by Naomi Wolf
Many women today feel that their sexuality is something distinct from the rest of their character and is cut off in some ways from their other, more admirable roles as mothers, wives, or workers; some feel inhibited in bed by the sense that their sexual pleasure in some way demeans them. This set of beliefs is not a human constant—it is not even very old; it was essentially invented when cultural critics in Europe and America were alarmed by female enfranchisement, and female sexuality was assigned to a new profession, the male gynecologists. It was codified thoroughly for the first time about a hundred and sixty years ago. We are not stuck with this dualism.
The Victorian period saw a wholesale shift in how women’s vaginas and clitorises were dealt with medically. This shift transferred a middle-class woman’s sexual and reproductive health from the hands of midwives to those of male doctors. These doctors formed professional organizations in order to marginalize midwives. The midwives’ approach to sexuality and birth had been to advise, and to support natural processes; the male doctors’ model of dealing with the vagina and uterus was, rather, one of “heroic medicine,” or impatient, sometimes violent, intervention.
In America, Ephraim McDowell, W. H. Byford, and J. Marion Sims also expanded the limits of the new male-dominated profession of gynecology. Sims perfected a technique for the repair of vesicovaginal fistulas; but his ambiguous legacy is that he did so by practicing on enslaved women—without the use of any kind of anesthesia. Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, Robert Lawson Tait and William Tyler Smith pioneered British male-dominated gynecology. This male domination of a field of medical care that for millennia had been in the hands of female midwives was not challenged until the late 1890s when one of the first women gynecologists, Helen Putnam, began practicing in Providence, Rhode Island. In two generations, British and American male gynecologists transformed the ancient and characteristically gentle practice of midwifery. They introduced such innovations as reclining births, which were more comfortable for the doctor than the midwife’s more active positioning of herself and her patient had been (reclining births require the baby to move against the force of gravity up the birth canal, a maternal posture in childbirth unknown outside the medicalized West), but that are far more damaging to women’s perineums and birth canals. This positioning, which we damagingly inherit, ushered in an era of new kinds of gynecological injury among middle-class women who could afford doctors in childbirth. Victorian male gynecologists also established the convention of performing pelvic exams behind a veil or covering; it was forbidden to physicians to actually visually observe the vagina or cervix, and they had to manage their diagnoses by touch alone. Finally, a new discourse of medically authorized judgment and shame elaborated itself around this highly contested site, the vagina. William Acton’s treatise promoting female passionlessness went through eight editions in twenty years; historian Carl Degler called it “undoubtedly one of the most widely quoted books” on female sexual issues “in the English-speaking world.”5
As the nineteenth century progressed, more and more public discussion about women’s role cast them as being mediated completely by their reproductive systems. Women’s uteruses were increasingly viewed as negatively affecting their owners’ moods, and their brainpower in general; women’s monthly periods were presented, by gynecologists writing in popular journals, as being the reason that higher education would debilitate young women. By the 1890s, female education, in turn, was cast as affecting women’s sexual nervous system, rendering “New Women” who insisted on a masculine education, infertile, in the views of some “experts,” or sexually insatiable, in the words of others, and in either case, hairy and unmarriageable.
“Although the idea of separate spheres was not new to the nineteenth century,” historians Ema Olafson Hellerstein, Leslie Parker Hume, and Karen M. Offen write, in Victorian Women: A Documentary Account of Women’s Lives in Nineteenth-Century England, France, and the United States, “the obsessive manner in which [French, U.S., and British] cultures insisted on this separation seemed particularly novel. . . . [A]ny woman who, however tangentially, rejected the role that Victorian culture thrust on her, seemed as noxious and threatening to her contemporaries as the political revolutionary or the social anarchist.”6 Female sexuality, they argue, was seen as a threat as profound to a stable, ordered society as was terrorism or anarchism: “Just as Victorian society wanted to give a young woman educational experience but not the experience of being an educated person, so it wanted her to have (on the permitted marital basis and for reproductive purposes) sexual experience but not the experience of being a sexual person.”7
From the 1860s to the 1890s, the brutality and punitive nature of masculine gynecological practices reached an apex. In this period, the use of cliterodectomy became, if not widespread, not unheard of, in “treating” girls who persisted in that dreaded vice, feminine masturbation. Dr. Isaac Baker Brown introduced cliterodectomy to England in 1858, and it was much practiced by him for ten years after that.8 Dr. Brown became famous and sought after for his “cure,” which took argumentative, fiery girls, and, after he had excised their clitorises, returned them to their families in a state of docility, meekness, and obedience—a result that we can now understand was doubtless the result of trauma, and also of interrupted neural activation.
And even for girls who were not threatened with actual excision of their clitorises as punishment for “the solitary vice,” guidebooks, moral manuals, and even popular journals were filled with warnings about how a female masturbator, lured by “French novels” or “sensation novels,” could be identified easily from her lassitude, listlessness, pallor, feverish eyes, and general air of furtiveness and dissatisfaction. It was understood that masturbation led girls on the downward path to other, even worse forms of “viciousness” and moral laxity; parents were advised to be vigilant and severe with those girls who persisted.
