When women first claimed admission to the privileges of higher education, men pointed out that a female who studied in botany that plants had sex organs would be unfit to associate with her respectable sisters. When she knocked on the gates of medicine, men declared that a woman who could listen to a lecture in anatomy was unworthy of honorable wifehood. When she asked for chloroform to assuage the pangs of childbirth, men quickly informed her that if women bear their children without pain, they will be unable to love them. When the married woman demanded the right to own property, men swore that such a radical step would totally annihilate woman’s influence, explode a volcano under the foundations of family union, and destroy the true felicity of wedded life, and they assured us they opposed the change not because they loved justice less, but because they loved woman more. During the many years that woman fought for citizenship, men gathered in gambling-dives and bar-rooms and sadly commiserated with each other on the fact that woman was breaking up the home. Now woman demands the control of her own body, and there are men who reply that if women learn how to prevent pregnancy, they will abolish maternity. It seems there are always some men who are haunted by the fear that women are planning the extinction of the race. To attempt to reason with such men is folly, and we can only hope that a general knowledge of contraceptive methods, judiciously applied, will eliminate this type.1
Contraception was the key issue, then, in the battle for the body, its central pivotal demand, as the vote had been in the campaign for women’s rights. But far more was involved here than the mechanics of birth control. If woman could be free from ‘the tyranny of her organization’, she stood a chance of becoming an autonomous individual. If she could rescue herself from the endless cycle of sexual activity, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, pregnancy, then personal growth and social identity were possible. If sex ceased to carry the dire consequences of unwanted pregnancy, social catastrophe, even death in childbirth, then woman could no longer be seen as sinning, sinful and justly punished. If every woman got hold of these ideas, along with the control and disposal of her own body, what price the patriarch and his power?
It was to be, and remains, for it is far from over, a terrible struggle. The task was nothing less than a redefinition of women’s sexuality, as women wrenched from men the right to be more than vessels for their seed. The new industrial cultures of the world had taken advantage of nineteenth-century ‘progress’, in particular of ‘scientific’ prognostications, to redefine woman as weak and frail, a position from which others had never departed. There was no doubt as to the source of that frailty – the unpredictable uterus, the ‘wandering womb sans wit or will’. To the modern medical experts, as to generations of men before them, woman was no more than ‘an admirably constructed apparatus for the most mysterious and sublime of nature’s mysteries – the reproductive process’.2 We are back 350 years with Luther’s contemptuous outburst – ‘that’s what women are for!’
When women are seen as dominated by their wombs, the condition is a life sentence. Nineteenth-century gynaecologists, in full Shakespearean flight, identified the Seven Ages of Woman: her birth as a female, her menstruation, defloration, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation and menopause. All these focus exclusively upon ‘the great crown and joy of a woman’s life – MOTHERHOOD’, carrying the repeated reminder that ‘the natural vocation of every woman is that of wife and mother’. This function is so much part of woman’s ‘natural destiny’ that ‘she is an imperfect, undeveloped being until she has borne a child.’ Yet the process, as seen by the good doctors, does not sound very natural:
No woman passes through life without being ill. She suffers from ‘the custom of women’, or she does not. In either case she is normally or abnormally ill . . . Nature disables the whole sex . . .3
The whole sex? Absolutely, without exception: one prominent gynaecologist told his patients that ‘if a woman knew what danger she was in from her pelvic organs, she would not step from her carriage to the pavement.’
