Health and Girlhood in Britain, 1874-1920

H. Marland

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137328137
• eBook ISBN: 9781137328144
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This first major study of girls' health in modern Britain explores how debates and advice on healthy girlhood shaped ideas about the lives of young women from the 1870s to the 1920s, as theories concerning the biological limitations of female adolescence were challenged and girls moved into new arenas in the workplace, sport and recreation.

1

Unstable Adolescence: Medicine and the ‘Perils of Puberty’ in Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain

The late Victorian and Edwardian eras were in many ways times of great opportunity for young women, marked by increased access to secondary, college and university education and paid employment in factories, workshops, offices and professions such as teaching and medicine. New, less restrictive modes of dress and models of body image made headway, associated with the opening up a variety of exercise regimes, sports and recreations to adolescent girls. These opportunities paralleled and, to a certain extent, drove forward a process whereby established ideas of female weakness based on biological vulnerability were challenged and substituted by the ideal of the strong, fit and active modern girl.¹ This was a process that varied greatly across the social classes and, though working-class girls had far fewer opportunities in terms of employment or recreational outlets, as subsequent chapters will demonstrate, it potentially involved all girls regardless of status or location. None of these developments, however, went undisputed on medical, social or moral grounds, or all three combined. The emergence of the vibrant and ambitious modern girl triggered negative responses by social commentators eager to preserve the status quo in terms of the ideals of girlhood embodying the characteristics of femininity, docility and homeliness. These ideals were reinforced by medical theories which described young women as biologically unstable. This instability, many argued, was likely to be intensified by girls’ inappropriate and harmful actions, notably their pursuit of new educational or emancipatory goals, which jeopardised their mental and bodily health.

This and subsequent chapters, however, will argue that depictions of girls as ‘eternally wounded’, frail victims of their biological weakness, were far from monolithic or impermeable. Yet they were certainly durable in many ways, spurred on by influential and widely read authors, notably the French historian Jules Michelet, who explained that for 15 or 20 days out of 28, women were indeed wounded invalids.² The late nineteenth century was notable for the production of a medical literature which dwelt long and hard on the diseases and disorders to which women were prone in connection with the reproductive process, the female life cycle more broadly and the rite of puberty in particular. Concerns about youth focused on boys and girls, but girls, having the extra instability of female adolescence and the onset of menstruation to contend with, were deemed particularly liable to disease, disorder and deviance in behaviour as well as bodily state. Anxiety about the proneness of girls to hysteria reached a peak during this period, while anorexia nervosa was labelled in 1873 as a disorder to which young women were acutely susceptible.

Negotiating the engagement of medical authors with the issue of girls’ health in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, this chapter will suggest that this was complex, fluid and sometimes contradictory, much more than an extension of arguments about women’s limited physical and mental capacity and the centrality of reproduction, which Vertinsky has argued ‘increasingly defined medical views of women’s health and the productive boundaries of their lives’.³ Anxieties about girls’ intrinsic weakness and the dangers of passing through puberty were paramount in much of this literature. That much is clear. Yet, at the same time, this material indicated ways in which girls’ health in general and puberty in particular might be managed to reduce its perils, in a form of damage limitation that would also enable girls to engage with the new opportunities opening up to them. Mary Lynn Stewart has pointed out that in late nineteenth-century France puberty was treated not necessarily as pathological, but as ‘ambivalent’, ‘a transitional time when the body was susceptible to disease, and girls and women were prone to irrationality’.⁴ And even doctors who have been singled out in the historical literature as holding particularly pessimistic views on the predestination of women and girls to poor health and the limits of their biological capabilities, appear to have been willing to explore the potential for girls to improve their health, albeit moderately and incrementally. Around the same time, debates about girls’ mental and physical health began to spill over from medical arenas to engage a wider range of experts, social commentators and writers, as well as more diverse audiences, including girls themselves.⁵ This literature tended not only to engage – sometimes critically – with the question of biological limitation, but also to promote approaches that would enable girls to enhance their health.

This chapter also examines the ways in which ideas about female adolescence as a distinct and vital phase of development became something of a national preoccupation at the turn of the twentieth century, speaking to concerns about the health and fitness of the nation’s youth as a ‘body’ rather than the potentially poor health of individuals. Carol Dyhouse has suggested that historical literature on youth has focused strongly on boys, as has the literature passed down from this period, produced by social and welfare workers and club leaders.⁶ With regard to the historical literature, this rings true; most studies have focused on boys.⁷ But while young men were the main focus of many studies produced around 1900, a number also devoted sections – or even separate volumes – to the particular problems of adolescence for girls, including the health challenges associated with the onset of puberty and their long-term implications for motherhood and the security of the race and the nation.

Girls and fixed funds of energy

Dominating the late Victorian era and persisting well beyond it was the theory that the body contained only a limited supply of vital energy to fuel its physical and mental activities. This energy needed to be ‘husbanded’ and ‘what was spent in one period was bound to be missed in another’.⁸ For women, it needed to be preserved above all else for the reproductive process, and those arguing in support of an expanded range of opportunities for young women would have to contest this theory well into the twentieth century. ‘Biological determinism’, which promoted a limited sphere of action for women in terms of the space of the home and family and the function of childbirth and childrearing, had been expressed in some form or another from the eighteenth century onwards, but such ideas gained particular resonance by the mid-nineteenth century, spurred on by growing professional interest in the diseases of women, notably in the burgeoning fields of gynaecology and psychiatry.⁹ An imposing array of historical literature has suggested the ways in which women were viewed increasingly as the products and prisoners of their reproductive systems which conditioned their health and social roles.¹⁰ This was bolstered too by the more overtly political stance adopted by individual doctors who invested in ideas of gender difference, as women, challenging traditional roles and stereotypes, campaigned to enter public life and higher education and win the vote, as well as to pursue sporting and leisure activities which demanded physical effort and strength as well as a certain amount of ‘nerve force’, all at odds with dominant medico-social ways of viewing the female body. There were also strong economic incentives driving interest in women’s bodies, as the new specialists dealing with female pathology sought audiences and markets for their practices and, to a certain extent, fuelled concerns about the risks associated with the female life cycle.¹¹ Much of this practice would focus on middle-class girls, and most medical interactions would take place in the homes of these girls rather than in medical institutions, though other institutional sites, particularly schools, also devoted a good deal of attention to girls’ health and wellbeing and it should not be assumed that medical men had little or no contact with girls of the working classes. Certainly in their role as factory inspectors or through attendance at girls’ clubs, they began to observe the impact of work on the physical and mental wellbeing of women and girls, while, via dispensary or hospital employment or in private practices devoted to poor patients, they were able to note the ways in which poverty imposed itself on girls’ development and susceptibility to illness.

