Resource Guides: Book Displays: 3.21 Women's History Month

Women's History Month eBooks

eBooks

Changing Notions of the Feminine by Margarita Cereijido

ISBN: 9781138360501

Publication Date: 2018-12-04

As culture changes, so do notions of the feminine. Today, women are exploring new gender identities, gender dynamics, and family configurations. They are questioning and redefining what it is to be feminine and expressing different attitudes toward motherhood. These issues have challenged classic psychoanalytic theory and practice. In this timely collection, a range of prominent psychoanalysts confront and explore their prejudices about changing notions of the feminine, and how it impacts their work. In a period of transition, these issues are present in the clinical material of female patients, and in the material of male patients who struggle in their complementary roles as partners and fathers. But how analysts listen and give meaning to clinical material is significantly affected by the analyst's own prejudices, her implicit and explicit theories, as well as her subjective view of the world. Discussing topics such as the expression of power, the compatibility of assertiveness and ambition with the feminine, and the psychoanalytic impact of the spread of new reproductive techniques, this important and far-reaching book will be essential reading for any psychoanalyst or psychotherapist who wishes to engage actively with the sociocultural moment in which they work.

Women's History Month Physical Books

Physical Books

Angel of Harlem by Kuwana Haulsey
Call Number: PS 3558.A7576 H372a 2004
ISBN: 0375508708
Publication Date: 2004-09-28
This novelized account of the life of Dr May Chinn, a woman who broke the barriers in the medical profession in the 1920s and became a leading specialist in cancer treatment, also features the dazzling cultural, social, and political life of the Harlem Renaissance.
Also accessible online through the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/angelofharlemnov00haul
As Long As Life by Mary C. Rowland; F. A. Loomis
Call Number: WZ 100 R883 1994
ISBN: 0964135701
Publication Date: 1994-11-01
The memoirs of an early 19th-century doctor who braved the wilderness to treat wounds, pull teeth, & deliver babies.
Also accessible online through the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/aslongaslifememo00rowl
The Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science by Marilyn Bailey Ogilvie; Joy Dorothy Harvey
Call Number: Q 141 B6158 2000
ISBN: 0415920396
Publication Date: 2000-01-01
Edited by two of the most respected scholars in the field, this milestone reference combines "facts-fronted" fast access to biographical details with highly readable accounts and analyses of nearly 3000 scientists' lives, works, and accomplishments. For all academic and public libraries' science and women's studies collections.
Also accessible online through the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/biographicaldict02ogil
A Biographical Dictionary of Women Healers by Laurie Scrivener; J. Suzanne Barnes
Call Number: WZ 112 B6145 2002
ISBN: 157356219X
Publication Date: 2002-05-30
Women have always been healers; they have helped each other through the birthing process, nursed the sick and wounded, and sought cures for illnesses and injuries. This book summarizes the lives of 240 significant or representative women who have engaged in the core professions of mid-wifery, nursing, and medicine (exclusive of psychiatry), and whose careers were primarily spent in the United States and Canada, from colonial times to the present. For the high school or college student, it will serve as an introduction to the lives of these healers; some students may be inspired to do further research on them or may be inspired to become healers themselves. Women's Studies scholars, biographers, and historians of science, medicine, or nursing, will find the biographies useful starting points for more in-depth research. Each biography provides references for further reading and study.
Bodies of Knowledge by Wendy Kline
Call Number: HQ29 .K58 2010
ISBN: 9780226443058
Publication Date: 2010-10-15
Throughout the 1970s and 80s, women argued that unless they gained access to information about their own bodies, there would be no equality. In Bodies of Knowledge, Wendy Kline considers the ways in which ordinary women worked to position the female body at the center of women's liberation. As Kline shows, the struggle to attain this knowledge unified women but also divided them according to race, class, sexuality, or level of professionalization. Each of the five chapters of Bodies of Knowledge examines a distinct moment or setting of the women's movement in order to give life to the ideas, expectations, and pitfalls encountered by the advocates of women's health: the making of Our Bodies, Ourselves (1973); the conflicts surrounding the training and practice of women's pelvic exams; the emergence of abortion as a feminist issue; the battles over contraceptive regulation at the 1983 Depo-Provera FDA hearings; and the rise of the profession of midwifery. Including an epilogue that considers the experiences of the daughters of 1970s feminists, Bodies of Knowledge is an important contribution to the study of the bodies that marked the lives of feminism's second wave.

