ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the women’s role in the medical profession was shaped by their response to the notion of separate spheres. The entry of women into bourgeois public life, via philanthropy and the professions, should form an integral part of any full analysis of the public sphere. Habermas implies that the political power inherent in public opinion was denatured over time and, from the mid-Victorian period, was rendered impotent by the gradual emergence of a coercive welfare state. The notion that men and women occupied distinct ‘separate spheres’ formed a powerful ideology throughout the Victorian period. It assumed that women would remain in the home and would devote themselves to all things domestic, while men were concerned with the public world of business, commerce and the professions. The practice of medicine by women doctors at the Edinburgh Hospital for Women and Children reflected this preoccupation with hygienic instruction.
