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Women's bodies: an unreliable history
00:39:10
Professor Helen King explores the ever-changing cultural history of women's bodies
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Podcast Host
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. Female anatomy and the ideas surrounding it, from breastfeeding to virginity, can still cause contention today. From the original Pandora myth to intact hymens being used as evidence in courts of law, Professor Helen King takes Lauren Good on a journey through the ever changing cultural history of women's bodies.
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Lauren Good
Thanks so much for joining me today to discuss your new book, Immaculate Uncovering the History of Women's Bodies. Firstly, Helen, what made you decide to write it?
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Professor Helen King
Well, I've been working on the history of the female body for decades now, and I've never really put it all together into a book that was accessible for a general reader. And I do want people to hear this because I think history is really exciting and I think it tells us things about our own bodies that we wouldn't have otherwise known. So when I was asked to do this, I thought, how do I approach it? How do I even start the history of the female body from like ancient Greeks to now? And it occurred to me the only way through this was to do it by body parts, which of course is reductive because being a woman is a lot more than what your body parts are. But historically I decided there were the four parts that really had been used most to think about what a woman is and what women can do. Because all of this is actually not just theoretical, it's actual. So that was why I decided to do it through the four parts. So the four parts are breasts, clitoris, hymen and womb. So I'm going from the outside, from what's visible to the inside. And that means I'm also going from what we can see to what we can only imagine. Because a lot of this is about the historical imagination. What do we think bodies are like in the bits we can't see?
- [03:15]
Lauren Good
Would you say there are any particular messages that are at the heart of this book?
- [03:20]
Professor Helen King
I suppose the key message is that there have been changes in how women's bodies have been seen across history, that there isn't consistency. It's not just, you know, you've always had these body parts. This is always how we thought about women. It's actually much more complicated. History is more complicated and more fun. I think that's important too. So the sorts of body parts I'm talking about, breast, clitoris, hymen and womb, have been seen differently. Sometimes people haven't believed in them. There's a point where no one believed in hymens. That's really round about now. But there was a point earlier when no one believed in the clitoris, when it was regarded as a sort of strange thing that was just a freak of nature. It wasn't a normal part at all. So things have changed. And that means that how women have been seen has changed and what women have been allowed to do has changed, because this always has practical implications in terms of what a woman's body is allowed to do by a particular society.
- [04:14]
Lauren Good
You talked about change there. But what I found really interesting was that the Pandora myth, you know, this kind of origin myth of women is still reflected in the terminology that we use for female genitalia today. Could you please explain to listeners how this still persists?
- [04:31]
Professor Helen King
So in the original Pandora myth, what she has is a jar. She opens up her jar to let out the evils in the world. And in ancient Greek medicine, the womb is also referred to there as a jar. So her womb jar, it's a sort of jar for storing grain over winter so you can plant it in the spring. But it's also somehow a womb that's letting out all the evils of the world. But then along history, that then changes, and instead of it being about the jar, it becomes Pandora's box. So we have the box terminology, which we still use. So it's again, it's this idea of sort of an opening and closing thing. Which is the womb. And even that is, I think, fascinating. Opening and closing as the things the womb is all about. There are amulets from the ancient Greek world that show a womb with a key next to it, like a little lock. And the idea being that you open the womb to let male seed in to make babies or to let blood or babies out. You open it, you close it, you close it to keep the male seeds safe so the baby won't fall out too early, sort of opening, closing imagery, which is throughout history. And of course, it's not like actually wombs do open and close in that way. You know, there isn't a lid that you suddenly put on. But nevertheless, that's how it's been seen, like a sort of a mechanical thing, the opening and closing. But then wombs have been seen in so many weird ways anyway. So we'll all be familiar with the idea of the wandering womb as something that has existed in history. It's actually more complicated than we might think, because what's wrong with you as a woman can depend on where your womb went to. It might wander sort of up, it might wander down, it might go side to side, it might swivel around. Wombs have been seen as having extraordinary capacity to move around the body, which has then been used to explain various different conditions in women. So it's a weird belief, but it's been very practical in terms of how it's been applied to women's bodies.
