DOC PREVIEW
Stanford HPS 154 - The Female Animal

This preview shows page 1-2-3-4-5 out of 14 pages.

Save
View full document
View full document
Premium Document
Do you want full access? Go Premium and unlock all 14 pages.
Access to all documents
Download any document
Ad free experience
View full document
Premium Document
Do you want full access? Go Premium and unlock all 14 pages.
Access to all documents
Download any document
Ad free experience
View full document
Premium Document
Do you want full access? Go Premium and unlock all 14 pages.
Access to all documents
Download any document
Ad free experience
View full document
Premium Document
Do you want full access? Go Premium and unlock all 14 pages.
Access to all documents
Download any document
Ad free experience
View full document
Premium Document
Do you want full access? Go Premium and unlock all 14 pages.
Access to all documents
Download any document
Ad free experience
Premium Document
Do you want full access? Go Premium and unlock all 14 pages.
Access to all documents
Download any document
Ad free experience

Unformatted text preview:

Other Books by the Same Author The Trial of the Assassin Guiteau: Psychiatry and Law in the Gilded Age The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849. and 1866 No Other Gods On Science and American Social Thought Charles E. Rosenberg The Johns Hopkins University Press Bsltimore and London f2 The Female Animal: Medical and Biological Views of Women Since at least the time of Hippocrates and Aristotle, the roles as- signed to women have attracted an elaborate body of medical and bio- logical justification. This was especially true in the nineteenth century as the intellectual and emotional centrality of science increased steadily. This chapter is an attempt to outline some of the shapes assumed by the nineteenth-century debate over the ultimate bases for woman’s domestic and childbearing role.’ In form it resembles an exercise in the history of ideas; in intent it represents an attempt to use the form of conventional ideas to gain insight into their social and psychological function. This approach was selected for a variety of reasons. Role definitions exist on a level of prescription beyond their embodiment in the in- dividuality and behavior of particular historical persons. They exist, rather, as a formally agreed upon set of characteristics understood by and acceptable to a significant proportion of the population. As formally agreed upon social values they are, moreover, retrievable from historical materials. Such social role definitions, however, have a more than platonic reality, for they exist as parameters with which and against which individuals must either conform or define their deviance. When inappropriate to social, psychological, or biological reality, such definitions can themselves engender anxiety, conflict, and demands for change. During the nineteenth century, economic and social forces at work within Western Europe and the United States began to compromise traditional social roles. Some women at least began to question-and This chapter was writtcn with Carroll Smith-Rosenberg as coauthor. 54 MEDICAL AND BIOLOGICAL VIEWS OF WOMEN 55 a few to challenge overtly-their constricted place in society. Naturally enough, men hopeful of preserving existing social relationships, and in some cases threatened themselves both as individuals and as mem- bers of particular social groups, employed medical and biological arguments to rationalize traditional sex roles as rooted inevitably and irreversibly in anatomy and physiology. This chapter examines the ideological attack mounted by traditionally minded men against two of the ways in which women could express their dissatisfaction and desire for change: women’s demand for improved educational opportunities and their decision to resort to birth control and abortion. Much of this often emotionally charged debate was oblique and couched in would-be scientific and medical language. The Victorian woman’s ideal social characteristics-nurturance, intuitive morality. domesticity, passivity, and affection-were all assumed to have a deeply rooted biological basis. These medical and scientific arguments formed an ideological system rigid in its support of tradition, yet in- finitely flexible in the particular mechanisms which could be made to explain and legitimate woman’s role. Woman, nineteenth-century medical orthodoxy insisted, was starkly different from the male of the species. Physically, she was frailer, her skull was smaller, her muscles were more delicate. Even more striking was the difference in the nervous system of the two sexes. The female nervous system was finer, “more irritable,” prone to overstimulation and resulting exhaustion. “The female sex.” one physician explained in 1827, “is far more sensitive and susceptible than the male, and extremely liable to those distressing affections which, for want of some better term, have been denominated nervous, and which consist chiefly in painful affections of the head, heart, side, and indeed, of almost every part of the system.”z “The nerves themselves,” another physician concurred a generation later, “are smaller, and of a more delicate structure. They are endowed with greater sensibility, and, of course, are liable to more frequent and stronger impressions from external agents or mental influences.”J Few if any questioned the assumption that in males the intellectual propensities of the brain dominated, while the female’s nervous sys- tem and emotions prevailed over her conscious and rational faculties. Thus it was only natural, indeed inevitable, that women should be ex- pected and permitted to display more affect than men; it was inherent in their very being. Physicians saw woman as the product and prisoner of her repro- ductive system. It was the ineluctable basis of her social role and be- havioral characteristics, ’the cause of her most common ailments;56 SCIENCE. AUTHORITY, AND SOCIAL EXPLANATION woman’s uterus and ovaries controlled her body and behavior from puberty through menopause. The male reproductive system, male physicians assured, exerted no parallel degree of control over man’s body. Charles D. Meigs, a prominent Philadelphia gynecologist, stated with assurance in 1847 that a woman is “a moral, a sexual, a germi- ferous. gestative and parturient creature.”4 It was, another physician explained in 1870, “as if the Almighty, in creating the female sex, had taken the uterus and built up a woman around it.”5 A wise deity had designed woman as keeper of the hearth, as breeder and rearer of children. Medical wisdom easily supplied hypothetical mechanisms to explain the interconnection between the female’s organs of generation and the functioning of her other organs. The uterus, it was assumed, was con- nected to the central nervous system; shocks to the nervous system might alter the reproductive cycle-might even mark the gestating fetus, while changes in the reproductive cycle shaped emotional states. This intimate and hypothetical link between ovaries, uterus, and nervous system was the logical basis for the “reflex irritation” model of disease causation so popular in middle; and late-nineteenth- century medical texts and monographs on psychiatry and


View Full Document

Stanford HPS 154 - The Female Animal

Download The Female Animal
Our administrator received your request to download this document. We will send you the file to your email shortly.
Loading Unlocking...
Login

Join to view The Female Animal and access 3M+ class-specific study document.

or
We will never post anything without your permission.
Don't have an account?
Sign Up

Join to view The Female Animal 2 2 and access 3M+ class-specific study document.

or

By creating an account you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms Of Use

Already a member?