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AWoman’sTouch 81 good lady of the family” with all the fields of knowledge requisite for the proper practice of medicine:anatomy,physiology,pathology,nosology,chemistry,botany, and pharmacy,“beside a knowledge of the dead languages,geometry,and natural and experimental philosophy” (1812: 136). Some women tried to hold on to at least midwifery as an acceptably feminine branch of medicine.The English midwife Elizabeth Nihell argued that men should not “spin, make beds, pickle and preserve, or officiate as a midwife,” thereby locating midwifery within the homely sensory domain of women (Nihell 1760). Women’s presumed competence to care for—or detect—pregnant bodies was based on their own intimate experience of reproduction. In one seventeenthcentury investigation of a supposed illegitimate pregnancy, aYorkshire woman who had examined the accused declared: “If you all say she is with child, she is not,for I have born nine children and I can tell who is with bairn and who is not” (cited by Gowing 2003:45).However,even the care of women in childbirth would come to be the preserve of male doctors in many urban centers.The authority of the doctor concerning the female body did not come from direct embodied experience but rather rested on knowledge gained from more highly regarded sources: medical practice, texts, and anatomical dissection (48). It bears noting that women themselves often preferred being attended by a male doctor, for, aside from his scientific authority, a physician had a higher prestige-value than a midwife (see further Keller 2003). Women could still act as nurses, performing simple, everyday tasks of patient care as long as their manual labors were supervised by the watchful eye of a trained physician.After summing up his case against amateur doctors JamesAdair wrote, “I therefore offer this serious and urgent admonition,that as health and life are at stake,my worthy countrywomen would quit this dangerous medical department and confine themselves solely to the amiable and most worthy office of exercising their humanity and goodness, in taking care that the sick be regularly supplied with foods or medicine, as directed by the medical men, and thereby avoid the hazard of committing a breach of the sixth commandment [thou shalt not kill]”(1812: 139). HannahWooley would have been dismayed to hear that her mother and sisters, whom she so greatly admired for their skill in “Physick and Chirugery,” had in fact been femmes fatales, threatening their victims with a killer touch. Texts and Textiles One skill that a number of women plied contrary to convention was that of writing .Writing had the social advantage for women that it could be undertaken within the feminine domain of the home.When contrasted with the quintessential male instrument of power, the sword, the pen might even seem demurely feminine. Classen_Text.indd 81 3/15/12 2:48 PM 82 chapter four Thus, in an open letter to her husband, the Duke of Newcastle, seventeenthcentury writer Margaret Cavendish contrasted his manly deeds on the battlefield with her own lady-like penwomanship: “[Your actions] have been of war and fighting, mine of contemplating and writing: yours were performed publicly in the field, mine privately in my closet: yours had many thousand eye-witnesses, mine none but my waiting-maids”(Cavendish n.d.:xxxviii).Cavendish here made writing seem a very modest,homey endeavor compared to the aggressive,public, and highly visual act of warfare. Writing, furthermore, arguably bore some manual and metaphorical similarity to the quintessential feminine occupations of spinning and sewing. It was a work of the hand and, if it used words rather than threads, it could still be conceptualized as a kind of weaving.Why could not writing therefore be an approved occupation for women? Provided, of course, that it did not lead them to neglect their housework. Catherine des Roches wrote on this point in the sixteenth century: But spindle, my dearest, I do not believe That much as I love you, I will come to grief If I do not quite let that good practice dwindle Of writing sometimes, if I give you fair share, If I write of your merit, my friend and my care, And hold in my hand both my pen and my spindle. (in Sankovitch 1988: 52) However, while certain kinds of writing—letters, recipes—were approved for elite women, the practice did not form a socially acceptable counterpart to the unquestioned feminine occupation of needlework. For one thing, while needlework had important visual dimensions, it was...

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