Able-Bodied Womanhood: Personal Health and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century Boston

This study concerns itself with the relationship between popular health and social conditions in middle-class Boston from 1830-1900. Women's lives, in particular, reveal the social significance of ideas about health during that period. Against the backdrop of national debate about female duties and well-being this book follows middle-class women as they learned about physiology and hygiene through popular health literature, voluntary clubs, and schools in Boston. The pursuit of health also enabled middle-class women to explore the nature of womanhood, and to discover both conventional and new meanings.