Articlegreen1996

Contesting the Zenana: The Mission to Make “Lady Doctors for India,” 1874–1885

91 citations0/0 files storedJournal of British Studies

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Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes History of Science and Medicine Medical History and Innovations

Abstract

Recent work in British studies suggests that the project of historicizing the institutions and cultural practices of British imperialism is crucial to understanding metropolitan society in the nineteenth century. Monographs by Catherine Hall, Thomas C. Holt, and Jenny Sharpe, together with the impressive nineteen-volume series on Studies in Imperial Culture, edited by John Mackenzie—to name just a few examples of scholarly production in this field—have effectively relocated the operations of imperial culture at the heart of the empire itself. By scrutinizing arenas as diverse as the English novel, governmental policy making at the highest levels, and the ephemera of consumer culture, scholars of the Victorian period are in the process of giving historical weight and evidentiary depth to Edward Said's claim that “we are at a point in our work when we can no longer ignore empires and the imperial context in our studies.” The origins of the London School of Medicine for Women (LSMW), its concern for Indian women in the zenana (sex-segregated spaces), and the embeddedness of its institutional development in Victorian imperial mentalities is one discrete example of how ostensibly “domestic” institutions were bound up with the empire and its projects in nineteenth-century Britain. As this essay will demonstrate, the conviction that Indian women were trapped in the “sunless, airless,” and allegedly unhygienic Oriental zenana motivated the institutionalization of women's medicine and was crucial to the professionalization of women doctors in Victorian Britain. One need only scratch the surface of the archive of British women's entry into the medical profession to find traces of the colonial concerns that motivated some of its leading lights.

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References

1994Culture and Imperialism.1995Burdens of history: British feminists, Indian women, and imperial culture, 1865-1915 1994Colonizing the body: state medicine and epidemic disease in nineteenth-century India 1993Allegories of empire: the figure of woman in the colonial text 1988Imperial medicine and indigenous societies 1993Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History 1987Imperialism and Popular Culture 1994Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth Century India.

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2005Procreation and Pleasure 2000Ironies of Emancipation: Changing Configurations of ‘Women's Work’ in the ‘Mission of Sisterhood’ to Indian Women 2012Missionaries and Indigenous Education in the 19th‐Century British Empire. Part II: Race, Class, and Gender 2008Married to the Mission Field: Gender, Christianity, and Professionalization in Britain and Colonial Africa, 1865–1914 2015Women Doctors and Lady Nurses: Class, Education, and the Professional Victorian Woman

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