In the Middle Ages there were gaols and dungeons, but punishment was for the most part a spectacle. The economic changes and growing popular dissent of the 18th century made necessary a more systematic control over the individual members of society, and this in effect meant a change from punishment, which chastised the body, to reform, which touched the soul.

In Bodies and Pleasures, Ladelle McWhorter reads Foucault from an original and personal angle, motivated by the differences this experience has made in her life.

Physically frail, badly educated girls, brought up to lead useless lives as idle gentlewomen, married to dominant husbands, and relegated to "separate spheres" of life—these phrases have often been used to describe Victorian upper-middle-class women. M. Jeanne Peterson rejects such formulations and the received wisdom they embody in favor of a careful examination of Victorian ladies and their lives. Focusing on a network of urban professional families over three generations, this book examines the scope and quality of gentlewomen's education, their (...) physical lives, their relationship to money, their experience of family illness and death, and their relationships to men (brothers and friends as well as fathers and husbands). Peterson also examines the prominent place of work in the lives of these "leisured" Victorian ladies, both single and married. Far from idle, the mothers, wives, and daughters of Victorian clergymen, doctors, lawyers, university dons, and others were accomplished and productive members of society who made substantial public and private contributions to virtually every sphere of Victorian life. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Reshaping the Female Body: The Dilemma of Cosmetic Surgery. By Kathy Davis.