La bourgeoise respectable.
The Respectable Bourgeois Woman.

Reflections on the Political Dimension of the Medical Discourse in 19th century Romania

Summary/Abstract: 19th century Romanian society experienced a reconstruction of individual and collective identities due to the numerous social, cultural and political changes. This study focuses on the political effects of normative scientific standards, i.e. on the ideological stakes underlying the hygienist discourse. The reshaping of social hierarchies and the emergence of new actors - i.e., the "experts", who seek to legitimize the new political discourse - call for a re-evaluation of the status of hygiene and of the hygienist specialists during the 19th century. Taking the Western analyses treating similar topics as a starting point, this study suggests that respectability and national ideology are the vectors in the process of elaborating new social models and new gender identities. A careful examination of the hygiene treatises - whose specific object and audience were bourgeois women - allows the reconstruction of a comprehensive normative model pre­scribing a systematic control of feminine gestures, stances and sentiments. As those treatises repeat the stereotypes of the dominant ideology - e.g., the impor­tance of demographic growth and the emphasis on work and savings - the author develops the intrinsic link between the political order and the corporal order.

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