The Connection between Women Medicine and Sociology - Essay Example

Women’s Medicine and Sociology: What’s the Connection? Women have frequently been identified throughout history as they are related to their wombs and the process of procreation. Other than giving birth to children and then taking care of those children through the hearth or home, women have had very little identity or ability to act in the greater community until relatively recently. Even as recently as the early 20th century, women were still defined primarily by their relationship with the home and family and concepts such as the working woman or the professional woman remained rare and often disapproved of. The question remains, however, from where did this conception of women as being only useful within a procreation capacity originate? Certainly, in prehistoric days, women were often depicted in statuary and other items in the context of an obviously pregnant woman, but evidence remains that they were also considered useful and productive members of society even outside of these functions. As mankind became more civilized and settled, women became more a piece of the background scenery rather than fully functioning partners within the community. There are a variety of reasons why women may have been consigned to strictly the home and the children, but one of the more compelling explanations lies in the ways in which medicine has conceptualized the female body and its functions, placing definitions and specific roles on the woman that are constrained around their unique bodily functions rather than through any other defining element. A general understanding of how women have been objectified by the medical field begins to illustrate why women have often been constrained within the larger social construct and what kind of impact this has had on sociology in general. One of the biggest impacts on women throughout history has been a general socially oriented tendency to objectify the gender rather than consider females as fully viable members of a society. According to Diana Kendall (2004), “objectification is the process of treating people as if they were objects or things, not human beings” (312). While the concept can be as easily applied to men as well as women, it has traditionally been women who suffer most from the process of sexual objectification, or viewing women from the context of their sexual proclivities. This is true whether the woman is viewed as a ‘walking womb’ and potential mother to future children or as a plaything for the sexual pleasure and gratification of men. One of the obvious dangers of this process is how women are seen by men within the greater social context and thus become limited and constrained by these single viewpoints. However, a less obvious danger of this process exists in how women come to see themselves. “The pervasiveness of sexual objectification in our society influences girls and women to internalize the views present in society and to begin viewing themselves in the same way. That is, girls and women gradually learn to adopt an observer’s perspective on their physical selves and to treat themselves as an object to be looked at and evaluated on the basis of appearance” (Slater & Tiggemann, 2002). This social process is the primary contributing factor to what is now being termed the Cult of Thinness (Kendall, 2004) in which women, in particular, are obsessed with dieting, watching caloric intake and frequently developing unhealthy eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia as a means of staying as slim as possible. To a large extent, the medical field can be looked to as a reason why women have been the subject of such intense scrutiny of this type. Examining the medical field of the nineteenth century, Ann Wood (1973) illustrates how the field of medicine as it applied to women was almost obsessively focused upon the womb and its functions. “Medical analysis of a woman began and ended with consideration of an organ unique to her, namely, her uterus. Here, supposedly, lay the cause and the cure of many of her physical ailments” (Wood, 1973: 28). Suggesting that doctors acted in fear more often than in a search for true care, Wood indicates that medical practice for women was based on “veiled but aggressively hostile male sexuality and superiority” (Wood, 1973: 37). Treatments for ‘female diseases’ regardless of the severity, type or location, were frequently either painful and violent treatment of the uterus or the so-called ‘rest’ cure, which was “a combination of entire rest and of excessive feeding, made possible by passive exercise obtained through steady use of massage and electricity” (S. Weir Mitchell cited in Wood, 1973: 31). Social expectations that ladies would prefer ill health to the degradation of ‘local examination’ coupled with the idea that all women’s problems stemmed from the womb sent a message that women were generally weak and ailments were often manufactured or ‘made-up’ as a means of escaping social obligations. In a statement made regarding women under treatment who might engage in “acts of a depraced and indecent nature” Wood explains that the speaker, Byford, “was indirectly expressing his doubts as to whether or not his patients were truly sick. Such doubts were widely shared” (Wood, 1973: 34). Because treatments directed toward the womb were not always successful in curing more common human ailments such as a head cold, these suspicions continued to hold credence well into the 20th century. The medical field has frequently defined what an image of a healthy woman should be by providing various height and weight charts, defining women’s health through their uterus and doubting numerous complaints of women as being little more than romantic notions of femininity from antiquity. Women desiring to get true help for medical conditions often found themselves turning not to the doctors who were supposed to treat them as people, but to the midwives who knew the difference between a chest cough and cervical obstruction. However, medicine stepped in even here to define women’s social role. As the nineteenth century came to a close, the profession of medicine became more scientifically based and required greater education than formerly expected. “Though there was no indication that doctors were as knowledgeable and efficient as midwives, many states passed laws outlawing midwifery … Women’s place in the profession became nursing … The paradox is that the use of this argument not only expanded women’s involvement in public life, it also reinforced the stereotypes. Rather than liberating women, the effect was to entrench them even more into their traditional, undervalued roles” (Olson, 1994: 111). Women were no longer allowed to practice medicine for women nor were they given any input into the true nature of their own illnesses. The effect of this long-term medical perspective of the female body as little more than a womb with a devious mind behind it always seeking new ways of subverting the male dominated world view has had numerous repercussions on the way in which society is understood and the development of sociology. The obvious discrepancies that were arising at the end of the nineteenth century as women became more and more associated with illness and frailty compared with their European counterparts began to invest numerous scientists and philosophers with an interest in the social variables that might have contributed to such a state (Gillin, 1926). As the field progressed, it was informed by and informed the medical field regarding the true nature of women not as objects centered around a womb but instead as people, another half of the human population that had long remained ignored and misunderstood. Thus, the questions regarding the nature of women that had started within the medical field and received widespread attention as a result of its inability to affect sufficient cures helped give rise to the birth of sociology and improvements in fields far beyond just the medical realm. References Gillin, John Lewis. (1926). “The Development of Sociology in the United States.” St. Louis: The American Sociological Society. Kendall, Diana. (2004). Sociology in Our Times. New York: Wadsworth Publishing. Olson, Miriam Meltzer. (1994). Women’s Health and Social Work: Feminist Perspectives. New York: Haworth Press. Slater, Amy & Tiggemann, Marika. (May 2002). “A Test of Objectification Theory in Adolescent Girls.” Sex Roles: A Journal of Research. Wood, Ann Douglas. (Summer 1973). “The Fashionable Diseases: Women’s Complaints and Their Treatment in Nineteenth-Century America.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History. Vol. 4, N. 1, pp. 25-52. Read More