Feminist Perspectives on the Body

10.1 The Body: Historical Background

Early feminists such as Wollstonecraft and Harriet Taylor Mill, regarded their bodies with suspicion. In the context in which they lived as middle class women, their bodies were commodities to be maintained to enable them to entice men into matrimony so that they would have the material means to live. Women's attention to their bodies took the form of producing them as objects for others' appraisal. Wollstonecraft's 1792 text, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, provides a clear example of the disciplining of the female body to preserve personal beauty (Wollstonecraft, 1988, 55). The body was also considered as a source of vulnerability. John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill were preoccupied with the way their susceptibility to illness interrupted their ability to produce philosophical work and cast the shadow of early death over their life plans. Moreover any celebration of the body as source of sensual pleasure was constrained by a risk of pregnancy.