Chastity signifies sexual purity and restraint, either through virginity or through fidelity in marriage. While Augustine and Aquinas define chastity as a virtue for both men and women, Shakespeare depicts chastity almost exclusively as a female virtue, repeatedly using the term in connection with feminized representations of nature, the virgin goddess Diana, and young women (married and unmarried). Although Shakespeare’s plays include male characters who fixate on the chastity of female characters, chastity is a virtue of self-government that must, by definition, be under the control of women themselves. For Shakespeare’s female characters, chastity functions as a means of expressing bodily autonomy and rejecting attempts at patriarchal control, concepts that are still relevant for young women today. Shakespeare’s chaste heroines now lend their names and stories to projects designed to promote social justice and advocacy for young women. The cultural authority of Shakespeare’s plays can help provide a historical and ethical reference for a virtue that centers on control over one’s own body. In the context of current global debates about women’s rights and sexual assault, Shakespeare’s plays demonstrate that chastity is not only a relevant virtue — it is crucial to understanding the importance of women’s autonomy.

Schloendorff v. Society of New York Hospitals is a 1914 New York Court of Appeals decision frequently cited as the foundational case establishing a patient’s common-law right to bodily autonomy. But Judge Benjamin Cardozo’s assertion that “every human being of adult years and sound mind has a right to determine what shall be done with his own body” was mere dicta. In affirming a directed verdict for the hospital where the plaintiff’s uterus was removed without her consent, Cardozo deemed a nurse’s awareness of the patient’s objection to surgery insufficient to put the hospital on notice that an independent-contractor surgeon was planning a non-consensual hysterectomy. In her feminist judgment, Professor Kelly Dineen unearths a treasure trove of contemporaneous sources that establish the nursing function as an independent basis for duties to patients for which the hospital may be held vicariously liable. In her commentary, Professor Danielle Pelfrey Duryea situates the case within the emergence of “modern nursing” as a devalued feminine counterpart to masculine, valorized “modern medicine."