Ungovernable

by Therese Oneill

  Then again, you don’t want to go too far in the other direction. Sperry raises the point that even a decent woman can spoil her reproductive organs through being a grumplepants: “Anxiety, fear, grief, suspicion, jealousy, anger, revenge, etc., are, for unknown reasons, strikingly preventive not only of conception, but also of normal ovulation.”

  Known causes of sterility include endometriosis, chronic illness, and unwitting ballroom dancing with Satan.

  So… stop being sad. Right now! “Feelings” are for artists and madmen. Sadness, fear, anger, are all emotions that can turn the body fluids that are supposed to welcome conception into vile baby-shunning serums. Sperry helps us understand.

  Alarming and depressing emotions or intense excitement often cause such changes in the mother’s milk as to render it actually poisonous to her nursing babe. Knowing these and kindred facts, we do not wonder that mental and nervous states can render male reproductive germs incapable of impregnating, and female germs incapable of receiving fertilization.

  West agrees. No baby wants to attain life inside a whiner’s womb: “A frequent cause of barrenness and matrimonial unhappiness is a coldness and want of congeniality in temperament.”

  Q: Isn’t there a possibility that my husband’s biology might be contributing to our struggles to conceive?

  A: Pshhh. I mean… it’s not unheard of. But if your man is low on baby grain, you’re not going to like the reason.

  “The most common cause of impotency,” Sperry tells us, “is sexual excess or abuse, resulting in collapse of the nervous mechanism of the reproductive system.”

  That means he’s either spending all his good sperm on some other lady, or, more likely, in solitude. As in, he’d rather be masturbating in the dead of night behind the outhouse than sharing his glorious fecundity with you.

  It may not be because you’re abhorrent, however! Chin up! Maybe he’s a Uranian, a condition we will learn of in later chapters. Or perhaps, without intending harm, you yourself are draining your husband of his vital fluids with your constant demands for carnal satisfaction. Men need time to re-seed. He’s not a piece of meat, madam.

  Dr. Michael Ryan points out that an overused seminal vesicle is a puny seminal vesicle. And that’s no good; sperm must be sturdy and pistoned with great power toward its goal. Vaginas, especially gluttonous overused ones, are naturally inclined to deploy chemicals to fight invading germ-sperms. So a man’s seed must have the force and guile to maneuver successfully through the shrewd labyrinth of your reproductive system.

  “Wilfred, what is the Matter?” Wilfred’s “matter” is that you and your baby-starved seed-sucking womb need to back off for a bit.

  “The most frequent cause of want of family, is too frequent intercourse,” Dr. Ryan tells us. In such cases, “the male semen will be too weak, and the female will become relaxed, have increased mucous vaginal discharge, which will extinguish the vivifying principle of the male altogether.… All healthy persons who desire children, should cohabit but once or twice a week, and they will be seldom disappointed in their expectations. The sexual act is not performed well when repeated too often.”

  Q: Okay. Just… let’s not talk about semen for a bit. Are there any other reasons for unsuccessful fruition that have been lost to history?

  A: Mismating is seldom talked about today, though it was a serious consideration for most of the nineteenth century. So much that it was even considered in courts of law, as seen in Dr. Ryan’s 1831 edition of Manual of Medical Jurisprudence, in which he warned that large and small people who tried to reproduce could expect difficulties, likely due to “the disproportion of the organs.” “This is observed very often, when persons of extreme difference of stature cohabit,” wise Ryan observed.

  Throughout the century many men of learning believed that a husband and wife had to be of complementary physical and mental builds to successfully procreate. Napheys thought he had this one figured out. “The ancients and some modern authorities maintain that persons of the same temperament should not marry, as such marriage is likely to be unfruitful,” he wrote. “Hence blonde women should marry dark men, thin women robust men, and vice versa. There is evidently a condition of sterility which is the result of mismating. The proof of this is seen where a woman remained barren in a first marriage but was fruitful in a second.”

  A prime example of a mismatched couple. Too many similarities, such as light curly hair and an unnatural passion for soup ladles.