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson examined three hundred European medical journals from 1865 to 1900: “These readings,” he wrote, “all from standard, reputable professional journals—illustrate how men in positions of power over women’s lives, especially their sexual lives, misused that power to warp, damage, inhibit, and even destroy women’s sexual . . . selves.”9
Women’s ignorance of their own anatomy, coupled with the intense stigma surrounding female sexuality, often led to horrific outcomes. One French doctor, Démétrius Alexandre Zambaco, had a young female patient who, he believed, engaged in a “vice”—masturbation—which, he observed, “became more and more deeply rooted.” He reported that he felt it “necessary to change tactics and treat her severely, even with the most cruel brutality. Corporal punishment was resorted to, in particular the whip.”10 Alfred Poulet, the surgeon-major of Val-de-Grâce Hospital in Paris, published, in 1880, the second volume of his Treatise on Foreign Bodies in Surgical Practice. In it, he listed the objects that he had removed from the vaginas of young women in his care, and he included in his report similar cases that had been written up in England and America. Poulet noted that he had had to remove from the uteruses, urethras, and vaginas of his patients, objects ranging from “spools of thread, needle-cases, boxes of pomade, hair-pins and hairbrushes and . . . objects like pessaries and sponges.” He believed that “malice” and “insanity” addicted women to “the solitary vice,” and led these women to masturbate with these objects.
Poulet tells an appalling story: a twenty-eight-year-old woman was masturbating with the handle of a cedarwood hairbrush. When someone came into the room suddenly, she quickly jumped up and seated herself in order to conceal what she had been doing, and the hairbrush—brace yourself—“was suddenly pushed through the posterior wall of the vagina into the peritoneal cavity.” She was so ashamed, because a “modest woman” in the terms of Victorian medical discourse would never masturbate, that she kept her injury concealed for eight months, though the stick of wood had by then penetrated her intestines. Finally, when presumably the pain was too much to bear, she saw
her doctor and confessed; the brush was removed, but she died of peritonitis four days later.
Poulet argues that nine out of ten of the perforations he dealt with, caused by sharp objects in the vagina, were introduced by the patient’s masturbation. But contemporary scholars think that this is unlikely, and that in fact the many accounts from the period that seem bizarre to us, of women being injured by sharp objects in the vagina, resulted from their efforts to self-abort. In Nymphomania: A History, Carol Groneman claims that “the physical evidence . . . might have led to multiple explanations, including sexual abuse or attempted abortion. Instead, many physicians saw these women as temptresses, not victims.” Groneman points out that doctors see what they choose to see, and that Poulet saw “willfulness . . . vicious habits” and “lewd practices” leading to these injuries, not victimization or desperation, as “little distinction” in the medical profession at the time, Groneman notes, “was drawn between abuse, abortion, and masturbation.”11
According to Yale University historian Dr. Cynthia Russett, uterine prolapse was extremely common throughout the nineteenth century because of the demands of fashion. From about 1840 to 1910, elegant women wore tightly laced whalebone corsets. Russett makes the case that corsets or girdles, in our experience, are made of elastic or rubber; but whalebone does not easily bend. These corsets—as you can visualize—constricted the waist, and in doing so they also forced the other abdominal and pelvic organs (small intestine, uterus, bladder) sharply downward, and exerted continual pressure upon them. Women were expected to lace tightly and keep their waists even when heavily pregnant, which of course forced the distended uterus downward as well, putting even more terrible pressure on the pelvic floor. Pessaries were round metal objects like diaphragms, which women suffering from prolapse introduced into their vaginas to take the place of the damaged pelvic floor and to mechanically prevent the uterus and other organs from collapsing into the vaginal canal. In their journalism, books, and poetry, many women writers made impassioned pleas for change in fashions, so that women’s lives not be “deformed”—a frequently used term—into artificial models of propriety. They were talking about a physical as well as a psychological reality—a fashion that regularly led to the destruction of the integrity of the uterus and pelvic floor.
This epidemic of vaginal and uterine injury, and the invalidism it led to, was the background against which the great Victorian women novelists and poets—from the Brontës, to George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning—fantasized about women’s physical and emotional freedom.
THE STATE VS. THE “BAD” VAGINA
In 1857, the first Contagious Diseases Act was passed in England, and it was expanded in 1864. This gave the state the power to round up any woman suspected of being a prostitute, and to forcibly incarcerate her in an institution in which she was compelled to submit to a vaginal and pelvic exam against her will—ostensibly to prevent the spread of syphilis, gonorrhea, and other venereal diseases.
