Bodily knowledge: Female body culture and subjectivity in Manchester, 1870--1900 (England)

This dissertation has a two-fold goal: to reconstruct the medical lives of middle-class women in a particular time and space—late nineteenth century Manchester—and to suggest ways in which women managed and understood their bodies in sickness and in health reflected the formation and expression of female subjectivities in the Victorian period. I suggest that the mundane medical world of Victorian women is not reflected in the historiographies of the female patient, which focus on mental illness and reproduction, but can be found in women's personal writings and in the kinds of resources for medical knowledge upon which Victorian women themselves relied: specifically, popular medical literature. This evidence reveals that women exercised a great deal of agency and autonomy in the medical inscription of their bodies. Moreover, the ways in which gender differences and roles were communicated to women in these texts suggests that women encountered the categories of masculine and feminine not as rigidly defined polar opposites, but rather as ambiguous, unstable concepts that could and did flow one into the other.; Focusing particularly on the ways in which information relating to physiology and gender was conveyed to women by means of the highly gendered corporeal metaphors of the steam engine and the locomotive, this dissertation goes on to explore the ways in which these images served to shape the ways in which women managed and understood not only their bodies, but themselves and the city within they lived. Manchester was perceived and managed according to the imagine of the body-as-machine, and the dysfunctions of the industrial served to not only further destabilise the category of the masculine for Victorians, but enabled women to present a particular subjective posture for themselves in their own efforts to remedy it.