Evens, Elizabeth; (2021) Regulating Women: Female Professionals and Gendered Surveillance in the Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century United States. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

Abstract

Women’s entrance to the male-dominated professions of medicine and law enforcement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries coincided with new, far-ranging prohibitions on female sexuality and reproduction. These included the criminalisation of abortion, regulation of sex work, and eugenic law-making. This thesis argues that these two phenomena were not coincidental, but profoundly interconnected. Would-be state and private regulators needed to devise methods and personnel to intervene in women’s intimate lives. Enter female professionals. Female physicians and policewomen, whose authority depended on their acquisition of knowledge and power over others’ bodies, had to engage with these issues. Because of notions of gendered propriety and male colleagues and society’s hostility to their presence, professional women worked predominantly with female patients and criminalised women. Meanwhile, their precarity within these spaces meant they could rarely challenge the status quo, and, if they did, they often lost state sponsorship. Yet, professional women also consciously used regulation as a strategy to gain power within society. Using the lens of homosocial relationships, this thesis intertwines the experiences of women in medicine, policing, and corrections, with those on whose bodies they defined their expertise. By claiming a unique position within the emerging regulatory infrastructure, professional women distinguished themselves from men in their fields and laywomen, from whom they claimed difference based on class, education, and character. In turn, by establishing themselves as gatekeepers of reproduction and maternity, professional women navigated their own, often fraught, relationships with these issues. These women were not gender-neutral experts nor providers of sisterly solidarity, but rather champions of gendered surveillance that had profound consequences for those caught in their punitive gaze. Examining six different case studies from the late nineteenth century to World War Two, this thesis captures the fraught, complex worlds of female regulators and those they sought to control.

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