THE BODY
The Enlightenment construction of woman started with her body. The body is an appropriate starting point for a study of nineteenth-century woman because the body, and more especially reproductive biology, was used to underpin a broader reconception of woman's nature and role.
The physical differentiation of women from men was thought to account for the moral and social differences between the sexes. Different gender roles were determined by different bodily function, but it was the female body that came to bear an enormous interpretive weight. As Rousseau so memorably put it: ‘The consequences of sex are wholly unlike for man and woman. The male is only a male now and again, the female is always a female... everything reminds her of her sex.'7 For woman, experience could not be independent of her physical function.The belief that women were enslaved to their bodies has been a historical constant. The words of one sixteenth-century German Protestant speaking of women ‘inextricably caught in the snares of their own biology, enslaved to a sexuality which destroyed their reason and unbalanced their health' anticipates the much later nineteenth-century assertions equating women's physical with their mental weakness.8 What had changed in the intervening centuries was, first of all, the fact that women's bodies ‘in their scientifically accessible concreteness... came to bear an enormous new weight of mean- ing'.9 The second change was a new conviction on the part of the medical profession that the body (and implicitly the mind) of woman could be medicalised, pathologised and controlled.10
Until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the classical idea of woman's body prevailed. According to this model of the male and female body, and more especially of the reproductive organs, formulated by Galen in the second century ce, the female was essentially the same as the male, her sexual organs were the mirror image of his only they were located inside the body.
Thus the ovaries were equivalent to the testes, the vagina to the penis. ‘Turn outward the woman's, turn inward, so to speak, and fold double the man's, and you will find the same in both in every respect.'11 This ‘one-sex model' of humankind was not equal. It prioritised the male or normal sex; the female was the lesser sex, a variation on the norm, lacking the strength or heat of the male and thus imperfect. Stories of women transmogrifying into men when placed under duress abounded. One apocryphal tale from the sixteenth century featured a female swineherd who, upon chasing a pig, jumped a ditch and promptly developed male genitalia on account of the vigorous activity and the generation of heat from the exertion. Such stories attest not only to the belief in the transmutability of sex but also to the idea of a sexual hierarchy because, as the seventeenth-century story-teller said: ‘Nature tends always toward what is most perfect and not, on the contrary, to perform in such a way that what is perfect should become imperfect.'12In this pre-Enlightenment conception, the woman was seen not merely as weaker in body but also as weaker in mind. A woman's body was unstable. She had no control over her own body, it was said, because of the demonic struggles contained therein. This instability was most powerfully manifested in the image of the wandering womb: women who experienced fits or ‘hysteria' were said to be suffering from a condition in which the womb roamed around the body as a result of the failure to put the womb to its rightful use. Thus, psychological complaints were explicitly linked to physical changes in the body. Woman's mind was, therefore, unstable, unable to reason. ‘Her mind and judgement is as variable and as fickle as the weather,' stated a husband of his wife in 1713.13
By the middle of the eighteenth century things were changing. The one-sex model of humankind was being replaced by the ‘two-sex model' which stressed not the similarities but the differences between the sexes.
The female reproductive organs were no longer seen as imperfect versions of the male forms, but as distinct in their own right. Thus the early modern gender hierarchy predicated on male heat and strength and female coldness and weakness (a male model of bodily form and female imperfection) was superseded by gender difference based on distinct anatomies with specific functions. The Enlightenment, and specifically the medical and scientific investigations of the anatomy and physiology of sex, caused this reassessment of ideas of sexual difference. The discovery that women's bodies were not the inverse of men's — that they had a smaller frame, a broader pelvis and completely different reproductive organs — propounded the concrete reality of sexual difference. Now there was no in-between, no possibility of uncertainty. And, in theory, the old hierarchy which subordinated the female to the male body could be discarded as the differences between the two were clear for all to see. Yet, in the eighteenth century, writers used the body and physical difference more than ever to explain and legitimise cultural and political inequality. Indeed, whereas before 1700 a woman's status might have been signified by cultural signs such as the long hair of the virgin and the covered head of the married woman, now sex determined identity and destiny. Scientists and doctors played a central role in the rethinking of gender; their discoveries based on natural law rather than religious belief or metaphysics, served to bolster the new conception of male-female relations. Women's anatomical difference was said to be natural: their finer nerves made them more sensitive than men; their smaller frames made them more childlike; their reproductive cycles made them prone to mental disturbance; their smaller skulls and brains made them unsuited to mental exertion.14 Women's bodies may have become more fixed in a scientific sense but little had changed in the perception that women were enslaved to their bodies in ways that men never would be. The scientific and medical revolution, far from breaking down sexual stereotypes, served to reinforce them.15Woman, according to the men of the Enlightenment, was not, as previously imagined, an imperfect man, but a completely different creature.16 It followed that whilst a man might be unencumbered by his body, his sex, a woman could never be free of hers. For woman, body and mind were as one. Her mind was in thrall to her physical being. The consequences were twofold. Firstly, the theory that a woman's mind was innately connected to her reproductive function helped to justify the theory of separate spheres — the translation of sexual difference into social and economic difference comprising the belief that woman was fitted for the private or domestic sphere and the male for the public or civic and political arena. Secondly, the mind-body continuum helped to legitimise the use of the female body as a battleground for a variety of knowledges or discourses. By the end of the nineteenth century the female body had been transformed in popular discourse from a wild, untameable symbolic entity containing demons and unknown forces, into something that could be medicalised, invaded and controlled. The modern (female) body, then, was a sexualised body which determined identity and destiny.
