“The Purity of Truth”: Nineteenth-Century American Women Physicians Write about Delicate Topics

Abstract

This article examines the strategies nineteenth-century American women physicians used to maintain a respectable ethos when writing about human sexuality and reproduction. In order to make these topics appropriate for women, women physicians strove to alter the connotations surrounding sex, insisting that readers view it from a scientific, socially conscious, pure standpoint. The popularity of these texts suggests that women were active in shaping the scientific and social discourse surrounding “delicate” subjects.

Notes

¹I thank RR reviewers Barbara Heifferon and Vicki Burton for their valuable suggestions for revising this essay and Carol Mattingly for her feedback on earlier drafts.

²For a discussion of women's intervention as patients and as physicians in nineteenth-century discourse about women, “nervousness,” and mental illness, see Nancy M. Theriot. Jane E. Rose makes a similar point when she observes that several nineteenth-century women wrote prescriptive conduct literature and thereby actively influenced notions of ideal womanhood (40).

³For a history of British and American popular medical writing and the related self-help tradition, see Right Living, edited by Charles E. Rosenberg.

⁴The “Self and Sex” series is a collection of eight advice books (four each targeted to men and women) addressing specific life stages (girl/boy, young woman/man, young wife/husband, and middle age) edited by Sylvanus Stall, DD. Stall wrote all four of the books addressed to boys and men; Emma Drake and Mary Wood-Allen each wrote two of the books for girls and women.

⁵While most women physicians who wrote advice texts opposed abortion, one notable exception was Mrs. W. H. Maxwell, MD, who favored abortion when the mother's life was in danger and when a woman had been seduced by an unfaithful lover. I have been unable to locate biographical information about Maxwell, but it seems unlikely that she attended medical school, and it seems possible that she may have been one of those “female physicians” that Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to graduate from a medical school in the United States, cites as a motivation for her pioneering career choice: “The gross perversion and destruction of motherhood by the abortionist filled me with indignation, and awakened active antagonism. That the honourable term ‘female physician’ should be exclusively applied to those women who carried on this shocking trade seemed to me a horror. It was an utter degradation of what might and should become a noble position for women” (76–77).

⁶According to Morantz-Sanchez, the concept of medical professionalism operating before the widespread acceptance of the germ theory of disease “maintained a place for intuition and sympathy and stressed the therapeutic powers of moral and social concerns.” This understanding of medical professionalism was “advocated by and potentially accessible to both sexes” (“Rereading Blackwell” 61). Constructing the role of the physician in this way, however, drew on characteristics associated with women (intuition and sympathy) and suggested that physicians' interests overlapped with the social and moral work delegated to nineteenth-century women.

⁷Wood-Allen wrote What a Young Girl Ought to Know (1897) and What a Young Woman Ought to Know (1892) for the “Self and Sex” series, and Almost a Man (1895), Almost a Woman (1897), Teaching Truth (1892), Child-Confidence Rewarded (1903), and Ideal Married Life (1901) for the “Teaching Truth” series.

⁸While a significant number of nineteenth-century American women physicians practiced “irregular” therapeutics such as homeopathy or hydropathy, the public tended to see these approaches as just as legitimate as “regular” medicine, although many physicians themselves would disagree. Because many leaders of the women's medical movement sought the acknowledgment of the medical establishment, however, most of the prominent women's medical colleges insisted on strict regularity. In fact, Mary Roth Walsh argues that “women practitioners needed the advantages of professionalization more than men. Female physicians, already suspect because of their sex, required corroboration of their expertise to meet a disbelieving public” (15). Likewise, Morantz-Sanchez notes that “many physicians used inadequate schooling as an iron-clad excuse for barring women from membership” (Sympathy 70).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Carolyn Skinner

Carolyn Skinner recently completed her dissertation, a study of the ethical appeals used by nineteenth-century American women physicians in their writing for public audiences. She is currently working on extending that project through an examination of women physicians' professional writing. She teaches at the University of Louisville.