A Monster of Virtues: Female Ideality, (Dis)ability, and Nineteenth-Century Womanhood

My dissertation, A Monster of Virtues: Female Ideality, (Dis)ability, and Nineteenth-Century Womanhood, investigates how female ideality served as a precursor for the development of three ideologies commonly critiqued by critical disability studies: the individual responsibility for health, the absence of futurity for disabled people, and the role of wage labor in the construction of (dis)ability. Combining the theories and methods of feminist disability studies, history, and literary study, I revise the history of (dis)ability in the U.S., particularly the its rootedness in the concept of normalcy, through an exploration of lives and writings of nineteenth-century women. I argue that, instead of normalcy, many of current ideas of (dis)ability originate in a prescriptive ideal Womanhood—unachievable, but not imagined as such —which I name “female ideality.” I turn to diaries, letters, and fictional works written by nineteenth-century U.S. women to explore how female ideality not only shaped ideologies of (dis)ability today, but, as these authors show, had material effects then. These authors link illness, invalidism, ill-health, and debility to the wear-and-tear of the conflicting responsibilities of wife, mother, and community member, each defined by their own rubrics of the ideal