Fixing Women: The Birth of Obstetrics and Gynecology in Britain and America - Softcover

Nichols, Marcia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 173554230X ISBN 13: 9781735542300

Publisher: University of California Medical Humanities Press, 2021

Synopsis

Using the tools of book history, media studies, and literary theory, Fixing Women examines the construction of a masculinist professional selfhood in male-authored midwifery textbooks during the long eighteenth-century. Ordinary birth events were cast as archetypal struggles between life and death that required the intervention of the “Hero-Accoucheur,” who fought valiantly to rescue the pregnant damsel-in-distress endangered by her own body. By casting themselves as literary heroes, medical men could present themselves as altruistic, disinterested professionals. Yet under the mask of altruism and scientific curiosity lurked a self-interested, hegemonic masculinity that justified the emerging medical specialties of obstetrics and gynecology—specialties that required the homogenization of white, bourgeois women as “the Sex.” By charting the development of and struggles of obstetrical discourse, Fixing Women sheds light on the gender politics of a biomedical model and practice that continues to reverberate in our own time.

About this title

About the Author

Marcia D. Nichols is Associate Professor in the Center for Learning Innovation at the University of Minnesota Rochester where she teaches literature and medical humanities. She has published on pedagogy and professorial identity, science education, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and medicine.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Medical Humanities Press
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 173554230X
• ISBN 13: 9781735542300
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 235