Yesterday we hosted professor Karen Miller’s class on ” Female Bodies in the Nineteenth Century,” and the students examined a myriad of sources, including frontier newspaper ads from the 1880’s, issues of Harper’s Weekly from the 1860s and 1890s, huckster medical guides, and legitimate obstetric manuals spanning the 19th century.  The students took turns presenting sources they were given (at random), and generally agreed that the parallels and the differences between Victorian-age and modern advice on beauty, child-rearing, and proper behavior for women were fascinating.