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HUMANITIES 259 Parke-Taylor's article, and the catalogue in general, continue the important research the AGO staff and the University of Toronto's Department of Fine Art have .been undertaking for decades on the 'northern romantic tradition,' which has resulted in Robert Welsh's 1966 exhibition on Piet Mondrian, Roald Nasgaard's The Mystic North of 1984, and the recent Group of Seven show. One hopes that this distinguished series will continue. (SERENA KESHAVJEE) .Anrunarie Adams. Architecture in the Family Way: Doctors, Houses, and Women, 1870-19°0 McGill-Queen's University Press. xii, 228. $39.95 The Victorian was undoubtedly a great age of sanitary obsessions. What other era could have given rise to the Ladies' National Association for the Diffusion of Sanitary Knowledge; the International Health Exhibition; domestic science as a school subject; the publication of improving tracts such as 'A Word about Fresh Air' and 'The Power of Soap and Water'; a plan for a utopian city called 'Hygeia'? Plumbing the reports of Mayhew, Chadwick, and Kay Shuttleworth on the moral and physical condition of the working classes, cultural critics andsocial historians have demonstrated that the history of the health movement and Victorian explanations for disease, poverty, slum conditions, and sanitation have a great deal to say about the construction of class and social stratification during the period. We have come increasingly to recognize that the condition-of-England question swirled around working-class domestic spaces as it did factory conditions and labour relations. The domestic was an exemplary site'for associating spaces with bodies and moral attributes, and hence for articulating and defining class differences. Since the 18505, middle- and upper-class women had been closely involved in the 'diffusion of sanitary knowledge.' As Perry Williams and others have shown, the women's sanitary reform movement was an important aspect of a powerful female philanthropic tradition. But to what extent were the homes of middle-class women themselves the locus of anxieties about unsanitary practices? If the middle-class bid for social and political power through the century depended on their claim to moral superiority, then their homes had to be contrastingly free of disorder, slovenliness, and disease. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that middle-class homes were anxiouslyregulated lest they failed to distinguish the bodies they metonymically represented from those of the lower classes or turned out themselves to be conduits of disease instead of guaranteeing the moral and physical superiority of their inhabitants. In Architecturein the Family Way, Annmarie Adams focuses on the period 1870-1900, claiming that these three decades marked a distinct moment in 260 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 which urban middle-class health became the focus of sanitary reformers. But the causes for this heightened sanitary surveillance - certainly wider and deeper than that the Prince of Wales alrnost died of typhoid in 1871warrant a more thorough scrutiny than Adams undertakes. Her study misses an excellent opportunity to contextualize the period in relation to the women's sanitary reform movement and to explore the class implications of anxieties about domestic management. Nevertheless, Architecture in the Family Way is a useful and informative study. In 'five broad essays on Victorian bodies and space/ Adams tackles the network of conflicting interests produced as the emerging field of sanitary science exerted its authority in associating disease and environment. She takes the reader on a fascinating tour of 'The Healtheries/ a grand 1884 exhibition of sanitary and insanitary places; she offers an account of the professional skirmishes between doctors and architects, showing how influential women and doctors werein matters ofdornestic architecture and its reform. The chapteron childbirth at home (confinement, attitudes to home preparation, and the postpartum body) nicely reveals how constructions of a noxious female body allowed for the persistence of medical ignorance and incompetence in the spread of puerperal fever. A fifth chapter on domestic architecture and Victorian feminism is interesting onhow female authority affected the lo~stics of family space and interior decoration. The overall strength of Adams's study is its wealth of detail and illustration from such sources as advice books and domestic manuals, advertisements, furniture catalogues, and plumbing rnanucils. (JILL MATUS) Catherine A. LWldie, editor. Restless Spirits...

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