Bodily Subjects: Essays on Gender and Health, 1800–2000 by Tracy Penny Light, Barbara Brookes, and Wendy Mitchinson (review)

Where should we look for the meaning of “health”? The cover illustration of Bodily Subjects: Essays on Gender and Health, 1800–2000 provocatively suggests a site and method for just such an exploration: a circa 1940s wooden examination table that looks like standard medical office backroom furniture, but when all its pulls and drawers are opened, it reveals a hidden collection of specialized features many of which (like stirrups and a hidden drop pan) are designed for gynecological check-ups. The gendering of health, the editors of this collection posit, is not merely ideological and discursive: it is material. It has “embodied meanings” (3) for men and for women that are culturally and historically specific. From the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries, Western bodies became not only increasingly subject to the medical gaze, but also the primary sites through which “gendered identity was reinforced over time by meanings of health” (5).

The co-construction of Western medical and cultural knowledge, along with its disciplinary tools, is not a new idea to historians of science, medicine, and technology — but the strength of this vibrant collection lies in its comparative approach to this topic, as well as its insistent focus on the political and social consequences of such developments. In this way, Bodily Subjects itself embodies a productive intersectionality of scholarship in social history and material culture (from history, anthropology, and geography) plus gender studies (in sociology, rhetoric, and literature). Taken together, these essays (masterfully curated and edited by Tracy Penny Light, Barbara Brookes, and Wendy Mitchinson) make the case that bodies are at once agents for and reflections of how gender shapes the complex and varied experiences of health and illness.

The chapters’ authors come from a range of perspectives and approaches, but the editors impose coherence on the collection by arranging their case studies into three thematic sections. The advantage of this strategy is that each section provides a rich body of material through which to explore one focused aspect of the gendering of bodies and health.

The first section, “Embodied Citizenship,” considers how health concepts, framed by gender, race, and class, have consequences for defining political rights and responsibilities in different places and times. Patricia Reeve finds — in corporate archives, industrial laws, and trade union publications — evidence that the requirements for American antebellum citizenship, including bodily agency and good hygiene, were shaped by ideals of manliness and masculinity that de facto excluded the “laboring bodies” (37) of slaves, women, and the disabled. Similarly, Marjorie Levine-Clark examines the successes and failures of applications for relief to one English Poor Law Union, and shows how ill health provided both a “respectable source of need” for assistance and a means through which social expectations for men (public work) and women (private domesticity) were enforced. Labour needs, Meg Parsons suggests, also framed the construction of the Cherbourg Aboriginal Settlement as a hygienic, if not healthy, space in which the “medical surveillance of Aboriginal bodies” (82) — specifically, their reproduction and cleanliness — became a means to deny them civil rights and “protect” white society from uncivilized natives. By contrast, Catherine Gidney shows that, while Canadian university students had access to one of the most comprehensive and holistic health care systems in the world, in the 1940s and 1950s its increasing attention to individual self-realization enabled a “reorientation of women’s place on campus” — even while this system also allowed “sexism to remain in obvious, but more insidious, forms” (113).

The second section, “Defining and Contesting Illness,” explores gendered interactions between medicalized bodies and professional authority. Brigette Fuchs’ history of “osteomalacia,” gleaned from Central European medical texts of the 1870s–1890s, shows how concerns about women’s potentially self-destructive reproductive capacities figured prominently in treatments for the softening of their pelvic bones. In turn, Antje Kampf...