Doctor Nellie : the autobiography of Dr. Helen MacKnight Doyle by Helen MacKnight Doyle

Call Number: WZ 100 D754 1934a

ISBN: 0931378060

Publication Date: 1983-01-01

A true story of pioneer life in the Old West. Obsessed by tales of gold and silver in the Far West, Smith MacKnight abruptly decided to sell his home, send his wife and five-year-old Nellie to live on the family farm in up-state New York, and head for the mines at Bodie in eastern California. That was on Christmas Day, 1878, the beginning of Nellie's story. Fifty-five years later Helen MacKnight Doyle, M.D., wrote this autobiography. She was then a respected member of the medical profession, the wife of Dr. Guy Douyle, and the mother of two children. Doctor Nellie (as this new edition is titled), a story of tragedy and adventure, tells how she became one of California's first woman physicians and the beloved Doctor Nellie of Owens Valley. An absorbing story of a gallant woman, Doctor Nellie also vividly recreates a portion of Early America from the 1870s to the 1920s. It illustrates one family's part in the vast drama of our country's early years, the migration westward. It also brings to life the real people of rural New York, of a New England factory, and of the Old West- pioneers, Native Americans, drifters, winners, and losers. Here are real stories of the mining booms, the homesteads, San Fransisco's Gay Nineties- stories of defeat and hardship, stories of joy and love.

Also accessible online through the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/doctornellieauto00doyl