This pelvic preoccupation with women’s rampant innards had more than a comic effect, however. Since women were seen as reproductive beings, any and every disorder they experienced was treated by treatment of the reproductive organs. Anaemia, ‘hysteria’, insanity, ‘criminality’ were treated by sexual surgery, the gynaecologists often removing one ovary or fallopian tube at a time, thereby prolonging the patient’s original condition, her suffering, and her dependence on the doctor. Performing a dilation and curettage (forcibly dilating the cervix and scraping out the lining of the womb) for ‘the moral effect’ was commonplace. This surgical rape was particularly recommended for unladylike or boisterous girls. Cruellest of all, yet defended as ‘vivisection of the noble kind’, was genital mutilation, the so-called ‘female circumcision’, the excision of the clitoris and external genitalia. Throughout the whole of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, this operation was performed to cure masturbation, hallucinations, ‘vaginal catarrh’, ‘spinal irritation’ and ‘hysterical mania’, and was particularly recommended for epilepsy.4 Leading the ‘advanced’ countries in this specialized field of surgery, Britain and America marched complacently backwards into the dark ages of the Near and Middle East, where female sexual mutilation continued to be found equally efficacious as a cure for the female condition called womanhood.
Yet a picture of women as eternal victims of their sex would be far from the truth. The historical overview of the whole business of sex, menstruation and reproduction shows how consistently women sought, and how frequently they achieved, a measure of control. This is particularly true of contraception; since childbirth was and remains the most life-threatening physical activity that women naturally undertake, there was always a strong incentive to minimize or avoid it. The staggering range of devices and potions from prehistory to the present day, with women worldwide straining every nerve for non-motherhood, also casts an ironic sidelight on the myth of the ‘maternal instinct’. Anything and everything, it seems, that could possibly have conferred the blessing of infertility was pressed into service.
For many of the women’s contraceptive preparations were so horrific that only the unwanted pregnancy could have been worse than the remedy. In Japan, pillow-books advised a mixture of mercury, a horsefly and a leech, ‘the whole boiled to a pulp, and taken as soon as it has come to the boil’.5 For those without asbestos throats, the recommended infusion consisted of ‘turnips in large quantities’ lightly fricasseed with ‘monkey’s brains in cold water’ and the silvering from mirrors. Other countries showed an inexplicable fascination with animal excrement: the first mention of contraception by the Egyptians, in a papyrus of 1850 B.C., suggests a vaginal plug made from honey and crocodile dung. Elsewhere in Africa, fresh supplies doubtless governed by local availability, the preferred dung was that of elephants. By A.D. 900, the dung wheeze had made its way to England, where the Boke of Saxon Leechdoms counselled a contraceptive so dreadful that it clearly operated as an early kind of aversion therapy: ‘Take a fresh horses turd, lay it in hot gledes [coals], make it reek strongly between the thighs up under the raiment, that the woman may sweat much . . .’6
Other precautions relied on the barrier theory. In an otherwise unconvincing field, the clear winner was the Japanese forerunner of the cervical cap, an oiled disc of bamboo tissue paper, which, however, would have been more easily displaced or destroyed in action than the cervical discs of melted beeswax used by the German-Hungarian women of Banat. Countless other ingredients – yoke of egg, foam from a camel’s mouth, walnut leaves, saffron, onion, peppermint, dried roots, seaweed, rags, opium and grass – were used in different parts of the world to form plugs to block up the mouth of the womb and prevent the entry of the sperm. Most extraordinary of all were Casanova’s personal specifics – a ‘golden ball’ (size unspecified) dipped in alkali, and a half-lemon squeezed into the vagina so that the lumpy end entered and blocked the cervix; the cut end, presenting to the penis, would let down its juices during
intercourse. The unforgettable nature of the ensuing experience for both parties helps to show why Casanova has fucked his way into history while many a journeyman bed-presser passed unsung into oblivion.
As this shows, the women of history could not simply take intercourse lying down. On the contrary, a busy programme of actions and motions was widely recommended as an antidote to conception. The Greek gynaecologist of the second century A.D., Solanas of Ephesus, prescribed a little ritual which continued in use for many centuries: ‘at the critical moment of coitus, when the man is about to discharge the seed, the woman must hold her breath and draw herself away a little, so that the seed may not be hurled too deep into the cavity of the uterus’.7 From Roman whores to Spanish contessas, women were instructed that vigorous activity throughout the sex act would dislodge the sperm – the author of that advice clearly hoping for more in a sexual partner than a woman simply lying there holding her breath.
