Review: Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885-1920, by Mary E. Odem

Enacting Self and Scientific Personas: Models for Women Health Professionals in Dr. S. Josephine Baker’s Fighting for Life

“…Many of these personas are rooted in the dominant templates for white women physicians during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Regina Morantz-Sanchez (1985) offers a cogent articulation of these personas by drawing from the private and public discourse of female physicians, including Baker's Fighting for Life. Specifically, she explains that these models existed on a continuum: At one end of the extreme, medicine was seen as a path to financial success and professional renown; this more masculine perspective coalesced as a "culture of professionalism" that valued "individualism, scientific objectivity…personal achievement, and careerism" (Morantz-Sanchez 1985;p.…”

“…Baker's autobiographical recollection of her childhood foreshadows the scientific personas she engages with to conceputalise her early years as a private physician who also worked as a part-time public health inspector. In light of my earlier claims about autobiography's ability to construct-and not simply reveal-individual identity and collective personas, I want to revisit some passages in Fighting for Life that Morantz-Sanchez (1985) examines in her historical study of women physicians in the U.S. These passages illustrate that Baker conceives of her fledgling professional years as being shaped by the same forces that encouraged other women to become physicians: financial need and personal achievement, on the one hand, and moral duty, on the other.…”

“…Baker, for instance, attended the Women's Medical College of New York, which was founded by Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, who Baker calls "the fountainhead of all medical training for American women" (1939, p. 31). For Blackwell, medicine was a moral calling, but for Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi and Dr. Marie Zakrzewska, who were employed as professors at the Women's Medical College of New York during Baker's enrollment, medicine was an intellectual pursuit that demonstrated women were on equal footing with men (Bittel 2009;Morantz-Sanchez 1985;Tuchman 2009). During Baker's studies, she also completed a course with Dr. Annie Sturges Daniel on "The Normal Child," which, ironically, she initially failed because she found it boring (1939, p. 42).…”

“…Lorraine Daston and H. Otto Sibum (2003) first theorized scientific personas as the "collective ways of thinking, feeling, judging, perceiving, [and] working" associated with "the human as well as the natural sciences" (p. 1,5). Due to forces that enabled and constrained women's entrance into medicine during the fin de siècle, many women health professionals like Baker simultaneously were engaged in the research, practice, teaching, and administration of medicine and public health (Fee & Greene 1989;Meckel 1990;Morantz-Sanchez 1985). Consequently, scientific persona becomes an apt framework for understanding how such work was collectively conceived.…”

“…I begin exploring Baker's enactment of self and scientific personas in Fighting for Life by more deeply theorizing genre's role in this process; by way of illustration, I show how Baker's construction of her younger self in Fighting for Life anticipates the personas for women health professionals with which she will contend in subsequent parts of the text. These models, at their extreme, connected women's motivation for studying medicine with either financial advancement and personal achievement, on the one hand, or moral obligation and a natural affinity for caretaking, on the other (Morantz-Sanchez 1985). Baker largely adopts these competing personas in the retelling of her early professional career, but she reinterprets them in more radical ways when she recounts her later, more significant interventions in preventive public health.…”