Dr. Mary Walker by Sharon M. Harris
Call Number: WZ 100 W183HA 2009
ISBN: 9780813546117
Publication Date: 2009-10-30
A suffragist who wore pants. This is just the simplest of ways Dr. Mary Walker is recognized in the fields of literature, feminist and gender studies, history, psychology, and sociology. Perhaps more telling about her life are the words of an 1866 London Anglo-American Times reporter, "Her strange adventures, thrilling experiences, important services and marvelous achievements exceed anything that modern romance or fiction has produced. . . . She has been one of the greatest benefactors of her sex and of the human race." In this biography Sharon M. Harris steers away from a simplistic view and showcases Walker as a Medal of Honor recipient, examining her work as an activist, author, and Civil War surgeon, along with the many nineteenth-century issues she championed:political, social, medical, and legal reforms, abolition, temperance, gender equality, U.S. imperialism, and the New Woman. Rich in research and keyed to a new generation, Dr. Mary Walker captures its subject's articulate political voice, public self, and the realities of an individual whose ardent beliefs in justice helped shape the radical politics of her time.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
Call Number: W 50 S628i 2011
ISBN: 9781400052189
Publication Date: 2011-03-08
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * "The story of modern medicine and bioethics--and, indeed, race relations--is refracted beautifully, and movingly."--Entertainment Weekly NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM HBO® STARRING OPRAH WINFREY AND ROSE BYRNE* ONE OF THE "MOST INFLUENTIAL" (CNN), "DEFINING" (LITHUB), AND "BEST" (THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER) BOOKS OF THE DECADE *ONE OF ESSENCE'S 50 MOST IMPACTFUL BLACK BOOKS OF THE PAST 50 YEARS *WINNER OF THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE HEARTLAND PRIZE FOR NONFICTION NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review*Entertainment Weekly*O: The Oprah Magazine*NPR *Financial Times* New York *Independent (U.K.) * Times (U.K.) *Publishers Weekly *Library Journal *Kirkus Reviews *Booklist *Globe and Mail Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells--taken without her knowledge--became one of the most important tools in medicine: The first "immortal" human cells grown in culture, which are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb's effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions. Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave. Henrietta's family did not learn of her "immortality" until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family--past and present--is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of. Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family--especially Henrietta's daughter Deborah. Deborah was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Had they killed her to harvest her cells? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn't her children afford health insurance? Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.
Also accessible online through the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/immortallifeofhe0000sklo
Japanese American Midwives by Susan L. Smith
Call Number: WQ 11 AA1 S659j 2005
ISBN: 0252072472
Publication Date: 2005-10-05
In the late nineteenth century, midwifery was transformed into a new woman's profession as part of Japan's modernizing quest for empire. With the rise of Japanese immigration to the United States, Japanese midwives (sanba) served as cultural brokers as well as birth attendants for Issei women. They actively participated in the creation of Japanese American community and culture as preservers of Japanese birthing customs and agents of cultural change. The history of Japanese American midwifery reveals the dynamic relationship between this welfare state and the history of women and health. Midwives' individual stories, coupled with Susan L. Smith's astute analysis, demonstrate the impossibility of clearly separating domestic policy from foreign policy, public health from racial politics, medical care from women's care giving, and the history of women and health from national and international politics. By setting the history of Japanese American midwives in this larger context, Smith reveals little-known ethnic, racial, and regional aspects of women's history and the history of medicine.
A Lab of My Own by Neena B. Schwartz
Call Number: WZ 100 S399l 2010
ISBN: 9789042027374
Publication Date: 2010-01-01
What was it like to be a woman scientist battling the old boy's network during the 1960s and 1970s. Neena Schwartz, a prominent neuroendocrinologist at Northwestern University, tells all. She became a successful scientist and administrator at a time when few women entered science and fewer succeeded in establishing independent laboratories. She describes her personal career struggles, and those of others in academia, as well as the events which lead to the formation of the Association of Women in Science, and Women in Endocrinology, two national organizations, which have been successful in increasing the numbers of women scientists and their influence in their fields.
Medicine Women, Curanderas, and Women Doctors by Bobette Perrone; Victoria Krueger; H. Henrietta Stockel
Call Number: WB 50 AA1 P45m 1989
ISBN: 0806125128
Publication Date: 1993-03-15
The stories of ten women healers form the core of this provocative journey into cultural healing methods utilized by women. In a truly grass-roots project, the authors take the reader along to listen to the voices of Native American medicine women, Southwest Hispanic curanderas, and women physicians as they describe their healing paths. This book will fascinate anyone interested in the relationship between illness and healing-medical practitioners and historians, patients, anthropologists, feminists, psychologists, psychiatrists, theologians, sociologists, folklorists, and others who seek understanding about our relationship to the forces of both illness and healing.
A New and Untried Course by Steven J. Peitzman
Call Number: W 19 P3789n 2000
ISBN: 0813528151
Publication Date: 2000-04-01
