Bodies and Lives in Victorian England

Science, Sexuality, and the Affliction of Being Female

Pamela K. Stone, Lise Shapiro Sanders

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367026110
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429676994
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Medical Theory, Practice & Reference
• Index: History

This volume offers an overview of what it was like to be female and to live and die in Victorian England (c. 1837-1901), by situating this experience within the scientific and social contexts of the times.

With a temporal focus on women's life experience, the book moves from childhood and youth, through puberty and adolescence, to pregnancy, birth, and motherhood, into senescence. Drawing on osteological sources, medical discourses, and examples from the literature and cultural history of the period, alongside social and environmental data derived from ethnographic and archival investigations, the authors explore the experience of being female in the Victorian era for women across classes. In synthesizing current research on demographic statistics, maternal morbidity and mortality, and bioarchaeological evidence on patterns of aging and death, they analyze how changing social ideals, cultural and environmental variability, shifting economies, and evolving medical and scientific understanding about the body combined to shape female health and identity in the nineteenth century. Victorian women faced a variety of challenges, including changing attitudes regarding appropriate behavior, social roles, and beauty standards, while grappling with new understandings of the role played by gender and sexuality in shaping women's lives from youth to old age.

The book concludes by considering the relevance of how Victorian narratives of womanhood and the experience of being female have influenced perceptions of female health and cultural constructions of identity today.

1 Introduction

Why a Book on Victorian Women’s Bodies?

Bodies and Lives in Victorian England: Science, Sexuality, and the Affliction of Being Female offers a broad overview of what it was like to be female and to live and die in Victorian England (c. 1837–1901). With a temporal focus on women’s life experience, this interdisciplinary study moves from childhood and youth, through puberty and adolescence, to pregnancy, birth, and motherhood, into senescence. Reviewing the literature on skeletal remains, and drawing on medical discourses and examples from the literature and cultural history of the period alongside social and environmental data derived from ethnographic and archival investigations, we explore the experience of being female in the Victorian era for women across classes. In synthesizing current research on demographic statistics, maternal morbidity and mortality, and bioarchaeological evidence on patterns of aging and death, we analyze how changing social ideals, cultural and environmental variability, shifting economies, and evolving medical and scientific understanding about the body combined to shape female health (wellness and illness) and identity in the nineteenth century. Victorian women faced a variety of challenges, including changing attitudes regarding appropriate behavior, social roles, and beauty standards, while grappling with new understandings of the role played by gender and sexuality in shaping women’s lives from youth to old age. The book concludes by considering the relevance of how Victorian narratives of womanhood and the experience of being female have influenced perceptions of female health and cultural constructions of identity today.

Two unique features set this text apart from other current scholarship in Victorian history, anthropology, and literary and cultural studies. First, the focus on women’s bodies and lives enables a narrowed scope that attends specifically to questions of female physiology, health, and wellness, without taking the male body as the norm. Second, the interdisciplinary focus on reading science and culture together—through a biocultural approach, defined in detail below—facilitates a set of intersecting questions and perspectives that would otherwise be elided. In the past 30 years, for example, numerous books have been published in the field of Victorian cultural studies, many with a focus on fashion and the body, tropes of femininity, and women’s compliance with, or deviance from, constructed social norms and ideologies of gender in this period. However, none of these texts has adopted the biocultural approach that is a hallmark of this book, and none has examined the Victorian female body using osteological and medical data alongside cultural and historical analysis. The existing scholarship examining the body against the backdrop of industrial/political economies and their implications for Victorian women tends to focus on narrowly defined aspects of life in the Victorian era, such as asylums and mental illness, and fashion (corsets), femininity, and beauty; but often with little or no attention to the impact on the skeletal body, anatomy and physiology, and women’s health. Outside of academia, many websites and blogs explore women’s bodily experience in the Victorian era, but few offer clear information on the sources of their knowledge. In the most egregious examples, women are sensationalized for their roles in the horrific state of the asylum and their place in the world of fashion and beauty; in these cases, women take the stage as the deviant, exotic, and erotic. But women’s everyday lives and lived experiences, and the health issues they suffered as a result of cultural transformations that directly impacted their bodies, are often not discussed. This trend holds true as well for the majority of scholarly articles and research papers in anthropology, as they may address some of the skeletal consequences of changing medical and scientific practices, but they focus largely on disease pathologies. They therefore miss the opportunity to draw on larger cultural and ideological frameworks to explore the role, position, and impact of rapidly transforming social and economic landscapes, alongside changing approaches to medicine and health, on the construction of femininity and the experience of being female during the Victorian era.