By the third quarter of the nineteenth century medical practitioners had evolved an ‘economic’ model to explain how women’s reproductive systems interacted with other parts of the body, especially the brain, depicting ‘the body as a closed system in which organs and mental faculties competed for a finite supply of physical or mental energy; thus stimulation or depletion in one organ resulted in exhaustion or excitation in another part of the body’.¹² The notion that women had fixed amounts of vital energy to draw on had particular resonance when it came to describing puberty and the onset of menstruation. The philosopher, political theorist and ‘supreme ideologue of the Victorian period’ Herbert Spencer famously described nature as ‘a strict accountant’ and objected to the ‘forcing system’ of girls’ education which resulted in London drawing rooms full of ‘pale, angular, flat-chested young ladies’. ‘By subjecting their daughters to this high-pressure system, parents frequently ruin their prospects in life. Besides inflicting on them enfeebled health, with all its pains and disabilities and gloom, they not infrequently doom them to celibacy.’¹³

The two high priests of the ‘fixed fund of energy’ theory, Harvard Professor Edward H. Clarke and eminent British psychiatrist Dr Henry Maudsley, were remarkably successful in propagating their ideas on both sides of the Atlantic, reflecting a broader flow of medical information and medical texts between the two nations. In many ways, they were not presenting new ideas, but ‘merely publicized the new scientific evidence for prejudices which had existed throughout the century’.¹⁴ Their pronouncements met with a receptive audience, particularly as they engaged with current and pressing issues, notably the question of whether young women were fit to attend at high schools and universities and the impact that brain work might have on their future capacity to bear healthy children. Edward Clarke argued that excessive physical or mental labour would reduce the supply of nerve energy to the female reproductive system, and that schoolgirls were at risk of developing neuralgia, uterine disease, hysteria and other damage to health and the nervous system.¹⁵ If education interfered with the establishment of healthy, regular menstruation, according to Clarke, it could result in halted development, with girls graduating ‘from school or college excellent scholars, but with underdeveloped ovaries. Later they married, and were sterile.’¹⁶ Clarke did not deny that women were capable of learning, though he firmly opposed co-education, and stressed that ‘they must do it all in woman’s way, not in man’s way’. ‘For both sexes, there is no exception to the law, that their greatest power and largest attainment lie in the perfect development of their organization. If we would give our girls a fair chance . . . we must look after their complete development as women.’¹⁷ As Julie-Marie Strange has suggested, Clarke grounded ‘the notion that women’s educational opportunities should be restricted in a language of biology and scientific empiricism rather than (fallible) social theory’, thus setting ‘an important precedent for shifting prejudice into the realm of physiological fact’; those disputing his claims, by trying to overcome their physiology, ‘were, therefore, biologically and psychologically deviant’.¹⁸

In many ways though, theories based on economics, biology and social theory conspired and, in the case of Henry Maudsley, also joined with concerns about social and mental degeneration. Maudsley warned in ‘Sex in Mind and in Education’, which appeared in an 1874 issue of the Fortnightly Review – an influential journal offering a platform for a wide range of social issues – that overspending vital energy threatened to cause menstrual disorders and mental breakdown, and potentially to destroy women’s capacity to bear healthy children. Women, he argued, should not attempt to run alongside men, even women who did not aspire to marry and bear children: ‘They cannot choose but to be women; cannot rebel successfully against the tyranny of their organization.’ ‘The important physiological change which takes place at puberty . . . may easily overstep its health limits, and pass into pathological change . . . nervous disorders of a minor kind, and even such serious disorders as chorea, epilepsy, insanity, are often connected with irregularities or suspension of these important functions.’¹⁹ As Kate Flint has pointed out, Maudsley’s voice henceforth ‘had to be assimilated or countered by other commentators’, and also significant was the fact that the debate he triggered ‘spread from specialist texts to a range of publications with the potential to reach a wider readership’.²⁰

Maudsley’s article prompted an energetic and prompt response from Dr Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, published by the Fortnightly Review a month later. She robustly challenged the arguments he put forward directed at retarding girls’ mental training, stressing that study was unlikely to weaken women’s health, though teachers should protect girls from mental fatigue and violent physical activity. Education was, she argued, far less damaging than the idleness and boredom engendered by young women’s traditional pursuits or, alternatively, the stimulus of reading novels, the theatre and the ballroom, late hours, vanity, frivolity and dissipation: ‘There is no tonic in the ph...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Unstable Adolescence: Medicine and the ‘Perils of Puberty’ in Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain
• 2. Reinventing the Victorian Girl: Health Advice for Girls in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
• 3. Health, Exercise and the Emergence of the Modern Girl
• 4. Girls, Education and the School as a Site of Health
• 5. The Health of the Factory Girl
• 6. Conclusion: Future Mothers of the Empire or a ‘Double Gain’?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index