Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | W | Women and Language

Regulating gender through the language of Canadian medicine (1).

Article Excerpt
My doctoral dissertation examined the construction and regulation of gender through nineteenth-century medical language and discourses on dress reform in Canada. To start, it was imperative to determine who led the dress reform campaign in Canada, if indeed there was one. Although influenced by the dress reform movements in Germany and Britain, and to a lesser extent, the United States, it was physicians who were most prominent in the discussion of dress reform in Canada. My dissertation demonstrated that there was not a movement for dress reform in Victorian Canada, but rather a campaign that was located in medicine, maternal feminism and retailing. In fact, medical based knowledge was a distinguishing feature for the promotion of dress reform in Canada, unlike the dress reform campaigns in the United States and England where women played small, but significant roles. Medical knowledge and expertise on women's bodies produced a maternal image of women that was endorsed in social purity discourses and in the prescriptive literature.

In my dissertation, I explored how women's dress was discursively constructed, and how the discourse on women's dress reform related to broader concerns about the body and society. The nineteenth-century discourse on women's dress concerned the impact...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!