In this introductory chapter, we first define the key terms we use throughout the text, among them sex, gender, and sexuality; biocultural approaches and bioarchaeological methods; and the value of using microhistories to elucidate the historical and social contexts for women’s lived experience in the nineteenth century. We then address the theoretical frameworks for our book, among them Foucauldian discourse theory, theories of structural violence and embodiment, gender and queer studies, and critical race studies. Lastly, we offer a brief historical overview of the Victorian era, with particular attention to the significance of the industrial revolution; class difference and struggle; racial difference, the imperial project, and the effects of colonialism on England and its “others”; and new conceptions of sex, gender, and sexuality—all with an eye toward women’s health, wellness and illness, and the cultural role of the female body. Our introduction concludes with an outline of the book’s four main chapters, which trace a temporal overview of women’s life experience, and a brief discussion of our conclusions and opportunities for further research.

Defining Terms: Sex, Gender, and Sexuality

First and foremost, it is important to delimit the scope of our project, particularly with respect to sex, gender, and sexuality. When we use the term “sex,” we mean the biological elements that differentiate male and female physiology, namely the primary and secondary sexual characteristics, that lead to an individual being assigned the sex of “male” or “female” at birth. “Gender,” by contrast, is a much more complex set of individual and cultural definitions and associations, to do with aspects of identity, behavior, and an individual’s relationship to society. And “sexuality” entails all the aspects of human sexual behavior, from sexual orientation to the way one experiences sexual pleasure. “Sex,” therefore, has to do with biological (anatomical and chromosomal) differences, whereas “gender” has to do with the way one identifies, and in many cases the way one is identified by culture and society.

But sex, gender, and sexuality do not necessarily fit such binary definitions. The binary distinction between “male” and female” in the determination of what sex an individual is assigned at birth does not take into account the wide range of anatomical and chromosomal variations in human sexual identity; hence the use of the term “intersex” to represent sexual categories that do not fall neatly into “male” or “female” (Fausto-Sterling 1993, 2000). And “gender” is far more complex than simply identifying as a girl or a boy, a man or a woman. People whose gender identity more or less accords with the sex they were assigned at birth are termed “cisgender”; people whose gender identity does not align with the sex they were assigned at birth use the term “transgender” or simply “trans” to represent their gender identity. Gender-non-conforming, genderfluid, genderqueer, and nonbinary are all terms used to describe the wide array of gender identities and expressions experienced by people today. Sexual orientation, likewise, can be considered on a spectrum rather than as a binary of homosexual or heterosexual. ¹ And since the publication of Judith Butler’s influential text Gender Trouble in 1990, even the conventional distinctions between sex and gender have been shown to be “troubled” by the fact that sex does not exist before or without gender. Butler’s argument regarding the performativity of gender has played an important role in the development of fields such as queer and transgender studies, and has opened up key questions about the nature of sex, gender, and sexuality in contemporary culture as well as in history.

