Semi-permeable selves : hygienic discourse and the biopolitics of girls' health, 1870-1920

This dissertation explores how hygiene functioned as a dominant model of girlhood in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I argue that, from 1870–1920, health guides for girls along with girls’ fiction co-constructed the discourse of hygienic girlhood. In opposition to the medical paradigm of frail female biology, authors of girls’ health advice and fiction developed a medical-feminist narrative in which girls could become agential subjects. I employ the metaphor of hygienic discourse as a semi-permeable membrane. I propose that hygiene and its practices created a “boundary” that promised girls agency to move freely in the modern world by giving them control over which environmental agents were allowed to permeate their persons. The discourse of hygienic girlhood encouraged girls to develop semi-permeable bodies for the sake of gaining liberal subjecthood and biopolitical power. An adaptable discourse, hygienic girlhood was deployed both as an instrument of imperialist biopolitics by white supremacists and a tool for radical resistance by women of colour. Girlhood and hygiene are key sites of nineteenth-century biopower that need to be interrogated because of their ongoing role in race and gender formation. My research brings theoretical perspectives from health humanities, spatial studies, and ecocriticism—particularly new materialism, to the materials of girlhood studies. This dissertation is divided into four chapters each of which addresses a different site of modern girlhood—nature, the home, the school, the city, and life abroad. I illuminate hygienic girlhood’s construction of these sites by analyzing girls’ health guides—focusing on texts by women physicians like Mary Wood-Allen and Emma Walker—in concert with girls’ fiction—including Louisa May Alcott’s Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom, Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did series, Frances E.W. Harper’s Trial and Triumph, L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, and Zitkala-Ša’s American Indian Stories. Prompted by transethnic studies to look for places of (dis)connection between authors of varied racial identities, I demonstrate how girls’ bodies experienced the same sites and hygienic practices differently, with authors’ discursive moves ranging from claiming imperialist hygienic privilege to asserting the value of bodies of colour.