Talk Back

[malabar]

subtitle: 150 years of the experts' advice to women

In this landmark 1978 work, the authors trace how (mostly) male self-styled experts appropriated the right to make statements about the female condition. Up until the 19th century, this had been the sole property of female healers, midwives and the network of mothers, grandmothers and aunts that surrounded women in preindustrial society.

I've read this many times before, but this time I was particularly struck by how blatant the commercial background of 19th-century U.S. medicine was: medical training was once cheap and easy to obtain, leading to a great surplus of doctors. This surplus disastrously coincided with the attempts of women to undertake medical training; as the doctors were closing what they perceived as inferior schools right and left, the women were banging on the doors trying to get in. So while the pundits of the day came up with all kinds of moral platitudes about why women were unsuited to be doctors, the underlying motivation was economic. This shouldn't have surprised me, but the way these economic motivations were used all along to keep women and other minorities down never quite clicked in my head so forcefully before.