"The Sacred Domain": Women and the Transformation of Gynecology and Obstetrics in the United States, 1870-1920

This dissertation contends that women - as intellectuals, educators, physicians, activists, consumers, and patients - shaped the dramatic transformation that took place in the medical specialties of gynecology and obstetrics in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century United States. These two specialties were particularly contentious because they were inextricably linked with social, cultural, and political ideas about gender, race, class, sexuality, reproduction, and motherhood. In the resulting climate of chaos and controversy, women themselves played the key roles in resolving medical debates about their bodies. Furthermore, their work had a much broader significance: as women altered medical approaches to female bodies, they influenced a larger discourse about the meaning of normal femininity and the nature of American womanhood. This project is not an institutional history of gynecology and obstetrics but, instead, serves as a social and intellectual history of these specialties. It features women as primary actors and emphasizes significant connections between medical perceptions of women's bodies and social constructions of women's lives. By examining several key issues in these specialties - medical constructions of menstruation, controversies over women's medical education, the contested evolution of surgical gynecology, and the development of prenatal care and obstetric anesthesia - it demonstrates that the physical body served as a battleground for the ideological construction of women in society. As women worked from inside and outside the medical community to define what it meant to have a healthy, normal female body, they also constructed larger visions of what it meant, fundamentally, to be a healthy, normal American woman.2016-06-1