Gender and Medicine

Summary

Gender and medicine examines how sex difference, sexual identity, and gendered power relations have shaped medical knowledge, institutions, and practice. The field emerged from feminist scholarship in the 1970s, initially structured around narratives of women’s oppression by male-dominated medicine, but has since developed more nuanced approaches attending to how gender as an analytical category illuminates the construction of medical authority, the pathologization of female and non-normative bodies, and the contested roles of women as both patients and practitioners.

Historiographic Development

Keith Thomas’s seminal article on the “double standard” in the 1950s examined how sexual behavior was viewed with pervasive historical differences between the genders, helping to establish the history of sexuality as a scholarly enterprise.(Jackson (ed.), 2011) Ehrenreich and English’s 1973 Witches, Midwives and Nurses declared that “health care was the property of male professionals” while women health workers were “a passive, silent majority,” becoming emblematic of early feminist approaches that framed medical history as a narrative of patriarchal appropriation.(Jackson (ed.), 2011)

Joan Scott’s 1986 article promoted the use of gender as an analytical category for exploring systems of social or sexual relations, and the history of medicine responded with studies exploring sex difference and employing gender as a means of signifying relations of power.(Jackson (ed.), 2011) Ludmilla Jordanova cautioned, however, against interpretations based on a one-dimensional construct aimed at the oppression of women, which assumes clear-cut power relations grounded in the nature-culture distinction.(Jackson (ed.), 2011) This methodological caution opened the way for more complex analyses in which gender operates not as a fixed axis of domination but as a shifting variable that intersects with class, race, and professional identity.

The One-Sex and Two-Sex Models

Thomas Laqueur’s “one-sex” model holds that prior to the Enlightenment, women were understood as inferior versions of men with the same basic reproductive structures placed inside the body.(Jackson (ed.), 2011) By the late eighteenth century, only male orgasm was believed crucial to conception, with “active” sexuality henceforth considered a masculine trait and female sexuality pathologized when it strayed from the marital ideal.(Jackson (ed.), 2011) The shift from the one-sex to the two-sex model was not a straightforward discovery of biological difference but a reconfiguration of the body in response to changing political and social demands, particularly the Enlightenment reordering of gender roles.

Victorian Sexuality and Medical Authority

William Acton articulated the Victorian double standard within medicine, stating that “the majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled by sexual feelings of any kind.”(Jackson (ed.), 2011) Such pronouncements did not merely reflect prevailing cultural attitudes; they actively constituted medical orthodoxy, inscribing gender norms into clinical practice and providing scientific legitimation for the restriction of female autonomy.

Foucault argued that sexual identities such as the homosexual were a recent historical phenomenon, the product of new medical and legal discourses from the nineteenth century that made the homosexual a particular “type” of person marked by peculiar habits of speech, thought, and dress.(Jackson (ed.), 2011) This social-constructionist insight transformed the study of sexuality and medicine by demonstrating that what appeared to be timeless biological categories were in fact historically contingent formations.

Women as Practitioners

Alison Bashford explored how the nurse shifted from being characterized as ignorant, filthy, and disordered to being seen as chaste, pure, and orderly, yet in a state of “precarious purity” always in need of further cleansing, with her moral purity in constant jeopardy.(Jackson (ed.), 2011) The figure of the nurse thus encapsulated broader anxieties about women’s presence in medical spaces: acceptable only when her body and behavior were subjected to continuous discipline and purification.

See Also

• medicalization — Medical control over female bodies and non-normative sexualities
• american-gynecology — Racial and gendered dimensions of surgical specialization
• midwifery — Women’s traditional healing roles and their displacement
• race-and-medicine — Intersections of race and gender in medical practice