Part I. The health of women --Menstrual cycle -- The female animal : Medical and biological views of woman and her role in nineteenth-century America / Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and Charles Rosenberg -- Women, menstruation, and nineteenth-century medicine / Vern Bullough and Martha Voght -- Sexuality -- What ought to be and what was : women's sexuality in the nineteenth-century / Carl N. Degler -- Passionlessness : an interpretation of Victorain sexual ideology, 1790-1850 / Nancy F. Cott -- The female world of love and ritual : relations between women in nineteenth-century America / Carroll Smith-Rosenberg -- "Imagine my surprise" : women's relationships in historical perspective / Leila J. Rupp -- Birth control -- Voluntary motherhood : the beginnings of feminist birth control ideas in the United States / Linda Gordon -- Patterns of abortion and the response of American physicians, 1790-1930 / James C. Mohr -- Doctors, birth control, and social values, 1830-1970 / James Reed -- Childbirth -- "On the importance of the obstetrick art" : changing customs of childbirth in America, 1760-1825 / Catherine M. Scholten -- "Down to death's door" : women's perceptions of childbirth in America / Judith Walzer Leavitt and Whitney Walton -- The Loomis Trial : social mores and obstetrics in the mid nineteenth century / Virginia G. Drachman -- Birthing and anesthesia : the debate over twilight sleep / Judith Walzer Leavitt -- Women's diseases and treatments -- Chlorotic girls, 1870-1920 : a historical perspective on female adolescence / Joan Jacobs Brumberg -- Prostitution, venereal disease, and American medicine / Mark Thomas Connelly -- "The fashionable diseases" : women's complaints and their treatment in nineteenth-century America / Ann Douglas Wood -- The perils of feminist history / Regina Markell Morantz -- "All hail to pure cold water!" / Kathryn Kish Sklar -- The woman behind the trademark / Sarah Stage -- The rise and fall of Battey's operation : a fashion in surgery / Lawrence D. Longo -- Part II. Pictorial essay / Rima D. Apple -- Part III. Women in the health professions -- Midwives -- "Safe delivered," but by whom? Midwives and men-midwives in early America / Jane B. Donegan -- The American midwife controversy : a crisis of professionalization / Frances E. Kobrin -- Mary Breckinridge, the Frontier Nursing Service, and the introduction of nurse-midwifery in the United States / Nancy Schrom Dye -- Health reformers -- Making women modern : middle-class women and health reform in nineteenth-century America / Regina Markell Morantz -- Mary Gove Nichols, prophetess of health / John B. Blake -- Ministries of healing : Mary Baker Eddy, Ellen G. White and the religion of health / Ronald L. Numbers and Rennie B. Schoepflin -- Physicians -- Feminist showplace / Mary Roth Walsh -- Professionalism, feminism, and gender roles : a comparative study of nineteenth-century medical therapeutics / Regina Markell Morantz and Sue Zschoche -- Homeopathy and sexual equality : the controversy over coeducation of Cincinnati's Pulte Medical College, 1873-1879 / William Barlow and David O. Powell -- On the evolution of Women's Medical Societies / Cora Bagley Marrett -- Doctors or ladies? Women physicians in psychiatric institutions, 1872-1900 / Constance M. McGovern -- Nurses -- "Neither for the drawing room nor for the kitchen " : private duty nursing in Boston, 1873-1914 / Susan Reverby -- "Little world of our own" : the Pennsylvania Hospital Training School for Nurses, 1895-1907 / Nancy Tomes -- More than "the physician's hand" : skill and authority in twentieth-century nursing / Barbara Melosh -- Mabel K. Staupers and the integration of Black nurses into the Armed Forces / Darlene Clark Hine.