  Q: Or maybe the first husband had fertility problems of his own—

  A: Please! Will you mind your serpent tongue for a single moment? I think I’ve made it clear that suggesting a man is infertile in this era is akin to just flat out calling him a limp-membered chronic masturbator who must fantasize about being birched by his old schoolmaster to achieve climax. Sperry brings a little more science to the issue. For one thing, maybe it isn’t your husband’s fertile season.

  Q: Oh. We’re going to be talking about semen again, then.

  A: You brought this on yourself. Sperry tells us, “In some instances the male produces spermatozoa and is fertile during certain periods of the year only. This seems to be natural with many species of inferior animals, and it probably explains the fact of the absence of any exhibition of sexual passion during protracted periods annually.”

  That is an incredibly reasonable correlation. Or causation. Fact! Reasonable probably-fact! Wait, he has some other very well-considered probably-facts. “Possibly nature has occult ways of knowing what is good or bad in such matters, and has also her secret methods of avoiding the one and securing the other.” In other words, maybe Nature just knows that some people—say a gangly sallow redheaded anemic, for instance—have no business breeding with another of their kind, and refuses to take part in their propagation.

  I’m not saying that’s correct, of course. Some of my best friends are sallow redheads.

  Q: Without modern tests, how shall I know when I am pregnant?

  A: First of all, outside of this book, unless you’re lecturing in a surgical theater to educated and properly emotionally stunted male doctors, don’t use the word “pregnant.” Just listen to it flop itself off the tongue. Ugh. “PRAYGNINT.” It’s a vulgar word, a gross shorthand of “I got a man’s love squirts all up inside me and now my gut’s churning up a bloody squish-baby for my vagina to squeeze out, so picture THAT, Aunt Lilah!”

  You have any number of modest allusions at your disposal; use them. “With child,” “expecting,” “in the family way,” and of course the French “enceinte.” Enceinte has a multisource etymology, but primarily seems to refer to swelling beyond one’s usual girding and becoming uncinched, or “uncorseted.” Less appropriate but fashionable terms for pregnancies past include “to have sprained one’s ankle,” “Hans en Kelder” (Dutch for “Jack in the basement”… though it seems just as opaque in English without the Dutch), and “Here come the infantry.”

  Truthfully, Aunt Lilah already suspected as much.

  Q: How shall I know when I have successfully sprained my ankle?

  A: No, no, that’s not how you use it. Other women whisper it about you behind your back! Ah, never mind.

  If you’re truly eschewing modern methods, confirming pregnancy will be a bit of a challenge. It wasn’t until well into the twentieth century that scientists began to understand, much less measure, the hormone changes that conception caused in a woman’s body.

  That’s when all the bunnies started to die.

  Once she has conceived, a pregnant woman’s placenta begins to produce a chemical called hCG, as well as elevated progesterone. By 1930 you could send off a sample of a woman’s urine to a lab, where it would be injected into a sexually immature rat, mouse, or, most favorably, rabbit. If the animal began to ovulate, it meant it had been injected with hCG and the woman from whom the urine came was pregnant. Of course, you had to cut the rabbit open to check for ovulation. They didn’t get sewn back up.

  “Poor Jessic
a really needs to work on her balance. She seems to sprain her ankle just about every time she gets into bed.”

  However, in the nineteenth century you would not yet know to look for answers inside the reproductive tracts of rabbit corpses. Pregnancy wasn’t diagnosed easily, at least not officially. A woman might know quite well within herself that she was with child, but there was no way to conclusively convince anyone else.

  Q: Why does she have to convince anyone else?

  A: Courts of law took pregnancy very seriously. Whether or not a woman was pregnant at a certain time changed how certain legal issues were handled, from the execution of a last will and testament to plain old executions. A pregnant woman could not be hanged no matter what her crime.

  A pregnant woman stands before a judge while an angry woman harangues a guilty-looking man.