The new Enlightenment understanding of women's bodies did not result in the liberation of women from physical and mental limitations. In fact the female body increasingly became a site of struggle - not of demons as in the early modern period, but of doctors and scientists who attempted to usurp women's functional and metaphysical understanding of their own bodies. There was a gradual shift from a privileging of a woman's own understanding of her body which relied upon sensation and what might appear as superstitious or ritual practices, to interpretations legitimised by scientific knowledge and the application of reason. Before the rise of men of science, women relied upon what might be described as a sensation-based bodily knowledge.
For example, only a pregnant woman would know when quickening had occurred, the moment when an expectant mother could feel her baby move, indicating the birth of the soul. From the end of the eighteenth century the medical profession began slowly to take possession of women's bodies, expropriating what had previously been areas under the control of women themselves based on visual or sensual apprehension. Thus the interpretive authority shifted from she who experienced the bodily sensations to he who observed the symptoms. What had previously been regarded as a ‘private reality under the skin became a public affair'.17 Women's ‘natural' functions were identified as specific causes of ill-health. The female body became a public space.18 Whilst nature continued to exert its hold over woman, now medical men believed they could actively intervene: nature as female was to be ‘unveiled, unclothed and penetrated by masculine science'.19‘Woman is woman by every part of her being and not uniquely by her uterus... woman is all maternity.'20 Thus stated the French doctor Bernutz in 1874, a statement which bears all the hallmarks of an ideology which defined woman in terms of her sex. By the second half of the nineteenth century the belief amongst the medical and scientific communities that the reproductive system was the key to understanding woman's physical and mental peculiarities was pervasive. Womanness was inscribed on the body so there was no escape. Woman was depicted as a slave to her own body, its monthly cycle, its specific reproductive functions, its secretions. Across Europe, doctors elaborated the theory of women's inherent disablement. The French doctor Michelet memorably commented that menstruation rendered woman ‘not only an invalid, but a wounded one' for 15 to 20 days out of 28.21 In Germany, another remarked that ‘every month for several days she is enfeebled, if not downright ill.'22 Pregnancy and childbirth were similarly regarded amongst the medical community as pathological conditions.
Indeed, it has been said that for many women, most notably those amongst the middle classes, ill-health became a way of life.23 Even the menopause offered no respite — despite the belief that the end of a woman's fertility symbolised the end of womanhood — since, according to one specialist, ‘many women [who] may have passed through the trials of puberty and child-bearing without serious nervous disorder, will break down at,24menopause.'
However, not only was a woman's reproductive function regarded as a determinant of her physical well-being, but her mental state was also said to be derived from her sex. Menstrual cramps aside, at this time of the month a woman was prone to a ‘mental state varying from a slight psychosis to absolute irresponsibility', according to one Parisian medical man in 1890.25 What doctors termed the sex-specific character of women's physiology predisposed her to mental illness and nowhere was this demonstrated more starkly than in the diagnosis of ‘nervous disorders' including ‘hysteria', anorexia nervosa, nervous excitability and other such neurological disorders which appeared to constitute an epidemic amongst middle-class women by the second half of the century. At the same time the belief in the inherently sick state of woman was buttressed by an ideology of femininity which restricted women's role and opportunities and which told women they would become ill if they tried to escape their destiny.
