Bodies and Lives in Victorian England: Science, Sexuality, and the Affliction of Being Female by Pamela K. Stone and Lise Shapiro Sanders (review)

A slim volume most likely to be used by North American undergraduates, Bodies and Lives in Victorian England: Science, Sexuality, and the Affliction of Being Female has prompted historiographical questions in this reader’s mind. Its central focus is women’s experience in Victorian England, using a multidisciplinary approach, mentioning, for example, archaeological and anthropological perspectives alongside demography and published sources, such as advice books and novels. Based on the authors’ teaching at Hampshire College in Massachusetts, its pedagogic origins are evident in summarizing bullet points at the end of chapters, followed by “questions to consider” (44). Although the dominant voice is a didactic one, some basic issues are left unexplained. Among the most striking is the relationship between England and Britain, with the result that it may be unclear to students just what areas are being considered, especially when both terms appear in a single sentence (for example, on page 9). While slippage between England and Britain is common enough, precision in such matters never goes amiss.

The categories “science” and “scientist” provide neat examples of the need for meticulous conceptualization (5). It is anachronistic to refer to scientists in the nineteenth century, and it helps to be clear about why this matters. For example, they can be read as implying a social, professional, and intellectual homogeneity that did not exist. Consider the following misleading statement: “Victorian science was structured through an understanding of human variation, evolution, and racial progress” (50). It should go without saying that much scientific activity in the period had nothing at all to do with evolution and race. The desire to simplify the past and make it widely accessible is felt by many people both in the media and in academic settings. Far harder to carry off than may be apparent to target audiences, it is necessarily a matter of judgment what level of explanation is appropriate. Undergraduates can, however, grasp more complexity than is offered here. Further, there is a mismatch between the main text and some of the questions to consider. After a chapter that contains merely four paragraphs on Charles Darwin, readers are asked: “How do the racially and gender-biased origins of Darwin’s evolutionary theory call into question ‘objectivity’ even as it is understood as a defining feature of modern science?” (44). While we may want to deconstruct the very question, it seems unlikely that students can assess Darwin’s theory in relation to objectivity on the basis of a short discussion in which his work is neither explored nor contextualized in any meaningful way.

The treatment of Darwin is not an isolated example. Many topics are alluded to so briefly that readers glean little sense of them. Others are treated inaccurately. In a section on demography, it is puzzling, given this is a book about Victorian England, to read about current practice in the United States. The extent to which vital statistics were gathered in the past is underestimated; no mention is made of the decennial census from 1801 onwards, which sheds light on household structures and gendered occupations, or of an interest in gathering vital statistics that goes back to the seventeenth century. Yet more surprising is the absence of references to the superb pioneering research of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, which can be accessed at https://www.campop.geog.cam.ac.uk/. There are many references in the book, but they come across as lacking in discrimination. For instance, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English’s writings were important in the 1970s but have been superseded by recent research that is considerably more nuanced, analytically speaking. There is brilliant work on Darwin with respect to race that is not deployed here. These are just a few indications of the ways in which the book is...