In 1850, a group of reformist male Quaker physicians and allies founded the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania to offer formal medical training to women. By the 1890s, the renamed Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania (WMC) had matured into a solid and progressive institution that would outlast other, younger women's medical schools that had arisen in the United States. Steven J. Peitzman describes how WMC survived periods of instability and crises as it became a remarkable experiment in single-sex professional education, and a rare early example of female-male collaboration in science and medicine. Its unique survival provided scarce opportunities for women physicians and scientists to teach and perform research, while maintaining the assurance of medical education free from gender discrimination, Yielding to complex forces, it became the coeducational Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1970 and found another new course to pursue
Oregon's Doctor to the World by Kimberly Jensen
Call Number: WZ 100 L89j 2012
ISBN: 9780295992242
Publication Date: 2012-09-19
Esther Clayson Pohl Lovejoy, whose long life stretched from 1869 to 1967, challenged convention from the time she was a young girl. Her professional life began as one of Oregon's earliest women physicians, and her commitment to public health and medical relief took her into the international arena, where she was chair of the American Women's Hospitals after World War I and the first president of the Medical Women's International Association. Most disease, suffering, and death, she believed, were the result of wars and social and economic inequities, and she was determined to combat those conditions through organized action. Lovejoy's early life and career in the Pacific Northwest gave her key experiences and strategies to use for what she termed "constructive resistance," the ability to take effective action against unjust power. She took a political and pragmatic approach to what she called "woman's big job"-achieving a full female citizenship-and emphasized the importance of votes for women. In this engaging biography, Kimberly Jensen tells the story of this important western woman, exploring her approach to politics, health, and society and her civic, economic, and medical activism. Watch the book trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch'v=blyfLWnCTV0
Our Lady of Birth Control by Sabrina Jones
Call Number: WP 630 J79 2016
ISBN: 9781593766405
Publication Date: 2016-07-12
Working class nurse. Mother of three. Labor organizer. Margaret Sanger--best known as the pioneer of birth control--was revolutionary in more ways than one. In Sabrina Jones's graphic novelOur Lady of Birth Control, the author illustrates the incredible life of Margaret Sanger (1879-1966), framing the biography with her personal experiences of coming of age at the height of the sexual revolution. During her lifetime, Sanger transformed herself from working class nurse to an exuberant free-lover and savvy manipulator of the media, the law, and her wealthy supporters. Through direct action, propaganda, exile, and imprisonment, she ultimately succeeded in bringing legal access to birth control to women of all classes. Sanger's revolutionary actions established organizations that eventually evolved into Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Jones's autobiographical sections of Our Lady of Birth Control show her journey into activist art in response to the anti-feminist backlash of the Reagan era. From street theater and protest graphics to alternative comics, her path similarly follows in Margaret's footsteps, encountering versions of the same adversaries. Her striking imagery evokes the late 20th century, recalling the ashcan artists of The Masses, an acclaimed magazine of Sanger's formative years. Powerful, poetic, and extremely personal, this historical graphic novel is an in-depth look at the woman responsible for bringing freedom to the masses.
Out of the Dead House by Susan Wells
Call Number: WZ 80.5.W5 W456o 2001
ISBN: 0299171701
Publication Date: 2001-03-12
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, two thousand women physicians formed a significant and lively scientific community in the United States. Many were active writers; they participated in the development of medical record-keeping and research, and they wrote self-help books, social and political essays, fiction, and poetry. "Out of the Dead House" rediscovers the contributions these women made to the developing practice of medicine and to a community of women in science. Susan Wells combines studies of medical genres, such as the patient history or the diagnostic conversation, with discussions of individual writers. The women she discusses include Ann Preston, the first woman dean of a medical college; Hannah Longshore, a successful practitioner who combined conventional and homeopathic medicine; Rebecca Crumpler, the first African American woman physician to publish a medical book; and Mary Putnam Jacobi, writer of more than 180 medical articles and several important books. Wells shows how these women learned to write, what they wrote, and how these texts were read. "Out of the Dead House" also documents the ways that women doctors influenced medical discourse during the formation of the modern profession. They invented forms and strategies for medical research and writing, including methods of using survey information, taking patient histories, and telling case histories. "Out of the Dead House" adds a critical episode to the developing story of women as producers and critics of culture, including scientific culture."
Pioneer Doctor by Mari Grana
Call Number: WZ 100 A887G 2005
ISBN: 0762736542
Publication Date: 2005-01-01
When Mollie Babcock stepped off the train in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1890, she knew she had to start a new life. She'd left her husband and their medical practice in Iowa, and with only a few hundred dollars in her pocket and a great deal of pride, she set out to find a new position as a physician. She was offered a job as doctor to the miners at Bannack, Montana, and thus began her epic adventures in the Rocky Mountain West. The true story of a medicine woman who found opportunity in the wide-open spaces of America's frontier west, "Pioneer Doctor: The Story of a Woman's Work, "is not just a beautifully written and thoroughly researched story of a fascinating woman's life. It is also the story of an era when daring women ventured forth and changed history for the rest of us.