The false notion of a female disease originating in disorder of the uterus was known to the ancient Egyptians. By the eighteenth century, though, the seat of this nervous disorder was seen as both neurological and uterine, so that by the nineteenth century hysteria was a diagnosis uniquely ascribed to the middle-class woman who suffered not only from the physical constraints of her sex, but also from the cultural constraints ofidealised femininity. Hysteria was a diagnosis that incorporated a multitude of symptoms — fainting, palpitations, suffocation, dizziness, tiredness, speech disturbance as well as acts of defiance and independence — all were seen to be signs of uterine disorder in a woman. The cause, according to the medical men, was the failure to follow the path nature had intended. Thus, a woman deprived of male company — the abstinent woman — was prone to developing the hysteric personality as was the educated woman, the woman who strove for independence. In Paris in 1880 it was authoritatively stated, ‘where young ladies of the lower classes and the petite bourgeoisie are educated beyond their social standing, hysteria is very frequent.'26 Women who harboured ‘overexalted dreams', who craved mental stimulation, women who thus threatened to destabilise gender roles were prime candidates for the diagnosis.27 The cure, according to those doctors who chose to specialise in female nervous complaints, was either marriage and children or complete rest and deprivation of any sensory stimulation. Isolation in a darkened room without reading matter or visitors, a diet of pappy food, regular body massage and an absence of exercise was the recommended treatment for a woman who was experiencing a struggle between her body and her mind. The rest cure supposedly lulled the mind into a state of languor and total submission so that in time, the patient would accept her assigned role as dutiful wife and mother. For some women, though, this treatment was more insufferable than the symptoms it was supposed to cure, tipping them closer to madness as a consequence of deprivation of any mental stimulus.28
Hysteria was not the only supposed female malady said to derive from uterine disorder. Madness or lunacy and anorexia nervosa were similarly defined as conditions arising from the sex of woman. However, feminist historians have rightly drawn attention to the symbolic and literal meaning of such conditions. Notwithstanding the physical reality of these complaints exacerbated by restrictive corsets and heavy clothing, lack of exercise and a diet which induced anaemia, it is clear that the propensity of women to such disorders was also induced by a certain way of life. The lifestyle of some middle-class women almost predisposed them to sickness, and their sickness determined their way of life. Deprived of education, mental stimulation and economic independence, and forever exhorted to conform to an ideal of femininity which exalted a pale, sickly, languid beauty, illness became both a vindication and a cry for help. Anorexic girls, argues Elaine Showalter, ‘paraded physical starvation as a way of drawing attention to the starvation of their mental and moral faculties.'29 The inherent sickness of woman was both accepted by her and used as a means of rebellion against a rigid and restraining social role. It is doubtful, as some have suggested, that women (or
their advocates) deliberately feigned hysteria and other nervous disorders as a defence in prosecutions for a whole range of crimes from shoplifting to murder. But the belief that women were suggestible, weak and prone to uncontrolled acts in moments of temporary insanity resulted in hundreds of women in the late nineteenth century being judged sympathetically by the courts.30
Women were caught in a double bind. By 1850 the belief in the relationship between the brain or mind and female sexuality was so strong amongst the medical fraternity that if a woman escaped a nervous disease she was liable to be warned of the danger of succumbing to gynaecological complaint. Diseases of the reproductive system, argued physicians, were almost certainly caused by women's emancipation. Excessive stimulation, education and public activity caused atrophy of the reproductive organs; in other words it unsexed a woman. Likewise, a disorderly woman, a woman whose behaviour did not conform to the feminine ideal, might be considered a candidate for invasive surgery. From the 1860s onwards, clitoridectomy (surgical removal of the clitoris), ovariotomy (removal of the ovaries) and hysterectomy (removal of the uterus), were carried out by gynaecologists as cures for masturbation, lunacy, and other so-called nervous complaints.31 Ironically, gynaecological surgery desexed a woman but in the process it controlled her, brought her within the bounds of appropriate behaviour. The English doctor Isaac Baker Brown became infamous for his surgical procedures which exerted the power of the doctor over the woman's body and mind. A typical case was that of Mrs O upon whom Brown commenced treatment in 1862. ‘She had been ill ever since marriage, five years previously; having distaste for the society of her husband, always laid upon the sofa, and under medical treatment', wrote Brown in his case notes. ‘Evidence of peripheral excitement being manifest, I performed my usual operation [clitoridectomy]. She rapidly lost all the hysterical symptoms which had previously existed.'32 Mrs O went on to deliver two children and regained a ‘robust health'. For Brown and his followers such operations rendered women ‘tractable, orderly, industrious, and cleanly.'33
So far, we have been talking about perceptions and understandings of women's bodies — discourses — but not about women's own experiences of their bodies. It is necessary to know how the body was imagined and talked about in the past as a framework for understanding how women experienced their own bodies. Yet, as Lyndal Roper has reminded us, ‘Sexual difference is not purely discursive nor merely social. It is also physical.'34 The body has always been important for feminist historians for whom it is not merely a discursive construct but ‘a feminist site of lived experience that serves to ground agency and resistance, to give it concrete origins'.35 However, how can we know how a nineteenth-century woman experienced her own body at a time when few women expressed their physical experiences in writing? How do we deal with the tension between how a culture imagines a body and actual corporeal experience? Barbara Duden argues that in pre-modern western society, women understood their bodies by interpreting their own bodily sensations; thus they would ‘know' when they were sick or pregnant by observation. Even in nineteenth-century Saxony the notion of the wandering womb was still current: Womb, you rascal, get the hell back to your own house' — suggesting that medical advances had not penetrated all that far into the popular psyche.36 Before 1800 there existed a female culture which strongly influenced reproductive practices; and after 1800 or thereabouts, this female world was powerfully superseded by male doctors and surgeons. Women's bodies have always been a matter of public concern and a range of community and legal constraints competed with women's own interpretations of their reproductive functions.37 But in the early modern period the balance was tipped towards women.