- [06:23]
Lauren Good
The idea of the wandering womb was known as hysteria, and this is rooted in the. In the ancient Greek word hystera. How does etymology of this link to the story of Adam and Eve?
- [06:36]
Professor Helen King
So when you get the word hystera, it means later, or it means lower. It's got a temporal meaning and it's got a spatial meaning. So lower in the body, as in it's low down, it's the bottom of your body, of your torso. But also Pandora, late arrival, created after men were created as a punishment for bad behavior by Prometheus. But also, of course, Pandora myth, women are a late creation. Eve myth, women are a late creation. So there's a sort of afterthought thing that's happening with women in both ancient Greek myth and in Hebrew mythology, which all relates to the medical view of the womb. And I think throughout my book, connections between medicine and myth are things which I find really interesting to think about. Medicine, myth, religion, and how they're really giving the same messages about women. It's like you're not really human, you know, you're late, you're afterthoughts. You weren't the originals, you're late arrivals on the scene, you don't really count, you're not normal. You know, men are default, men are normal. And I think that's something that comes through in all the material I've been looking at.
- [07:49]
Lauren Good
It's a fascinating thread throughout your book. That idea, as you say, of men being the default and women being that afterthought. Something that needs to be be explained. Were there any particularly striking issues you came across that were resultant of this idea of women being the ones that were the unusual?
- [08:07]
Professor Helen King
I think the whole way that the female body's economy, fluid economy is seen is interesting there because the idea that fluids dominate the body is something that applies to both men and women through medical history, in western tradition at least. So the idea of the four humours, blood, phlegm, yellow bile, black bile, and the balance between them being essential to health and how if one of them is dominating, that will cause a particular illness that applies to both sexes. But with women, because of menstruation, blood dominates and blood therefore becomes the most important thing in looking at women's health. And that blood is then used to explain why women can't do things that men do. So it's that men are normal, women are weird thing. So particularly the 19th century idea that because women have a finite amount of blood and the blood is going to, if it doesn't come out, it's going to make a baby. It's the raw material. Therefore women can't use their brains and their wombs together. Because if you're educated as a woman, your blood will have gone up to your brain, you won't have any left to make babies out of. So you'll stop menstruating if you use your brain in higher education. That I find, since it's only the last century, when my grandmother was born in 1888, we are talking within the lifetime of people that. That I've known, that that was believed and that was very striking to me.
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Lauren Good
Another striking observation you make in the book is that the woman's womb hasn't always been reduced to its reproductive ability. Could you talk a little about how it was viewed in the pre modern world?
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Professor Helen King
So wombs are actually fascinating because as well as being seen as reproductive, they're also seen as excretory organs. So sometimes the womb is described as being like a sewer. Now for us that's quite negative. Sewers, you know, filth, et cetera. And it can be used like that. But it can also be quite positive, as in a sewer is a good thing because it takes away excess fluids. And if you're thinking of the body as dominated by fluids, then getting rid of excess might be a good idea. So it's a sewer, but it's also a sort of miraculous organ. It has the power to retain, to contain, to nurture, to expel. It's an extraordinarily powerful organ. And that sort of contrast between sewer and miracle is something which comes and goes. It's not a linear process, this history. It doesn't go from being seen as disgusting and yuck to wow, it's amazing both exist together. And it depends which line you want to take. What you're trying to argue as to which one of those two theories you'll give prominence to.
- [10:47]
Lauren Good
Another interesting debate that you measure is whether the womb reduced women's position in society or liberated them due to their ability to reproduce. Did you manage to land either side of that debate or is it just really complex?
