Sanitising Spaces: The Body and the Domestic in Public Health

Abstract

The mid-nineteenth-century movement for sanitary reform has long been of interest to medical historians. The ways in which this movement was shaped by a gendered politics of health, however, has been little discussed. Given the sheer frequency with which women’s place in sanitary reform was articulated in the widest possible range of nineteenth-century texts and discursive practices, this lack of interest is curious indeed. Dr Benjamin Ward Richardson, for example, wrote in his 1880 lecture ‘Woman as a Sanitary Reformer’ that ‘[i]t is in those million centres we call the home that sanitary science must have its true birth’.1 Needless to say, it is precisely this connection between domesticity and femininity which has placed the topic ‘woman as sanitary reformer’ outside the interests of a largely masculinist tradition of public health histories. However, as I argue in this chapter, and as was more than apparent to nineteenth-century sanitary reformers themselves, ‘public’ health was secured largely in ‘private’, that is in domestic spaces. It seems to me that in a range of ways, sanitary reform was never really settled as a masculine or feminine domain.KeywordsPuerperal FeverDomestic SpaceSanitary ImprovementSanitary WorkSanitary IssueThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.