Vagina (21 page)

It may also have been an unconscious cultural expression of an innate recognition of the dopamine-vagina-brain connection: in this period, middle-class women were successfully pushing for greater access to rights and influence of all kinds. They lobbied for the right to divorce from abusive husbands (the Married Women’s Property Act, 1857); opposed the rounding up of women accused of prostitution, who were then forced into brutal pelvic exams (the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866, 1869); fought for greater control over their own earnings and inheritances in marriage (the Married Women’s Property Act, 1870); and sought the right to leave a marriage with their own property and retain custody of their own children (the Married Women’s Property Act, 1882). By the end of the century, they were establishing women’s colleges at Oxford and Cambridge and fighting to get into the professions. Given the dopamine-vagina-brain nexus, it is not unreasonable in retrospect to understand that an ideology would arise—however subconsciously—that would increasingly rigorously keep these same newly educated, middle-class Western women, who were seeking and gaining so many new rights, from understanding how their own vaginas even worked, and that would indeed punish them in many ways for even considering touching their vaginas and clitorises in ways that would activate more unruly dopamine.

By the 1850s, Victorian medical and social commentators were asserting that masturbation for both sexes led dangerously to “a spectrum of physically horrible diseases” that finally brought the self-abuser to a state of madness. But the preoccupation with the dangers of female masturbation led to violence. The Victorian obsession with stamping out female masturbation was often tied to fears about women’s education, and often connected to images of girls or women seduced by reading. (The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had virtually no such preoccupation with a potential link between female reading and female masturbation.) In the pre-Victorian world in which even elite women were generally uneducated and propertyless, it really didn’t matter much to anyone if they masturbated. This nineteenth-century obsession with the dangers of female masturbation, which emerged in a century in which women secured legislative victory after legislative victory involving access to rights, must be understood as a reaction against the dangers of female emancipation from the patriarchal home.

Gynecologist William Acton asserted, in his influential 1875 treatise,
Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs,
that “masturbation may be best described as an habitual incontinence eminently productive of disease.” He noted, though, that “the majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind.” Acton also believed that “As a general rule a modest woman seldom desires any sexual gratification for herself. She submits to her husband’s embraces, but principally to gratify him . . . the married woman has no wish to be placed on the footing of a mistress.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.