Among women themselves, though, the same beliefs prevailed. From Iceland to Peru, the old wives’ nostrums included coughing, sneezing, jumping about, or even rushing outside for a roll in the snow to expel or freeze out the semen. Commonest of all, ‘hearty pissing in a pot’, was known to prostitutes worldwide (and to their respectable sisters as well) for thousands of years and is still in use today, with the addition of a good sluice-down with wine or vinegar. When circumstances precluded any post-pokery jiggery, passive techniques were invoked instead; amulets women wore round their necks to ward off insemination included the tooth of a dead child, a verse of the Koran, or the left testicle of a weasel taken alive before the moon went down.
Women, of course, were not entirely alone in their efforts to enjoy sex without the inevitable consequence, as the long history of the humble condom makes plain. Whether made of linen, gut, the caecum of a sheep, fish membrane, leather, tortoiseshell or horn, these could hardly be said to be aids to pleasurable love-making: in 1650 Madame de Sévigné complained that a sheath ‘made of gold-beater’s skin’ was ‘armour against full enjoyment and only a spider’s web against the danger of infection’.8 As this reminds us, condoms were originally devised for male not female protection, as a prophylactic against the venereal diseases that had ravaged Europe ever since their invisible importation by Columbus and his crew from the New World. What makes clearer a genuine male desire to avoid impregnating a female is the tricky and unnerving practice known as coitus obstructus, ‘full intercourse with ejaculation suppressed by depressing the base of the urethra [where?] and so forcing the ejaculate into the bladder’.9 With this demanding manoeuvre to perform, it is hard to imagine that either partner to the sex act would know if they were coming or going.
If a good deal of this sounds more like an ordeal than a delight, it almost certainly was. Equally dismal must have been the other practices to avoid having children, like late marriage, a primitive but essential birth control device in use up to the present day in Ireland, for example. Coitus interruptus, the snare of the ‘safe period’ or ‘Vatican roulette’, marital abstinence or Thoreau’s ‘moral restraint’ must also have come between the participants and any hope of sensuous joy and abandon. There were worse consequences, too. Where not distasteful, many of the contraceptive practices employed by women up to the modern period were positively dangerous; eating the dirt from a dead mule’s ears, or the mercury-based silvering from mirrors, drinking the water in which smiths doused their tools (for its lead content), introducing into the vagina plugs of sheep’s wool, bark, roots, alum or corrosives, all too often prevented conception in the simplest way, by killing the woman.
Above all, these techniques did not work. While some of the ingredients used, such as honey or gum arabic, would have had a sperm-retardant or spermicidal effect, the machinery of reproduction was too powerful and complex to yield to anything except the full onslaught of twentieth-century scientific knowledge. And as any rehearsal of this confusing and frequently revolting field suggests, a woman would have to have a strong stomach, a steady hand, an iron nerve and an almost inconceivable run of luck during a reproductive life that could stretch from twelve to over fifty, if in all those years she only had the children she wanted, when she wanted them.
In reality, whatever most women conceived of in the thousands of ages before our own, it was not of having any choice in this matter. Children were sent by God: ‘the more babes, the more blessings’, was a pious Elizabethan formula. Motherhood was also a prime role and occupation for women: indeed in the centuries before they had any other prospect of individual employment, it was their major source of power and significance. ‘Who is the greatest woman, alive or dead?’ Madame de Staël asked Napoleon. ‘The one that has the most children,’ snapped back the little dictator unhesitatingly.10 Nor was this merely the preoccupation of the coarse Corse. In America, the Puritan ethic combined with the vastness of the New World to make the production of large broods an imperative, while those under the sway of the Roman church had never been allowed to sign off from the duty of Catholic-making.
Elsewhere, especially in poorer countries, the huge infant mortality dictated a policy of continuous replenishment; the intricate connection between poverty, over-breeding, parental ignorance and the death of children had yet to be made. Almost everywhere too, rich or poor, there was a deep, unargued feeling that to tamper with the birth process in any way was ‘against nature as well as against God’, as the daughter of Queen Victoria’s premier, William Gladstone, wrote to him.11 In most societies, neither babies nor mothers were necessarily expected to survive childbirth – prayers for the purification of women after childbirth commonly offer thanks for a safe journey through ‘the Valley of the Shadow of Death’ – and all societies provided for wife-replacement by permitting polygamy, in the East of the simultaneous, in the West of the serial variety.
