In the context of our June 5 08 discussion about the specific nature of the connections between reproduction, generation, and political economies of the late 20th C, I recalled Shuttleworth’s attempt to do something similar with female bodies and the 19th C. so I thought I’d post some quotes from Sally Shuttleworth’s essay Uterine economy (in the book edited by Mary Jacobus, Shuttleworth, and E Fox Keller)
p 52-3
The social effectiveness of Victorian gender ideology derived to a large degree from the lack of apparent novelty in the formulations. Women were not for the first time being associated with the forces of the body; nor were they thereby being cast forth from their other ideological role of spiritualizing and civilizing force. .. Woman, … though rarely identified with mind, can emerge on either side of the nature/culture divide, depending on the specific historical and social context of the argument. With changing economic and social formations, different aspects of these polarities are mobilized, often in seemingly contradictory conjunctions, their articulation both containing and contributing to wider social tensions and conflicts. … The introduction by Linnaeus of a sexual system of plant classification in the 18th century was indicative of a whole shift to a taxonomy of gender that was to emerge in the biological and social sciences in the nineteenth century.
53-4 Until recently, feminist criticism has tended to argue tha the Victorian ideologyof femal domesticity was deisgned to suppress and control the treat of female sexuality … Although many factors are once again in play (including the displacement of class antagonisms into gender terms), I would suggest that one strong impetus behind Victorian ideologies of womanhood springs not from the need to control women, rather from the problems involved in assimilating men to the new conditions of the labor market.
P 54 .. By the early-Victorian period gender demarcations in social and medical texts were mobilized within forms that responded directly to the contradictory formulations of laissez-faire economics.