- [11:05]
Professor Helen King
I think it's too complex to land either side. And that tends to be the way with most of these body parts. You can play it either way. And because both models are there, that means that it actually gives women who are writing about their bodies quite a lot of power too, to try and focus on the positive side and to be very upbeat about wombs and about their capacity. But at the same time, you've got the other line that sees wombs as a very dangerous thing. And menstrual blood is potentially ghastly and poisonous. And there are all these Western tradition stories of the malign power of menstrual blood. There's a story in the ancient Roman material of how you can walk through a field full of evil insects that are eating your crops, and if you're menstruating, you lift up your skirts, you'll somehow kill them all. It's bizarre. So the sort of malign power of the female body, if it's directed at the right target, can be quite useful. But then at the same time, with menstruation, you've got the idea that if you're menstruating, you can't make pickles or jam because they won't set, they won't be preserved properly, therefore you can't do it at all. But you can reuse that to say, okay, so if you're menstruating, great, you get a day off from jam making. There is actually some potential in this for taking a small break. So you can use all these materials in different ways. There's not a simple, straightforward line as to this is what women's bodies do. So therefore, you must do that. There's always flexibility. There's always the potential for finding a different way that might lead to a more positive conclusion.
- [12:42]
Lauren Good
That flexibility also applies to your chapter where you talk about breasts in the female anatomy. You talk about how we always see them through the defaults of another, for example, a baby who needs feeding or an adult with sexual interests. But you address how historically there have been different terms created to grapple with these different identities, I suppose, suppose, of the breasts. What were these?
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Professor Helen King
So there's different ways of looking at this. And again, there's not a simple linear pattern where we go from seeing breasts as sexual to seeing breasts as maternal or something like that. There are always both. And people have to somehow grapple with that contrast between the two. And I think today we're probably even more confused about it than we have been in the past. So, on the one hand, we're still praising breastfeeding, World Health Organization Breast Is Best campaign, trying to get more and more children breastfed. This is the thing. And if you can't do it, then you're made to feel inadequate, adequate and so on. But at the same time, breasts are sexual. And we get very confused by something like making breast milk ice cream, which has been marketed in the UK a couple of times in the last couple of decades. And that immediately gets a hideous reaction in the press. You know, how disgusting the idea of an adult taking breast milk. But then, historically, breast milk has been a remedy for many diseases, and we have Examples from the 17th and 18th century of men taking breast milk from their wife as a remedy, or if the wife's not available, taking it from somebody else. When does the yuck factor come in? At what point do you go, ooh, that's really weird? And when I started to look into this in terms of children and feeding children, I was very surprised to come across the practice of direct udder feeding, which is a term I'd never met before, which is where it was particularly a French thing in the 19th century. And it was a thing whereby you actually hold a baby whose mother has died and therefore has no source of nourishment. You hold it underneath the animal in question. Donkeys were considered a very good thing here. You actually hold it underneath and it takes it direct from the animal. So that seems to us quite yuck. But on the other hand, it's the way that the child would survive. So how do you sort of Balance that. Ooh, animals, humans and adults, babies. Where do you draw the lines? And historically, they seem to be drawn in a lot of different places.
- [15:15]
Lauren Good
The feeding of children was often linked to morality, as it was thought a woman's blood could influence the future behaviors of a child. How did this affect decisions surrounding the feeding of infants? You discussed there how they were fed by animals. Were there any particular decisions made because of these views?
- [15:32]
Professor Helen King
So this goes back to the point that for many, many centuries, it was believed that breast milk and blood, menstrual blood, were the same fluid, and that it was converted into milk when you were going to nourish a child. So the sorts of taboos and feelings about menstrual blood are immediately thrown into really sharp relief there, because when the menstrual blood has been converted into breast milk, suddenly it's okay. So that's quite weird too. But of course, with a child who's in desperate need of feeding, before the availability of milk banks and before the availability of formula milk, there was no alternative but to find a wet nurse. But the sort of people who were doing wet nursing would often be in slave owning cultures, enslaved people. So how does that work? If you're simultaneously saying that a woman should feed her child if she can, because she bonds with it, but also because it was believed she passes on her moral qualities to that child. So if you then instead have a slave, an enslaved person, feeding that child, how does that work? So in North America, when there was a slave owning culture, there are examples of people being fed by a black slave and bonding with that person. But somehow it was okay to be fed by a black slave in a way. It would not be okay to have any other sort of relationship with that slave. So there's some quite interesting things happening there about the necessity of keeping people alive, the basic necessity. And that leads you to do things which, if you go into it a bit deeper, are not utterly consistent with your views about those people. But because you need the milk, you know it has to be done. Breastfeeding as a profession is something that goes back massively long way in time. The earliest evidence we have for women's work outside the home is as wet nurses. There are wet nursing contracts from Egypt, from the Greek world. Deals were made that this person would feed your child and this is how much they'd be fed. It's an extremely long professional history, and it does involve interesting connections between race and slavery that we might not have thought of everybody. These are violent criminals, so they're not.
