The Eternally Wounded Woman: Women, Doctors, and Exercise in the Late Nineteenth Century (review)

This study by a sports historian is a bit of a throwback to an earlier historiographic era. In the 1970s historians of medicine and women were blaming physicians for a whole range of misogynistic tendencies in Victorian culture. Vertinsky is especially concerned with English and American physicians, pronouncements on exercise and women, and the ways in which they constructed women’s bodies as weak and sickly. She musters a large body of evidence, much of it familiar, to suggest that many physicians did view woman as constantly vulnerable to her reproductive life cycle—puberty, childbirth, and menopause. And, indeed, in the writings of the individuals she focuses on, these periods were depicted as powerful and dangerous stages in a woman’s life, in which her physical well-being needed to be monitored by scientific experts.

Because Vertinsky is more sophisticated in her approach than some of the earlier pioneers in this subject, much of whose work she depends on, she at least raises the question of whether prescriptive evidence and medical writings can serve adequately as the sole evidence for public and private belief and behavior. She argues that they can, primarily because the physicians she cites were social leaders. She is also more sensitive to women’s responses to these ideas, and admits that women themselves participated in the construction of their bodies as vulnerable. She even demonstrates that some women physicians preached moderate versions of biological determinism and were not always able to rise above the notions about women’s frail health that were so deeply embedded in the culture.

Vertinsky treats us to two interesting chapters, one on G. Stanley Hall and the other on Charlotte Perkins Gilman—both of whom held strong opinions about the place of physical exercise for women. Yet one wonders exactly where the ideas of these two, one a psychologist and the other a feminist theorist, fit in a book primarily devoted to the medical profession’s construction of women.

Most disappointing, however, is Vertinsky’s inclination to lump all commentators together, lay people as well as physicians, without regard to their position in the medical profession, their preference for regular or alternative practice, and, most important, their generation, institutional commitment, and specialty. Nancy Theriot and others have shown that physicians took different positions on female ailments depending on whether they were alienists or gynecologists, and other work on the emergence of gynecology suggests that a whole range of professional and specialty concerns, including an interest in laboratory science, made some physicians more sensitive to changing theories than others. None of these subtleties find their way into this book, which, alas, tells us mostly what we already know and are, perhaps, even a bit tired of hearing.