Embodied Rights: the Use of Health and Disease Rhetoric in the Late-Nineteenth Century American Woman Suffrage Movement

This thesis engages with the long history of the body in the context of the women’s rights movement, specifically with the role of medicine in the late-nineteenth-century women’s rights movement. I specifically focus on three aspects of the women’s rights movement during this period: bodily autonomy, woman suffrage, and women’s empowerment. This is not to say these three facets of the women’s rights movement were segmented from each other; rather, they were deeply intertwined. However, in researching the works and lives of the women in this thesis, it became clear that these were the three primary distinctions in the means through which women’s rights activists used medicine and health as a tool for pushing their cause. In this thesis, I argue that medicine and health played a key role in the nineteenth-century advancement for women’s rights. Women’s rights activists between 1870 and 1900 imbued their speeches with rhetoric of health and disease, demonstrating the deep connection between medicine, the body, and the concept of political rights.