A Woman Down to Her Bones

Abstract

Based on a wide range of Latin and vernacular sources, this essay reexamines Thomas Laqueur's and Londa Schiebinger's influential claim that the idea of incommensurable anatomical difference between the sexes was "invented" in the eighteenth century, reflecting, in particular, a need to resort to nature in order to justify female subordination against new ideals of equality and universal rights. It provides ample evidence that already around 1600 many leading physicians, rather than proclaiming a "one-sex model" of female inferiority, insisted on the unique and purposeful features of the female skeleton and the female genital organs and illustrated them visually. The author shares Laqueur's and Schiebinger's assumption that the shift toward incommensurable anatomical difference helped legitimize woman's subordinate position as housewife and mother as naturally given. But around 1600 Enlightenment ideals as yet played no role. Instead, this shift reflected, in particular, contemporary physicians' growing appreciation of personal discovery and innovation, the rise of a specialist gynecology, and new views on marriage and motherhood in the upper classes among whom the physicians lived and whose support they sought.

The female orgasm and the homology concept in evolutionary biology

“…In the last few decades, historians of gender and sexuality have objected that Laqueur's two‐stages narrative is built upon scarce and biased sources, and simplifies a much more nonlinear and complex history in which the themes of sameness and difference between the sexes cohabited in different time periods (Harvey, 2002 ; King, 2013 ; Linton, 2022 ; Stolberg, 2003 ). 1 Importantly for the case of the female orgasm, Alison Moore ( 2018 ) has convincingly shown that two different versions of the homologous model cohabited well into the 19th century.…”

Hermaphroditismus, Intersexualität, Zwitter, Varianten der Geschlechtsdifferenzierung – eine kurze Historie von Diskursen

“…In der medizinhistorischen Literatur ist umstritten, wann genau (die meisten Autoren tendieren auf die Mitte bis das Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts) sich das zweigeschlechtliche dichotome Modell (nach Aristoteles) der Geschlechter gegenüber dem hippokratisch-galenischen mischgeschlechtlichen Modell durchsetzte [ 16 , 17 ].…”

Beyond Constructivism?: Gender, Medicine and the Early History of Sperm Analysis, Germany 1870–1900

“…26 If this was indeed the case, Laqueur's argument that the two-sex model was invented because it suited enlightened thinkers who wished to justify the subordination of women, cannot be sustained. In a very well researched article, Michael Stolberg has questioned the validity of this explanation by pointing to inconsistencies in the periodisation offered by Laqueur and Schiebinger.…”