A 'Rose' By Any Other Name: Defining 'Environment,' 'Disability,' and the Female Body in Alcott's Eight Cousins

Stephanie Peebles Tavera (UT Arlington) examines the genre of feminist medical fiction, which focuses primarily on social hygiene –or sex education– reform, countering the assumption that women’s minds and bodies are... [ view full abstract ]

Stephanie Peebles Tavera (UT Arlington) examines the genre of feminist medical fiction, which focuses primarily on social hygiene –or sex education– reform, countering the assumption that women’s minds and bodies are inherently disabled by their sexual organs. This assumption frequently underpins medical practices such as diagnosing hysteria and limiting a woman’s activity to “appropriate” (read: domestic) spheres. She reads Louisa May Alcott’s Eight Cousins as a form of domestic sex education that responds to late nineteenth-century public discourses concerning definitions of womanhood. Through Rose Campbell, the novel’s young adult protagonist, Alcott portrays the female body and mind as influenced as much by its external physical and social environment as by its own internal anatomical, physiological, and mental functions.