In the Victorian period, sex and gender—and sexuality—were subject to cultural and societal expectations that perpetuated a set of what we would now call gender-normative definitions of male and female, which aligned an individual’s assigned sex with their gender identity and made it difficult for people to adopt alternative modes of gender expression. In an intensely homophobic era in which male homosexuality was not only culturally proscribed but liable to criminal prosecution, and in which (because of cultural assumptions about women’s sexuality or the lack thereof) female homosexuality was practically inconceivable, it was also difficult—if not impossible—for gay, lesbian, and queer people to openly express their sexual orientation without fear of reprisal. Nonetheless, as scholarship in the history of sexuality has shown, Victorians embraced a wide range of gendered and sexual identities, acts, and practices that contradict the popular perception of Victorian culture as prudish, repressed, and sexually inactive (Marcus 1966; Foucault 1976; Sedgwick 1985, 1990). In fact, the Victorian period is one of the most fascinating eras for the study of changing conceptions of gender and sexuality, as we explore at greater length below.

For the purposes of this book, when we use the phrase “Victorian women,” we mean people who defined themselves as women in the nineteenth century, some of whom may or may not have identified with the sex they were assigned at birth. When we use the phrase “the female body,” we intend to signify those elements of sex that are associated with the skeletal, anatomical, and biological definitions of “female.” For the most part, although exceptions do exist in the scholarly and archival record, this means that the association of the terms “women” and “female bodies” presumes a cisgendered understanding of the relationship between sex and gender in the Victorian period—a restricted view, to be sure. However, contemporary scholars are working within a set of complex and intersecting discourses and changing definitions of sexuality in nineteenth-century England, and we still have much to learn about the ways in which Victorians navigated their own understandings of sex, gender, and sexuality.

Microhistories and Historical Contexts

A microhistory approach is one in which smaller units of research (events, communities, settlements, even an individual) are explored in order to understand larger, macro-level questions in historical context (Joyner 1999; Lepore 2001). By concentrating on Victorian England and women’s lived experience across classes, and examining critical life stages from birth to death, we can explore how the rapidly developing fields of human science and social analysis become deeply entwined with political ideologies and meaning. Victorian scientists, largely male, white, and from the elite classes, elaborated what they saw as clear-cut distinctions of sex, gender, race, and social status, which in turn resulted in the construction of “normal” and “deviant” bodies that shaped legal and social understandings. In particular, Victorian science and medicine created a narrative of racial hierarchy and difference that took culturally constructed distinctions as biologically determined. These frameworks need to be understood as contingent rather than universal.

Biocultural Approaches and Bioarchaeology

In addition to engaging in microhistorical analysis, we also employ a biocultural approach in developing our analysis of women’s bodies and lives in the Victorian period. This approach requires us to consider multiple lines of inquiry that engage both social and biological understandings of what it means to be female in this era. In this text, we consider how evolving scientific inquiry into human variation is layered onto the lived experiences of people during the nineteenth century, while also considering how people embodied the narratives that science was developing in relation to social expectations. For example, the impact of corsets on the health and wellness of young women did not involve a single factor, but rather constituted a set of biological and social implications for young women that placed them at higher risk for sickness and potential death (as we address in greater detail in Chapter 3). While much of the cultural and biological evidence for our analysis can be gleaned from texts, diaries, medical reports, and many other sources for this time frame, we also consider scholarship that uses a bioarchaeological approach, looking directly at the skeletal body, to understand women’s health, wellness, and illness in the nineteenth century.

Bioarchaeological analysis offers a direct transcript of life. When examined in broader contexts, skeletal traces of health and disease can shed light on the complexity of the lived experience that may not have been articulated within the written literature (Geller 2016). For a study of female lives and bodies in the past, it is not only crucial that multiple lines of inquiry (skeletal, ethnohistoric, archaeological) are used to guide the discussion of gender, ideology, and power; it is also vital to ask whose bodies are being examin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Science, Evolution, and the Female Sex
• 3 Girlhood, Adolescence, and Sexuality
• 4 The Good Mother and the Proper Wife: Marriage, Pregnancy, and Motherhood
• 5 Matriarchs, Menopause, and Death
• 6 Victorian Bodies, Modern Issues
• Index