ABSTRACT
Historian Edward Shorter (1982: xi) maintains that women were ravaged by ill health between 1600 and 1900 and that, as long as they were vastly more enervated than men, any conception of personal autonomy was meaningless. He suggests that feminism depended on – effectively waited for – improvements in women’s health. Certainly women died at younger ages than men over much of this period, and living in ill health could have dampened political activity. Far more controversial is Shorter’s insistence that it was the combination of the rise of (male dominated) modern medicine and new ties of sentiment between men and women that delivered women from superstition by dissolving the need for a women’s healing culture and, in the process, improved their health and made feminist politics possible. In other words, ultimately it was men who were important for the development of feminism. An alternative explanation of the association between health and the rise of feminism emphasises the potential of male ideologies and practices to restrain rather than to liberate women. Throughout history patriarchal ideology has construed women’s illness as inherent biological weakness. Moreover, it has been bourgeois women – the women most often in the position to pose a feminist threat – who have needed to be told that they would become ill if they ventured outside of the conventional female role. Catch 22, then: ‘one way or another, by remaining in the female role or attempting to get out of it, the demon disease would attack’ (Duffin 1978: 31). It is reasonable to suppose that in such a climate many women might have thought twice before risking their personal health and well-being by demanding political and social rights. But an analysis of women’s writing and actions in the pursuit of health reveals that, across history, many have done exactly that: that is, both in sickness and in health, they have been far from passive subjects awaiting the enlightenment of men.
