“Out in Public: Configurations of Women’s Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America”

Piepmeier, Alison. “Out in Public: Configurations of Women’s Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America.” PhD Dissertation, Vanderbilt University, 1999.

Piepmeier’s 1999 dissertation takes up five women: Anna Cora Mowatt, Mary Baker Eddy, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, and Sarah Josepha Hale, as examples in 19^th-century America of the ‘outing’ of women’s bodies in the public sphere in ways that refused easy categorization. The “modalities” (21) of their embodiment were “multiple (15), transitional (21), strategic (31) and contested” (79). Piepmeier notes that these women were all “forced to address the powerful ideologies of domesticity and sentimentality in order to distinguish their own ideologies from them” (10). Her chapter on Eddy, “Woman Goes Forth to Battle with Goliath: Mary Baker Eddy, Medical Science and Sentimental Invalidism” can also be found in Women’s Studies, 2001, vol. 30. Piepmeier’s expansions include a closer look at Eddy’s textbook, Science and Health, as a critique of ‘sentimental womanhood,’ Eddy’s engagement with the science of her day, and how women were perceived and treated by medical science. In sum, Piepmeier shows that Eddy’s textbook was a “rewriting of major… discourses—science, sentimental invalidism and medicine—[and] represents a major rethinking of women’s roles and rights” (81). Piepmeier also published a 2004 book under the same title as her dissertation.

Access via WorldCat.

ISBN-13: 9780807829042
ISBN-10: 0807829048

See also annotation:

“Woman Goes Forth to Battle with Goliath: Mary Baker Eddy, Medical Science and Sentimental Invalidism” by Alison Piepmeier

For more, see chapter 2 of Piepmeier’s 2004 book, “Out in Public, Configurations of Women’s Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America.”