The remarkable lives of 100 women healers and scientists by Brooke Bailey

Call Number: WZ 112 B154r 1994

ISBN: 1558503617

Publication Date: 1994-04-01

Offers brief profiles of physicians, anthropologists, archaeologists, astronomers, biochemists, botanists, chemists, engineers, physicists, and psychiatrists.

Also accessible online through the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/remarkableliveso00bail

The Scalpel and the Silver Bear by Lori Arviso Alvord; Elizabeth Cohen Van Pelt
Call Number: WZ 100 A476s 2000
ISBN: 0553100122
Publication Date: 1999-06-01
In a remarkable book that takes the reader on a spellbinding journey between two worlds, surgeon Lori Arviso Alvord describes her struggles to bring modern medicine to the Navajo reservation in Gallup, New Mexico and to bring the values of her people to a medical care system in danger of losing its heart. Finding the solutions to modern medicine's most daunting problems was far from the mind of a girl from a small, dusty town on a Navajo reservation. But Lori Arviso Alvord would leave the traditional hogans of her people to attend the prestigious Stanford University Medical School and become the first Navajo woman surgeon. Only after conquering the high-tech realm of the operating room would this extraordinarily talented doctor realize something was missing from contemporary medical care: an understanding of the whole person who has come seeking healing. The Scalpel and the Silver Beartells of Dr. Alvord's pioneering journey to become a woman surgeon, fighting the odds presented by her own culture and the unspoken rules that made surgery the territory of a privileged class of males. Then, having accomplished her dreams, the strong-willed young woman would find herself faced with a different challenge: learning another approach to medicine amid the Hataali, the medicine men of the Dine, the people we call Navajo. Here in this moving, enlightening, and provocative volume, Dr. Alvord teaches us how she merged the latest breakthroughs of science and methodology with the ancient tribal paths to recovery and wellness. In dramatic encounters while practicing reservation medicine a man whose intestine was pierced by a porcupine quill, which he insisted was placed there by an enemy's curse; a woman who had been struck by lightning and blamed her cancer on it; an all-night winter sing for a gravely ill young woman, attended by the whole community. Dr. Alvord witnessed the power of belief to influence health, for good or for ill. She discovered that patients undergoing chemotherapy did better after having a native healer at bedside, and that the feelings of both the patient and the surgeon could affect recovery time, postsurgical complications, and even whether the patient lived or died. The secret, Lori Alvord discovered, lay in the Navajo philosophy of a balanced and harmonious life, called "Walking in Beauty." Her sharing of these ancient principles promises to have an immeasurable impact on today's doctors and patients by expanding the concept of mind-body healing to include the interconnectedness of all life. Personal, simply written, yet profoundly wise, The Scalpel and the Silver Bear joins those few rare works, such as Healing and the Mind, whose ideas have changed medical practices and our understanding of the world.
Also accessible through the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/scalpelsilverbea00alvo
The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger by Esther Katz (Editor); Cathy Moran Hajo (Editor); Peter C. Engelman (Editor); Margaret Sanger
Call Number: HQ 1236 S226s 2007
ISBN: 0252074602
Publication Date: 2007-01-12
The birth control crusader, feminist, and reformer Margaret Sanger was one of the most controversial and compelling figures in the twentieth century. The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger, Volume 1 is composed of Sanger's letters, diaries, journals, articles, and speeches, most of which have not appeared previously in print. Now in paperback, the book documents the critical phases and influences of an American feminist icon and offers rare glimpses into her working-class childhood, burgeoning feminism, spiritual and scientific interests, sexual explorations, and diverse roles as wife, mother, lover, nurse, journalist, radical socialist, and activist. Volume 2 chronicles Sanger’s efforts during the Depression years to legalize contraception. These significant and engaging letters and writings, constructed to be read as biography, tell the story of Sanger’s frank discussion of birth control before an uneasy Congress, her quest for a judicial test case, and her ongoing public relations campaign in the face of powerful opposition from the Catholic Church, to convince Americans about the benefits of birth control. Volume 2 also documents Sanger’s complicated personal life, her unstable marriage, loss of wealth, and love affairs in middle age. Required reading for anyone interested in the emergence of planned parenthood and the life of its extraordinary leader. Volume 3: The Politics of Planned Parenthood, 1939–1966 of The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger highlights Sanger's quest for the "magic pill," the non-barrier method of birth control she had envisioned since the early 1930s. These lively and fascinating letters and other writings tell the story of Sanger's consequential collaboration with the philanthropist Katharine Dexter McCormick and their masterful direction of scientists, physicians, and birth control bureaucrats toward the production of the first contraceptive pill--the catalyst for the sexual revolution. Volume 3 also chronicles Sanger's attempt to guide the American birth control movement during World War II and its immediate aftermath, when many were calling for increased fertility, not family planning. And it documents her controversial efforts to expand birth control services to African Americans in the rural South and to incorporate contraceptive health care into state and federal public health programs. All the while she was engaged in a contentious battle with the leadership of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America over the direction of the movement, with Sanger pushing to revive a feminist rationale for birth control and to emphasize the needs of the poor, and the Federation looking to extend its services beyond contraception and to encourage middle-class childbearing. Constructed to be read as the last chapter of her domestic biography, this volume documents the final turbulent decades of a remarkable life and includes important material on the efforts of biographers, film makers, journalists such as the young Mike Wallace, and Sanger herself, to assess her motivations and affirm her pivotal role in the history of reproductive rights.
