How did dread of epidemics influence women’s place in society?
There are scholarly papers in peer-reviewed medical journals that attribute tuberculosis (in the 1920s) to the new trend of young women’s independence. Instead of staying home and finding a husband, they were going out, getting jobs, and particularly wearing abbreviated clothing. They go out, catch a chill and one thing leads to another, the thinking went. Was there real science behind this? Yes and no. But it really reflected a set of prejudices about women. You see that set of prejudices more generally in the context of sexually transmitted diseases. There’s a general implication that sexual women are dangerous in the history of disease control in America. What fears did the AIDS epidemic reveal? AIDS touched on a really essential tension that had to do with modernity or the nature of modern life toward the last quarter of 20th century. The public health profession was feeling like contagion had been conquered, or could be. In the 1970s small pox was eradicated, polio vaccines had di