What this meant for women may be illustrated from the diary of a Renaissance merchant, Gregorio Dati. Dati’s first ‘beloved wife, Bandecca, went to paradise after a nine-month illness caused by a miscarriage.’ Dati briefly consoled himself with his ‘Tartar slave girl’, who bore him a son, but then married in the hope of legitimate children. His second wife died in childbirth after bearing him eight children in nine years. His third wife produced eleven children, after which ‘it was God’s will to recall to Himself the blessed soul of my wife Ginevra. She died in childbirth after lengthy suffering.’ Undeterred, Dati married again, and his fourth wife had had six children and one miscarriage when he stopped recording the body-count after twenty-eight pregnancies by five women within thirty years.12
Dati was not as unusual as he may appear in his unquenchable appetite for fatherhood, or at least for the process that led up to it. Nor were the risks of illness and death incurred by his women through childbearing at all out of the way, in his or many subsequent generations – we can only marvel at the confidence with which Thomas Jefferson in the nineteenth century wrote to his daughter that childbirth was ‘no more than a jog of the elbow’, when his wife had died in childbed, as this daughter was to do two months later. Much more honest was the anxiety evinced by Madame de Sévigné, when her beloved only daughter suffered three pregnancies in the first two years of her marriage, including a severe miscarriage. In a furious letter she warned her son-in-law that ‘the beauty, the health, the gaiety and the life of the woman you love can all be destroyed by frequent occurrences of the pain you make her suffer,’ threatening him, ‘I shall take your wife from you! Do you imagine I gave her to you so that you might kill her?’ Françoise survived this pregnancy, but her mother’s fears were not at an end. Immediately after the delivery she dashed off a hasty warning not to rely on breast-feeding to prevent conception: ‘if, after your periods start again, you as much as think of making love with M. De Grignan, you may consider yourself already pregnant, and if one of your midwives tells you differently, then your husband has bribed her!’13
The position of the husband in this all-too-common situation, caught between the options of lethal
ly selfish sensualist or reluctant celibate, was not a happy one. He would, however, survive his sex life: very many women did not. And as the modern age with its much-vaunted progress and prosperity broke about the ears of women in the West, they had the disconcerting experience of discovering that childbirth became worse, not better; for in one of the decisive power struggles that were to touch all women’s lives, men finally won their long fight to take over the management of women in labour. Male attacks on women healers were nothing new – one facet of the witch hunts had been the determination of university-trained male physicians to eliminate the female opposition. But with the advent of drugs, obstetrical forceps, anaesthesia and formal medical training, male practitioners were finally able to usurp women’s age-old role as birth attendant and present themselves as the chief accoucheur.
Armed with the authority of the expert, the new men had no difficulty putting down the old women, even when they were horribly in the wrong. On his own admission ‘the great William Smellie’, the mould-breaking ‘Master of British midwifery’, when learning his trade once slashed a baby’s umbilical cord so clumsily that the child almost bled to death. Smellie informed the suspicious midwife, whom his arrival had displaced, that this was a revolutionary new technique designed to prevent convulsions in the newly born. Privately, though, as he later disclosed, he was never so terrified in all his life.14
With the advent of chloroform and disinfectant in the West, medical science began at last to make headway against its own darkest prejudices that the suffering and death of women in childbirth were no more than a ‘necessary evil’, to be seen ‘even as a blessing of the Gospel’, as one leading British gynaecologist wrote in 1848.15 Elsewhere, though, it seemed that nothing could dislodge the fatalistic attitude to the loss of female life, nor change the habits and customs that promoted those deaths. From India, a British woman surgeon, Dr Vaughan, sent this despairing report in the last days of the Raj:
The Women's History of the World Page 28