ABSTRACT
During the Belle Époque, female health and sexuality became heated political issues, situated in discourses about race and eugenics as well as women’s rights. Contraception had become more available and slowly gained acceptance, but as Aletta Jacobs shows, feelings were impassioned, and contraception was not well received even among medical personnel. Large families continued to exist, and in Figure 2.6, note the arrangement of the picture, and that the wife is again pregnant. Josephine Butler’s campaign against the English Contagious Diseases Acts was one of the most important manifestations of the reaction to discourses that perceived women’s bodies as needing policing, a campaign she took to international audiences. At the fourth congress of Russian physicians, Dr Ekunina-Fiveskaya, a pioneer female doctor like Jacobs, described in meticulous detail the operation of a compulsory clinic for prostitutes in Moscow. Depicted as a well-run and efficient operation, it implies that inspections were in the prostitutes’ best interest. Both passages also are reminders of the kinds of work many early female doctors either chose or were allocated.