In the modern era, then, visual signs were prioritised over sensation and thus the interpretation of bodily experience shifted from the individual to the observer, often a male doctor.38 This transformation, writes Isabel Hull, ‘did more than simply undermine women's relative autonomy over their bodies, it changed the manner in which a modern person's sense of self... is organised.'39 In pre-modern infanticide cases a woman carrying an illegitimate child might convincingly deny her pregnancy to others and to herself, despite visual evidence to the contrary. It was generally understood that a missed period was not a sure indication that a woman was with child; a swollen stomach could be interpreted as the result of a cyst, clogged blood or a wandering womb. By the modern era the visual sign of a physical condition and a doctor's confirmation of a pregnancy overrode women's assertions to the contrary. Medical knowledge became privileged as proof in a court of law over women's word. When Robina Ritch was legally indicted for suspected concealment of a pregnancy in 1903 in northern Scotland, it was necessary that the prosecution included a doctor's evidence. The doctor did not merely rely on Robina's appearance — swollen abdomen and ankles — his examination detected that her ‘womb could be felt contracting and relaxing' and his stethoscope ‘revealed foetal heart beats 132 per minute'.40 With a male doctor's evidence there could be no doubt that Robina had been with child.
Historians of women tend to approach the history of women's bodily experience through the stages of the lifecycle — youth and adolescence, marriage, motherhood and old age. It is a valid framework although it tends to perpetuate the belief that women are little more than their reproductive systems.41 However, although it is undeniable that medical science has had a major impact upon women’s experience of themselves as women, it is necessary to move beyond the notion that women were innately sick, since it is plain that the vast majority of European women did not experience their bodies in this way. For the rural and urban working classes and the poor, the notion that menstruation was a disabling experience must have been laughable. Pregnancy and childbirth, although undoubtedly debilitating and dangerous for some, were dealt with as natural occurrences in a woman’s lifecycle. Illness was a luxury few working women could afford; the economically active woman had no time to be an invalid. Working-class women were rarely diagnosed with the symptoms of hysteria. On the other hand, a combination of religious ideology and superstitious practices did influence the ways in which these women understood their bodies. Some popular beliefs had meaning in an uncontrollable world little affected by modern science and rational thought. Taboos associated with pregnancy were especially strong at a time when pregnancy and childbirth were fraught with danger. Prohibitions on pregnant women consuming particular foodstuffs such as seafood, green salad, and even milk, were common in Spain. Everywhere pregnant women tried to avoid looking at certain animals for fear they would cause the baby to be born with a deformity. Birthmarks on a baby were attributed to the mother touching certain objects or having contact with a dead person or developing food cravings. If a pregnant woman looked at the moon her child would be born a lunatic; if she had intercourse during menstruation she would bear a monstrous child.42 These beliefs can be seen as part of a female knowledge — women’s ways of knowing — which aided women’s control over their pregnancy in an age when stillbirths, infant defects and maternal mortality were frequent enough to present a real fear. The words of one Alsatian proverb, ‘heaven stays open nine days for the woman in childbed’, indicates the prescient fear of death following the delivery of a child.43 In the religiously prescribed practice of ‘churching’ (les relevailles in France, Muttersegen in Germany), a woman recently delivered of a child went to church as soon as possible because she was regarded as unclean and liable to bring bad luck on any household she entered. This continued as a popular practice until the middle of the twentieth century in the Church of England and Catholic churches in Britain and France. Although in religious terms a purification ritual, it was also a celebration of the woman's survival of childbirth and her return to everyday life and as such became a female social occasion which gave thanks for a woman's life and fertility rather than emphasising the impurity of her body.44 Reproductive ill-health was undoubtedly, then, a key factor in women's corporeal experience but not the only one. Amongst the working classes, women were more likely than men to succumb to chronic diseases such as tuberculosis. Breast cancer was a scourge even in the nineteenth century and as a consequence of years of childbearing accompanied by hard physical labour it was said that women aged prematurely. In a Baden village in 1900, peasant women were routinely said to be worn out.45 Most European women continued to experience and interpret their bodies according to their own knowledge and understanding of physical sensation. But the emphasis on sex difference was bolstered by the scientific elaboration of ideas about social or cultural difference. Sexual difference was thus translated into separate spheres, or the idea that men and women were destined by nature for separate roles in public and private life.