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American women in health fields: identity formation and cultural positioning in autobiographical literature, 1847-1910
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2019
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American Women in Health Fields: Identity Formation and Cultural Positioning in Autobiographical Literature, 1847-1910 , examines multiple genres across several health fields over a span of more than sixty years in order to view the ways that women in these fields represented their lives for public consumption. I argue that these women chose to construct their identities through autobiographical literature using power gained from liminal moments in the social and medical discourses to claim agency and advocate for other women. They demonstrated their importance to medicine and history by writing their lives for the public and, thereby, arguing that their stories mattered and deserved to be told. Each chapter focuses on how these women employed autobiographical strategies and navigated social and medical discourses to illuminate their lives as health workers. The women employed different techniques and genres; however, despite their apparent departures they all grappled with normative cultural and health-related discourses in their self-representations as they managed and disrupted the expected boundaries of these discourses. I analyze recurring experiences of being gendered (and reflections on these moments) and self-characterizations as professional women. I have discovered that, while the majority of the tactics these women use to write their self-representations are genre and situation specific, they do use some similar strategies¿including heart histories and relational identity building. Bringing together autobiography and women in science in my analysis augments both fields by giving us insight into the ways this subgroup represented themselves and illuminating the social and medical discourses of the time.
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13862710.pdf
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English