The Legal and Medical Regulation of Nineteenth Century Women

The Legal and Medical Regulation ofNineteenth Century Women PETTICOATS AND PREJUDICES : WOMEN AND LAW IN NINETEENTH CENTURY CANADA . Constance Backhouse . Toronto: Women's Press, 1991. FROM PUNISHMENT TO DOING GOOD: FAMILY COURTS AND SOCIALIZED JUSTICE IN ONTARIO, 1880-1940. Dorothy Chunn. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. THE NATURE OF THEIR BODIES: WOMEN AND THEIR DOCTORS IN VICTORIAN CANADA. Wendy Mitchinson . Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. MARGARET MCWILLIAMS, AN INTERWAR FEMINIST. Mary Kinnear. Montreal : McGill-Queen's University Press, 1991. One of the au current words in Canadian women's history is "regulation." This concept is used to explore a longstanding issue, the social reproduction of gender relations and oppression, but its adherents stress that every mode of regulating gender is fraught with contradictions . The very methods used to assert control, for example, may create entirely new contradictions and new problems needing regulatory solutions.1 This concept of regulation, which draws on French theories of social regulation and some post-structuralist writing, is counterposed to a more limited Marxist political economy, or to inadequate theories of social control, supposedly utilized by the more naive historians of the past. "I didn't think anyone ever talked about social control any more," commented one Canadian historian dismissively at last year's Learneds, confirming the politi~al incorrectness of this concept. Social control, continues this view, denotes the conscious, one-way attempt by those in power to control the behaviour of the more socially marginalized, while regulation Journal ofCanadian Studies Vol. 28, No. I (Primemps 1993 Spring) denotes a complex process in which varieties of overt and inner control may be exerted (sometimes unsuccessfully) and through which the oppressed also exert forms of power. While this discussion of regulation may have exaggerate.d t~e simplicity of social-control theones m order to present regulation as a more sophisticated concept, it has nonetheless raised important questions about the many ways in which both the state and civil society shape women's life choices, and how women react to these forces of regulation. Three recent works in Canadian women's history explore in some detail the regulation and control of women's physical, mental and social lives. These books, by Constance Backhouse, Dorothy Chunn and Wendy Mitchinson, indicate that various kinds of instruction, regulation and control, both subtle and not-so-subtle, were evident in the legal system and the emerging male-dominated medical . profession of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The attempts to shape and control women's lives documented by these authors were by no means always conscious, or successful, and they were sometimes resisted by women. In the long run, as all three authors indicate, the process of regulation - or even "control" - tended to reproduce and reorder systemic power imbalances based on gender and class, rather than fundamentally to alter them. The nineteenth century legal system, argues Constance Backhouse in Petticoats and Prejudice, provides an "almost perfect example of a formal patriarchal institution ." Backhouse's argument is wellsupported by her extensive analysis of the ways in which the law dictated women's rights or lack of them, and shap~d dominant notions of womanhood m nineteenth century Canadian society. For women, the legal system was characterized by glaring contradictions: though women could not be jurors or judges, the1r lives were inevitably and powerfully shaped by the law and its understanding of their proper social and economic roles. 199 Backhouse's chapters are developed around individual cases, often of "ordinary" women: using these cases as examples, she goes on to show the legal consensus on each issue at the time, the historical roots of the law, its application in the courts, and any changes it may have undergone over the period studied. Her ability to evaluate this legal consensus, as well as its social origins and consequences , through the use of varied sources (from court reports and newspaper accounts to fiction of the time) and particularly through the technique of extensive narrative, is commendable, though, at times, the sheer length of her narrative may be overwhelming. Her study is admirable for making legal history accessible to a wide variety of scholars from many disciplines. However, this will not be a...