‘The age of physiological reformers’: rethinking gender and domesticity in the age of reform

Abstract

In 1852 the Westminster Review , musing upon the widespread popularity of alternative medicine, declared it to be ‘pre-eminently the age of physiological reformers’. Certainly for many early Victorian radicals, the concept of reform extended far beyond demands for political, economic, and social changes; it encompassed a desire to democratize the very care and feeding of the body. As J. F. C. Harrison observed, a striking number of Owenites and Chartists rejected the heroic, interventionist medical practices of the day, and turned to alternative health therapies; so too did the families of numerous middle-class reformers, including the Sturges, McLarens, Ashursts, and Stansfelds. This is not to say, of course, that there is a necessary causal link between radical politics and popular medicine. However, the frequency of these connections raises important questions, not least for assessments of women's political activism and the construction of the home within radical discourse. By focusing upon the importance of the domestic site and female activism within five areas of health reform (namely, vegetarianism, homoeopathy, hydropathy, hygeism, and medical botany) this chapter seeks to problematize the assumption that women became alienated from reforming politics during the 1840s as its structures and organization became increasingly formalized and bureaucratized. In so doing, it aims also to further debate concerning the nature of female political consciousness. The restricted nature of female political identities has been much discussed, such identities drawing so frequently upon socially constructed norms of wife and motherhood.