  For centuries, if a woman was sentenced to death, she could “plead the belly,” claiming to be pregnant. This would stay her execution, and often resulted in her sentence getting buried in busy dockets and commuted to imprisonment. But proving she was pregnant was near impossible to do beyond a shadow of a doubt. Commonly, according to Alfred Swaine Taylor’s 1853 edition of Medical Jurisprudence, a judge would commission a “jury of twelve married women” to determine if the woman was telling the truth. These women were “to be impaneled, and sworn to try, in the words of the law, ‘whether the prisoner be with child of a quick child or not.’ If they find her quick with child, she is respited; otherwise the sentence will take effect.”

  This method was only intended to determine a “quickened” child, meaning a fetus far enough into its development to have begun moving in the womb, usually the fourth or fifth month. Taylor recounts many cases where pregnant women were denounced as liars after their “medical” inspection, their lives (and their children’s) only spared by a cautious judge holding the case in limbo for a few months to be sure.

  Dr. Ryan’s previously cited book on medical jurisprudence gives a frightening illustration of just how pitiful actual evidence for pregnancy was. For Ryan, the most reliable way to tell if a woman was pregnant was to observe her “moral state,” which, in the case of pregnancy, “is subject to numerous changes”: “Some women, naturally gay and amiable, become sad, melancholy, and insociable, and vice versa. Many diseases appear, others disappear, as hysteria, chlorosis, chorea, epilepsy. If all are present they afford strong proof of pregnancy, but never that positive certainty which enables us to give decisive evidence before magistrates.”

  Basically, you can tell she’s pregnant if she seems… y’know… off.

  At least Ryan knew enough to be dissatisfied with his method. And so, in the later nineteenth century, medicine and law began to work together to find ways to determine if a woman was faking a pregnancy. Still, no symptom by itself was solid proof of anything. Including these:

  Ceasing to be “unwell”—To stop getting your period seems the most obvious indication of pregnancy. But one of the reasons a modern woman’s period is so darn periodical is that she is healthy, far healthier than her great-grandmothers were. Poor nutrition, arduous labor, the common occurrence of very early-term miscarriages that the woman was unaware of, and the continuance of spotting even when pregnant all contributed to the unreliability of this marker.

  Swelling and discoloring of the breasts—When a woman is pregnant, her breasts grow large to prepare for nursing and the areola darkens. Of course, noticing this requires having intimate knowledge of a woman’s breasts beforehand, and is still subjective.

  Morning sickness—Vomiting and retching, usually lasting until “quickening occurs.” Again, easily faked or caused by any number of nineteenth-century illnesses.

  Detection of fetal heartbeat or movement—Doctors often simply held an ear to a woman’s stomach, or used very rudimentary stethoscopes, both inconclusive methods. Could be gas.

  A growth in the abdomen—Where at this point most of us would surrender and declare the woman pregnant, tumors and cysts in the female reproductive tract were often cited as the cause.

  Pushing a small human out of her body—Provided you can prove it’s not a doll or monkey in a costume that was placed between her legs to look as if it emerged seconds before you saw it, this might serve as legal proof of pregnancy.

  Conversely, when nothing is solid proof, everything can be proof. Because it was an even more serious crime to conceal a pregnancy than to fake one. Hiding a pregnancy was considered criminal because it presupposed the grim question “What were you planning to do when you could no longer hide it?” Courts did not believe the majority of unwanted pregnancies ended with a baby warmly wrapped in a basket on the steps of a church.

  A nineteenth-century obstetric stethoscope, one of the few medical tools that were available and… all but useless in diagnosing pregnancy.

  Dr. Sperry tackles the less noticeable but just as likely secondary symptoms that afflict a pregnant woman. They include… ehh… every possible condition, illness, or irritation known to humans and most land mammals.

  The skin is apt to undergo decided alterations of appearance and behavior.

  Those who usually perspire freely are likely to have a dry skin during pregnancy, while those who usually have a dry skin may perspire freely… the perspiration in such cases is likely to have a decided odor.

