Inscribing the town on women's bodies

Female chastity and respectability in the eighteenth century were regarded as essential features of civil culture, while disorder, ‘wickedness’ and ‘deterioration of manners’ subverted urban polite society. In this context, public health became an important part of the civic agenda, where the creation of clean, open and salubrious social spaces was a priority, and filth and nastiness reflected badly on the city fathers and their town. Disorderly women constituted a specific challenge to urban propriety and the ‘healthy’ town as an affront not only to order but also to sexual mores, and potentially to physical health. Focusing on Aberdeen, this chapter explores shifting attitudes to health, sex, bodies and gender and the ways these were managed and policed in eighteenth-century towns.