- [17:48]
Lauren Good
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Professor Helen King
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Lauren Good
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Professor Helen King
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Professor Helen King
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- [18:46]
Lauren Good
Do we know when the practice of wet nursing actually died out?
- [18:51]
Professor Helen King
I don't think the practice of wet nursing has entirely died out. And even today there are examples of people who exchange children, as in, I'll feed your baby, you feed mine. So it's not hiring someone to do the job, but it is nevertheless feeding a child who is not your own. There are such things as little breastfeeding circles where that happens. And it's interesting when we are simultaneously still promoting it as the big way of bonding with your child, even if we're not being as explicit as people were in the past about actually passing on your virtues to that child. It's an interesting topic, and I think it's one of these things where there are things happening that we maybe don't like to think about too much. And of course, what we do have now are still milk banks where you can donate your milk and then that will be given to a child who needs it. So it's not direct. It's not that child on your breast, but nevertheless, your milk is going to help another child. So that spirit of generosity which is around breastfeeding, I think is important. And that's why you get these weird stories. Weird to us. In the literature of women who breastfeed their own father, for example, there's a Roman story, Roman daughter, there's a Greek story, both of which were told in the ancient world, but then retold a lot in the early modern period, the Renaissance, as examples of good family behavior. That your father is starving or he's imprisoned and he's not being fed you as a daughter, then feed him. And people were well aware this was transgressive that it was all the wrong way round, but nevertheless it was seen as an example of virtue.
- [20:33]
Lauren Good
You tie that into the idea of the life saving model. How do you think that ties in with the cultural pressures on women to be, as you said, virtuous?
- [20:46]
Professor Helen King
The pressure on you is very much to be the perfect woman in every possible way. And that will include something as weird to us as breastfeeding. Your own father, you can see as positive, as in you have the power, as a woman who's breastfeeding, you have the power to give life. So it's positive. But on the other hand, it's also, to us, extremely transgressive. And it was seen as transgressive when it was done because it's upsetting the balance of generations. So there are different factors at play in there, very different factors. But it was nevertheless something that was represented in art, in literature, as a good thing, as the best thing a woman could possibly do to give life to somebody else through her milk. So it's a power thing, a good power thing, but it puts a lot of pressure on the woman who is supposed to be doing all these different things in order to save her entire family.
- [21:45]
Lauren Good
The topic of breastfeeding, as you say, it's hugely contentious. And another huge topic you tackle in the book is that of virginity, which is still, as you know, hugely divisive in our modern world. I'm sure our listeners will be familiar with the concept of the hymen being broken as a symbol of a woman losing her virginity. Do you know where this idea actually stems from?
