The Hysterical Woman: Sex Roles and Role Conflict in 19thcentury America

Chapters in this book

1. i-iv i
2. Contents v
3. Series Preface ix
4. Introduction xi
5. Women’s Bodies: Health and Childbirth
6. “On the Importance of the Obstetrick Art”: Changing Customs of Childbirth in America, 1760 to 1825 3
7. Women, Menstruation, and Nineteenth-Century Medicine 23
8. The Female Animal: Medical and Biological Views of Woman and Her Role in Nineteenth-Century America 40
9. “The Fashionable Diseases”: Women’s Complaints and Their Treatment in Nineteenth-Century America 65
10. Women as Victims of Medical Experimentation: J. Marion Sims’ Surgery on Slave Women, 1845–1850 93
11. The Hysterical Woman: Sex Roles and Role Conflict in 19thcentury America 101
12. Smothered Slave Infants: Were Slave Mothers at Fault? 128
13. Making Women Modern: Middle Class Women and Health Reform in 19th Century America 156
14. From Maidenhood to Menopause: Sex Education for Women in Victorian America 174
15. Birthing and Anesthesia: The Debate over Twilight Sleep 195
16. Voluntary Motherhood: The Beginnings of Feminist Birth Control Ideas in the United States 213
17. Chlorotic Girls, 1870–1920: A Historical Perspective on Female Adolescence 231
18. Under the Shadow of Maternity: American Women's Responses to Death and Debility Fears in Nineteenth-Century Childbirth 252
19. The American Midwife Controversy: A Crisis of Professionalization 278
20. Forgotten Women: American Midwives at the Turn of the Twentieth Century 292
21. The Immigrant Midwives of Lawrence: The Conflict between Law and Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Massachusetts 309
22. “Science” Enters the Birthing Room: Obstetrics in America since the Eighteenth Century 324
23. Feminine Hygiene, Fashion, and the Emancipation of American Women 348
24. Using Oral History to Chart the Course of Illegal Abortions in Montana 358
25. Copyright Information 373
26. Index 377