Literature and Medicine I

36It became impossible to combine the hierarchic dichotomy between men and women which developed in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as the corresponding gender stereotypes, with women’s claims to education and greater or equal rights. This generated multiple attitudes to cope with the clash between old and new concepts of what middle- or upper-class women could or should be, and failure seems to be a way, during this period, to negotiate terms of higher (medical) education for women in contemporary discourses. This literary strategy is used at least up to the 1950s (the limit of my research). As Chris Weedon states, taking Ilse Frapan-Akunian’s Josephine as an example:

[...] the processes of studying and practicing medicine are shown to have profound effects on Josefine’s family and personal life, making clear that the achievement of feminist demands for access to education and the professions without other changes in gender relations opens up yet more sites of conflict and struggle for women. (61)

37Georges cannot compete professionally with Josephine anymore, so he writes anonymous lampoons of educated women as compensation. Ferdinand in Der Kampf einer Ärztin has to compete with his own wife, Therese, because he cannot be less successful than she. Women pay for their professional success in their private lives and they are isolated and severely suppressed if they are more successful than the men. Hence (in fiction) educated women who are already engaged or married have the strongest conflicts.

38What apparently could not be negotiated in literature around 1900 were women who were successful in their profession and also happy with their love life. Successful women who are not ready to give up everything for men must be unattractive, either in looks or have to be made so in character, like Dr. Lancelevée, even at the cost of distortions in the plot and a resulting lack of female role models.

39The popularity of women doctors as examples, i.e., representatives of higher education for women can be explained by their nearness and affinity to nursing. What was held against women was also used as a strategy to overcome the obstacles to higher education: by substitution, by presenting women doctors as nurses. Literary figures criticizing female medical students like Professor Clementi in Sina are “pacified” in later works by showing that women doctors are not different from nurses. These works assure the enemies of women’s education that even if women succeed in becoming physicians, they are primarily meant to be nurses. The new women doctors will mostly do something similar to nursing: i.e., care for children and change bandages. They will certainly not treat men. Even the practicing women doctors are mostly shown treating women and/or children only—a strategy also popular in “fact,” which allowed women doctors “an equal though distinct place within the profession” (Swenson 144) while keeping them out of much potential competition. Female medical students are shown as their future husbands’ assistants—so as not to be a threat to all those who see women doctors as competitors in the medical services market. Young adult fiction mostly avoids the conflicts between love (marriage) and career by simply denying that there could be a problem or by evading it, letting the protagonist give up her studies for other reasons and becoming what is supposed to be “natural” on her own “free” will. On the other hand, I assume that in a not-so-obvious way (“subversive” might be too strong a word) these novels are also encouraging (young) women to start higher education: These stories offer a means to fight the fear of becoming unfeminine in the eyes of the public or, more precisely, in the eyes of men; of being “emancipated” and not fit to be someone’s wife; and of never being loved and desired. They assure women that starting medical studies is not the end to any chance of finding a husband, so long as women still look and behave “feminine,” care for children, and do not perform surgery. That this picture of a woman doctor has little to do with reality is not important. It is an affirmation that the doors to love and marriage are not closed.

40To transform the anomaly of an educated, successful woman from an exceptional case to a commonly accepted phenomenon created insecurities which led to the contradictory situation in novels of female protagonists intelligent and determined enough to start academic studies and still “feminine” enough to give up as soon as a man expected them to do so for love. Women who fit neither the category of the traditional nineteenth-century middle- or upper-class woman destined to be a wife and mother nor the category of men who had a profession had to pay the price of being conspicuous and suspect because of an identity difficult to categorize. The woman doctor causes insecurity about her “femininity” in the eyes of her contemporaries. This leads to helpless constructions in describing an educated woman: Being “like a man” or “manly” was simultaneously viewed as still being “feminine,” when seen in a positive way, and as “mannish,” if seen negatively. Fictive failure—be it as student or as woman doctor—arises from this identity problem, which develops as soon as a woman enters the higher medical profession. The reasons for failure reveal the conflicts and insecurities caused by having created something new before having clarified what this something might exactly be, or as Swenson puts it, to “seek to fit the irregular woman doctor into existing social and gender roles, […] [or] actively question the roles themselves” (125). But altering the gender stereotypes is not yet an option, so the fictional characters show that the attempts to negotiate and combine the new profession with the old gender stereotypes lead to conflicts that can hardly be solved.