--1956)
(/isis/citation/CBB001567298/)
Article
Diederik F Janssen;
(2021)
Melancholia Scytharum: the early modern psychiatry of transgender identification
(/isis/citation/CBB268608686/)
Book
Fitzherbert, Dionys;
Hodgkin, Katharine;
(2010)
Women, Madness and Sin in Early Modern England: The Autobiographical Writings of Dionys Fitzherbert
(/isis/citation/CBB001214682/)
Book
Stahnisch, Frank;
Steger, Florian;
(2005)
Medizin, Geschichte und Geschlecht: Körperhistorische Rekonstruktionen von Identitäten und Differenzen
(/isis/citation/CBB000610391/)
Book
Klöppel, Ulrike;
(2010)
XX0XY ungelöst: Hermaphroditismus, Sex und Gender in der deutschen Medizin; eine historische Studie zur Intersexualität
(/isis/citation/CBB001220512/)
Book
Reis, Elizabeth;
(2009)
Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex
(/isis/citation/CBB001020415/)
Chapter
Annalisa Cegna;
(2019)
Femminilità pericolose. Le internate nel regime fascista
(/isis/citation/CBB645467414/)
Book
Liliosa Azara;
Luca Tedesco;
(2019)
La donna delinquente e la prostituta: L’eredità di Lombroso nella cultura e nella società italiane
(/isis/citation/CBB265080867/)
Book
Amy Koerber;
(2018)
From Hysteria to Hormones: A Rhetorical History
(/isis/citation/CBB570745124/)
Article
Bernal Borrego, Encarnación;
Calero Delgado, María Luisa;
(2013)
El Discurso Higiénico como Argumento Moralizante de la Mujer: “La Higiene del Bello Sexo” de Ramón Hernández Poggio (1847)
(/isis/citation/CBB001450458/)
Chapter
Rasussen, Ann Marie;
(2013)
Moving beyond Sexuality in Medieval Sexual Badges
(/isis/citation/CBB001201723/)
Article
Cryle, Peter;
Downing, Lisa;
(2009)
Feminine Sexual Pathologies
(/isis/citation/CBB001030574/)
Book
Paulo Drinot;
(2020)
The Sexual Question: A History of Prostitution in Peru, 1850s–1950s
(/isis/citation/CBB330483529/)
Article
Santos, Fabiane Vinente dos;
(2007)
Sexualidade e civilização nos trópicos: gênero, medicina e moral na imprensa de Manaus (1895--1915)
(/isis/citation/CBB000831574/)
Article
Newcombe, Suzanne;
(2007)
Stretching for Health and Well-Being: Yoga and Women in Britain, 1960--1980
(/isis/citation/CBB000850167/)
Book
Forth, Christopher E.;
Crozier, Ivan;
(2005)
Body Parts: Critical Explorations in Corporeality
(/isis/citation/CBB000820036/)
Be the first to comment!