Send Us a Lady Physician by Ruth J. Abram
Call Number: WZ 80.5.W5 S474 1985
ISBN: 0393302784
Publication Date: 1986-01-17
In the latter part of the nineteenth century, women, who had hitherto been barred from medical schools, were gradually granted the freedom to study and practice medicine. Indeed, by 1900, over 7,000 female physicians were practicing in America. Women were sought after to fill the void in women's health care a substantial one, thanks to Victorian mores as well as to imbue the medical profession with dignity which only women, it was believed, could supply. Thus the stereotype of women as gentle, virtuous creatures, natural healers, worked in their favor, opening doors to a major profession.
Also accessible through the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/sendusladyphysic00ruth
The Trotula by Monica H. Green (Edited and Translated by)
Call Number: WZ 292 T858 2002
ISBN: 0812218086
Publication Date: 2002-06-25
The Trotula was the most influential compendium of women's medicine in medieval Europe. Scholarly debate has long focused on the traditional attribution of the work to the mysterious Trotula, said to have been the first female professor of medicine in eleventh- or twelfth-century Salerno, just south of Naples, then the leading center of medical learning in Europe. Yet as Monica H. Green reveals in her introduction to the first English translation ever based upon a medieval form of the text, the Trotula is not a single treatise but an ensemble of three independent works, each by a different author. To varying degrees, these three works reflect the synthesis of indigenous practices of southern Italians with the new theories, practices, and medicinal substances coming out of the Arabic world. Green here presents a complete English translation of the so-called standardized Trotula ensemble, a composite form of the texts that was produced in the midthirteenth century and circulated widely in learned circles. The work is now accessible to a broad audience of readers interested in medieval history, women's studies, and premodern systems of medical thought and practice.
Walking Out on the Boys by Frances K. Conley
Call Number: W 21 C752w 1999
ISBN: 0374525951
Publication Date: 1999-06-04
In May 1991, Frances K. Conley, the first female tenured professor of neurosurgery in the country, made headline news when she resigned from Stanford University to protest the medical school's unabashed gender discrimination. In this controversial, forthright memoir, Conley portrays the world of academic medicine in which women are still considered inferior; she also explains why, as a consequence, the research and treatment of women's health problems lag far behind those of men. In assessingwhy women's careers and psyches are suffering, Conley provides a first-person look into what it is like to be an accomplished woman within this restrictive medical world, offering invaluable advice to patients and future doctors alike. Also accessible through the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/walkingoutonboys00fran
Women Physicians and Professional Ethos in Nineteenth-Century America by Carolyn Skinner
Call Number: W21 S628 2014
ISBN: 0809333007
Publication Date: 2014-01-27
Women physicians in nineteenth-century America faced a unique challenge in gaining acceptance to the medical field as it began its transformation into a professional institution. The profession had begun to increasingly insist on masculine traits as signs of competency. Not only were these traits inaccessible to women according to nineteenth-century gender ideology, but showing competence as a medical professional was not enough. Whether women could or should be physicians hinged mostly on maintaining their femininity while displaying the newly established standard traits of successful practitioners of medicine. Women Physicians and Professional Ethos provides a unique example of how women influenced both popular and medical discourse. This volume is especially notable because it considers the work of African American and American Indian women professionals. Drawing on a range of books, articles, and speeches, Carolyn Skinner analyzes the rhetorical practices of nineteenth-century American women physicians. She redefines ethos in a way that reflects the persuasive efforts of women who claimed the authority and expertise of the physician with great difficulty. Descriptions of ethos have traditionally been based on masculine communication and behavior, leaving women's rhetorical situations largely unaccounted for. Skinner's feminist model considers the constraints imposed by material resources and social position, the reciprocity between speaker and audience, the effect of one rhetor's choices on the options available to others, the connections between ethos and genre, the potential for ethos to be developed and used collectively by similarly situated people, and the role ethos plays in promoting social change. Extending recent theorizations of ethos as a spatial, ecological, and potentially communal concept, Skinneridentifies nineteenth-century women physicians' rhetorical strategies and outlines a feminist model of ethos that gives readers a more nuanced understanding of how this mode of persuasion operates for all speakers and writers.