- [22:10]
Professor Helen King
Well, a lot of the literature suggests that this is an ancient Greek thing, but it really isn't. Even the question of did hymen exist in ancient Greece, that is, did people believe in hymens? They really were not very clear about it. So the best discussion we have of that is in the second century, where Serranus, a Greek gynaecology writer, writer on many other topics too, talks about how some people think there is a membrane in virgins which is broken. But then he immediately says, well, of course there isn't. I've had a look, can't see anything. If there was anything there, then you couldn't insert a medical instrument in a virgin, and of course you can. So what's the problem? So some people believed it, other people didn't. It's always been a very contentious issue and I think that's got more and more the case. So by the time you get to the Renaissance, you get dissection and you get medical writers saying, I had a look for it but can't find anything there. And that's when you get some really horrible stories in which medical writers say, well, okay, how am I going to find a hymen? Well, I've got to find a virgin. How do I find a guaranteed virgin? So, oh, let's try a nun, that might work. Or let's try a really young female child. That might work. This sort of quest to go into the body to try and find evidence of this mythical part of the body is very disturbing, particularly when medical writers often say, you know, when I did this, when I found a hymen, I had the following doctors standing alongside me, and they saw it too. It's this sort of collective invasion of a female body for the purpose of knowledge, and particularly when. Now it's pretty obvious that hymens are not universal, that some people have a membrane, some people don't, some are stretchy, some aren't, some break, some don't. There are other ways of breaking it. You know, it's such a vague thing, and yet it seems to me that because the female body has been seen as so essential to being a proper woman, it's like the move from childhood to adulthood, from girl to woman, also has to be focused on a body part, and so you have to have one in order to make it work. And that's actually done quite a lot of disservice to women because you can have your virginity doubted when in fact you've never had any sexual intercourse. And nevertheless, the evidence isn't there. But the idea of actually having showing the sheets is definitely not an ancient Greek idea. It turns up in Jewish literature. But it doesn't mean there's a hymen. It just means that bleeding is expected when you have first sex. So it's not even a simple equivalence between hymen and blood loss. And that's again clear from some of the ancient Greek and Roman medical materials. And if you think about the history of marriage and about the ideal of a girl being married in her 14th year, so age 13 to a much older man, you can quite see why some sort of bleeding might well happen. But it doesn't mean. Doesn't mean there's a hymen. So it's a way into some rather disturbing material about women's bodies and women's maturity and about doubting women's word. Because, you know, why do you need physical evidence? If a woman says, I haven't done this before, why do you have to doubt her? Why do you need a body part to prove it?
- [25:29]
Lauren Good
This idea of physical evidence also came to light in your book when you discuss women in history, actually naming witnesses who could state that the hymen had still been intact. In the court of law, what examples did you find of women having to go to these lengths to defend themselves?
- [25:48]
Professor Helen King
Well, it's interesting. So what happens here is you get law, court situations in 17th, 18th century where a man wants to prove that actually it's not his fault that the woman hasn't conceived. So he will then sometimes, rarely, but sometimes be asked to demonstrate that his penis works in front of an audience. So the exposure of the body is actually happening to both. But then midwives are often called in to examine women to say, actually, no, no, she's a virgin. What are they supposed to be looking for? How are they supposed to see it? These are huge questions, but it's, again, it's to do with that, doubting women's word, doubting the word of the person whose body it is to say, this is what's happened, this is not what's happened. So if a woman is accusing somebody of raping her, well, if she's a virgin, it can't have happened. Well, it's not as simple as that, is it? And if her body is saying one thing and her words are saying another thing, what do you do with that?
- [26:52]
Lauren Good
And, of course, this idea of virginity stretches far beyond the physical. We have this idea of being deflowered. Where does this view actually come from?
- [27:04]
Professor Helen King
So there's a whole floral set of imagery around the female body, which I find very interesting. So that your virginity can be your flower, but also your hymen can be described as a flower. And bizarrely, your clitoris can also be described as a rosebud, as a flower. And it's all this floral stuff I find very interesting, because to me, one of the things that's going on there is some sense of fragility and some sense of the moment. So in the ancient Greek medical texts, in the text on disease of virgins, it talks about girls who are ripe for marriage. So that very much that floral fruiting imagery, girls who are ripe and who are not plucked from the tree in time, so they will then rot and their virginity will have gone off and they will no longer be marriageable. That idea of a moment where you have to be plucked from the tree, where your flowers have to be picked, all those sorts of images, it's as if only a girl a certain age is actually a desirable wife. And if she's lost the opportunity to do that because she's just been plain awkward or because she's too ugly to marry or whatever. There's all sorts of material on this. Whatever it is, she's somehow lost her chance. And you've just got one chance as a woman. Just one chance. That seems to be what they're saying. And I think the floral material is absolutely fascinating. So deflowered, as you say, is the most common expression of that that we have in this literature. You've had your flower taken and it's about impermanence, it's about the nature of femininity. You're not a proper woman. You're somehow stuck, undeflowered. Terrible thing. You're then going to rot. So much floral fruiting imagery around here. It's very messy and it's not exactly great for women.
