gender roles
Elizabeth Phelps, Doctor Zay
Regina Markell Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science: Women Physicians in American Medicine, 90-143
Sue Wells, excerpt from Out of the Dead House
Consider how positive and negative stereotypes concerning gender roles are invoked in history and fiction. What common
characteristics of female medical students do Morantz-Sanchez and Wells delineate? How are women healers represented
as being as heroic yet more nurturing than their male counterparts? How do these women relate to other women? to men?
to children? In what ways are they represented as sacrificing self for others? Is this characteristic positive or negative?
What other features of feminine character are represented as attractive or undesirable to other characters in the fictions? to
readers?