The legacies of the Contagious Diseases Acts are much more influential in women’s collective consciousness than histories usually suggest. All over England, especially in garrison towns, women who looked as if they might be prostitutes—a job category so loosely defined in the Victorian period that it described almost any woman who took care with her appearance, or looked or behaved as if she could be sexually active outside of marriage—could be seized by male agents acting undercover. Effectively kidnapped, they could then be held without due process in institutions much like prisons, called “lock hospitals.” There, they were restrained and forcibly medically examined—by male strangers. They were then medically treated against their will. These women could be held—legally—for up to eight months and kept away from families and employment.12
The British government planned to expand this program of the arrest and detention of young women who looked as if they might have ever been sexually active. It was to expand city by city and reach London. As British historian A. N. Wilson points out in The Victorians, the immense scale of these kidnappings and the scope of the terror among women that they engendered is reflected in the fact that the medical officer tasked with expanding the program to London argued against it, because, to be proportionate with the number of arrests taking place in the rest of the country, there would have to have been twelve full-scale hospitals opened in the capital just to house the women who would have to be swept up and imprisoned.13
The terror of this situation, I believe, has deeply imprinted Anglo-American female consciousness, even though few of us actually know this history.
Why do we today in the Anglo-American West so often feel that if we report a rape or sex crime against us, our treatment will depend on whether or not we ever had any sexual agency in our pasts? That if we were to “admit” sexual agency at all in our pasts, in the context of a rape inquiry, some terrible, lasting public shaming will follow? Why do investigations of sex crimes themselves, and even prosecutions and convictions, so often mirror this situation, with conviction rates higher the more “pure” or “innocent” of sexual agency a woman can be proved to have been—in contexts quite separate from the rape itself? Why do we still feel somehow that to be open about our sexual wishes or agency is somehow to court catastrophe?
Josephine Butler, an early feminist, campaigned successfully against the Contagious Diseases Acts by casting the women imprisoned in a “seduction and betrayal” narrative—they were not sexual beings but abused innocents.
Given this imprinting cultural experience of a first major feminist political victory, it is not surprising that feminism, and women’s campaigns in general, so often reflexively put their claims in a frame of women as “abused innocents,” especially when it comes to sexual issues. Our history had no room for a more nuanced frame. This success became double-edged. Feminists learned that they gained social sympathy, status, and legal victories by constructing a narrative of helpless female sexual victimization by predatory, brutal men; I call this the “wrongs of” narrative. While there were many situations that certainly suited that narrative, the problem for us is that they almost entirely failed to develop a companion discourse that included female sexual desire and sexual agency.
We still live with the fallout from this intellectual history. When I sought in 2011 to tease out, in the rape accusations against Julian Assange, what happened after the woman’s sexual consent on one level as well as her alleged lack of consent on another, I was attacked by feminists as “betraying the sisterhood.” The trouble is that most date rapes today happen after a nuanced encounter—in which a woman wants this, but emphatically does not want that. If we are unable ever to talk about sexual agency without fearing that this makes us “fair game” for anything that follows, we will never be able to prosecute real rapes successfully.
RESISTANCE
In spite of the brutal suppression of the vagina, uterus, and clitoris in this period, many female and male Victorians sought to create counternarratives to the toxic, medicalized vagina. Victorian women still sought out novels and art that represented the female self, female sexuality, and the vagina—however obliquely—in an appealing and positive light, and that sought to tell truths about female sexual desire and pleasure. Often these explorations and images were highly metaphorical.
In George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, for instance, Maggie Tulliver is depressed and isolated; but she is drawn by her suitor, Philip Wakem—secretly and against her parents’ wishes—to a part of the landscape that is called the Red Deeps. In this scenario, taking place in a vulval setting, female sexual desire is linked with female longing for learning, power, and a wider world:
In her childish days Maggie held this place, called the Red Deeps, in very great awe, . . . visions of robbers and fierce animals haunting every hollow. But now it had the charm for her which any broken ground, any rock and ravine, have for the eyes that rest habitually on the level. . . . In June time, too, the dog-roses were in their glory, and t
hat was an additional reason why Maggie should direct her walk to the Red Deeps, rather than to any other spot, on the first day she was free to wander at her will—a pleasure she loved so well, that sometimes, in her ardors of renunciation, she thought she ought to deny herself the frequent indulgence in it.
Eliot describes this “wandering” as intensely pleasurable, “the pleasure returning in a deeper flush.” Maggie wonders if the secrecy with which she explores the Red Deeps is a “spiritual blight”—“something she would dread to be discovered in”—the same phrase that often describes female masturbation in this period; but “[y]et the music would swell out again, like chimes borne onward in a recurrent breeze. . . .”14 Here female desire and self-knowledge are like music that “swells out”; as in so many such scenes, the female artistic or literary imagination, the sensual natural world, and an awakening vulval sensibility are all one.
Alluring holes, beautiful boxes, and valuable treasure chests appear with clearly suggestive implications throughout the classic women’s novels of the mid-nineteenth century as well. Dr. Rees, in “Narrating the Victorian Vagina: Charlotte Brontë and the Masturbating Woman,” explores the novel Villette—which tells the story of the quiet, humble governess Lucy Snowe, and how she triumphs over adversaries in a school in Belgium and finds passionate sexual and marital love at last—and looks at Charlotte Brontë’s use of such vaginal metaphors.15