“Vesse of the future” or “a bag of trouble”? How the female body has become an object of public discipline, control and punishment

“Deloed trap”: US Army poster, warning about the danger of sexually transmitted diseases, 1942

Studies conducted by the US public health service in the early 1940s showed that every tenth American was sick with syphilis and about a million people were infected every year. Since screening programs did not exist at that time, many did not know about the disease until it began to destroy the body.

During the campaign to eradicate this “great plague” of America, the first targets of doctors and police officers became “women of easy behavior” and “affordable ladies”, regardless of whether they sold sex or not, the British researcher of feminism and the historian of medicine Elinor Kleghorn in her new book “ Unhealthy Women. Why did the doctors not want to study the female body in the past and what made them change his mind ” (the Russian translation just went out at the Bombor publishing house).

According to the author, under the pretext of concern for the future health of the nation, a discriminatory punitive policy was carried out, which made the female body the object of public discipline.

With the kind permission of the publisher, we publish an excerpt from the chapter “Control and Punishment” .

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