Appealing to audiences interested in the histories of medicine, women, gender, labor, and social policy, Beyond the Reproductive Body examines womens health in relation to work in early Victorian England. Government officials and reformers investigating the laboring population became convinced that the female body would be ruined by gainful employment, making women incapable of reproducing a healthy labor force. Womens work was thus framed as a public health "problem." Poor women were caught between the contradictory expectations of the reproductive body, which supposedly precluded any...