  Women who are naturally pale before conception are apt to be florid during pregnancy, and those who are usually dark are quite prone to appear bleached, at least in spots.

  The lower lip is apt to protrude more than usual and the space below the eyes is frequently dark with venous blood. Troublesome skin diseases may appear at this time.

  A persistent loss of appetite and dyspeptic symptoms are not uncommon.

  Heartburn and flatulence are frequent.

  Marked drowsiness may result, and palpitations of the heart may give rise to unnecessary fears.

  The disturbed circulation and digestion are apt to produce constipation, or perhaps diarrhea instead.

  Q: Sex calculus, sperm hoarding, breast-suckers, Belgians. Wow. I sort of just want a cat now.

  A: Coward. Don’t be intimidated! You’re simply realizing the weight of your decision. Which, by the way, isn’t really a decision. If you’re a functioning, decent woman, motherhood is your duty to your civilization, your husband, and your God.

  Dr. West can scold you better than I can. “Self and self-gratification is not the end of life. The peopling of the earth and the perpetuation of the race are ends residing in and proceeding from the marriage relation. It is the way instituted by the great Lawgiver for properly, wisely and safely consummating His purpose concerning the earth and man.”

  Or even more simply, here’s a quote from the prolific nineteenth-century Scottish novelist Margaret Oliphant: “A house without a child is like a lawn without a flower.”

  Q: Is that really bad, though? Lawn without a flower? I try to keep my lawn completely green. The flowers I do get are dandelions and I’m constantly trying to kill off those little bast—

  A: It’s bad. Empty, she means. Devoid of color and vibrancy.

  Bottom line: It’s an abomination not to have children. Unless you’re unhealthy, unpleasant, or unattractive—then it’s an abomination to have them. But we’re going to assume you belong to the former blessed band of breeders. So do as God commanded. And if divine wrath isn’t enough to motivate you, Dr. West does make a good argument for the effort expended. Children may “bring care and trouble into the home”; they may “disturb its harmony, break up its quiet, scatter to the winds many of its carefully-observed rules. But,” says West, “they bring more than they destroy. They teach patience, forbearance, kindness, sobriety, diligence, veracity, and all the nobler virtues of human life and character. They are the light and joy, the happiness and bliss, the virtue and peace, of marital life.”

  Like you were gonna retire young and backpack through Europe anyway. Many of us suffer lack of motivation to improve ourselves without bein
g forced to. Kids are that force. Those little weeds may be the best thing that ever happens to you.

  Although, as we will see, their germination isn’t terribly fun.

  2

  How Much Violence and Lager Should My Fetus Be Exposed to as a Means to Ensure Sturdy Character?

  And Other Pregnancy Tips

  Congratulations. You got an A++ on the pee-stick test, or a gaggle of fishwives has stripped you naked and poked your belly to sufficiently convince the community you’re not trying to deceive your way out of execution. Either way, you’re pregnant.

  If you approach this as a twenty-first-century woman, you’ll want to immediately set to work ensuring the next nine months are healthy ones for both you and your growing baby. Throw out the allergy-causing peanut butter, nitrate-pumped prosciutto, mercury-tainted tuna fish, and all your favorite soft cheeses, because they weren’t allowed to sit in a dark room long enough to grow a good thick mold that somehow fortifies against listeria.

  Find the highest-quality prenatal yoga video you can stream. You can determine the best one by how expensive the New York loft it was filmed in looks. If you can’t see exposed ductwork, it’s not quality yoga.

  Then up and down the aisle at the all-natural pharmacy you go, grabbing shea butter for your nipples and stretch marks, and vitamins the size of Christmas lights because folic acid… something something… bones? Doesn’t matter—you just know it’s absolutely necessary to your growing child. Don’t forget the all-natural Jamaican ginger ale to ease your soon-to-come morning sickness. It’s not going to help the puking but it will ensure you will never, ever be able to stand the taste of that particular soda again.

  But then what? How frustrating it is, sitting home in your nest of prenatal commercialism with your still-flat belly, to have nothing to do but wait and worry.