- [29:06]
Lauren Good
You talk a bit about in the book that the female body is often equated with nature and very much tied into the natural world. We've talked a bit about floral imagery, but are there any other examples of this idea of the feminine body being very in touch with the natural?
- [29:23]
Professor Helen King
Yes. So even one of the ancient Greek words for the female genitalia as a whole, the external genitalia, is phusis, which means nature. So one of the stories we haven't talked about yet is the story of the Virgin Mary and her perpetual hymen, because somehow, even when Jesus is born, her hymen was thought at one point to be intact. And there's a story of the midwife Salome, who comes to inspect the Virgin Mary to prove she's still a virgin even though she's given birth. You know, odd thing to do, but that was a story that was told in the medieval tradition and later, and it was considered, you know, a really important story. So Salome puts her hand into the virgin's phusis, her nature, and finds that, yes, she's definitely still a virgin. What that means, whether it means a hymen, whether it means there's no evidence of abrasion after giving birth, is not at all clear in the story. But then her hand withers up because she's dared to doubt that the virgin is really a virgin. But there is phusis. The whole of the female external and internal genitalia actually are considered somehow nature. And women are always natural, but men are cultural. Women are equated with trees and flowers and fruits. Men pluck those fruits. That's the way it's always been. And it means that when we look at Things like the history of art. You look at images of a woman posed with a flower, it's telling you something. It's not just a flower, it's a reference to her genitalia. And it makes you just think very differently about a lot of images and poetry and ideas where women are connected to the natural world. And I think it's just one of those aspects of the history of the body which we don't necessarily think about because in a sense, you know, we're all natural, but it's been put onto women. And because women are natural, you then have all these ideas about what is natural for a woman's body to do. So it is natural to breastfeed. So to me, that really does make me think about what counts as natural. So we think now when you talk about trans women who can breastfeed, chest feed with hormones, because you just need the hormones. Anyone can do it. Once you've got the hormones, you can then chest feed. Is that natural? But then, okay, you say, no, it's not because you had to have extra hormones. Well, yeah, but an awful lot of people have medical interventions now and we don't say, oh, that's not natural. And then you look at the history of the past and something like the use of animals to draw off excess breast milk. So if a woman has too much breast milk to use and she's suffering from that, in the past, it was perfectly okay to get two puppies and apply them to your breasts and suck all the puppies. Is that natural? So where does natural stop? Where does natural start? Where does natural stop? And I think the material I'm looking at here starts to raise even more questions about that.
- [32:32]
Lauren Good
Finally, Helen, the very core of this book is what defines a woman and her body. And this has always been open ended and without consensus. As we've touched on a little bit in this interview. What do you think we should take from this history in the modern world?
- [32:51]
Professor Helen King
I think we should take the point that ideas about bodies have changed and that there has never been a point where bodies have been sort of pure and unaffected by anything else. We've always done body modification, we've always changed our bodies. There's never been a consistent, this is what the body should be. We've changed the fashions, we've changed our ideas of beauty, we have changed all of this. So to say that this is what a woman's body must be, actually, historically, that isn't consistent, it just doesn't work. So we should be able to think well beyond bodies we are more than some of our body parts. And things like body shaming. Obviously, that's another big topic now, telling people that their body shouldn't look like something. Well, actually, bodies can look how they like. We should have more freedom in how we present our bodies. We shouldn't be trying to hold people to ideals which are probably unattainable. We've always tried to do that. But maybe we could move beyond bodies to think about the essence of what a woman actually is.
- [33:55]
Podcast Host
That was Helen King, professor Emeritus of Classical Studies at the Open University and the author of Immaculate Uncovering the History of Women's Bodies, published by Profile in 2024. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Jack Bateman.