Back in 2013, I published a book about the claim that there was a clear division in the history of Western Europe between two models of the body: ‘one-sex’ and ‘two-sex’. In the first model, men and women were seen as having exactly the same genital bits and pieces, but with men’s on the outside… Continue reading One-sex and two-sex bodies?
Category: womb
What women know about sex (and eggs)
One of the best-known stories from the ancient Greek medical texts tells of a slave entertainer who became pregnant but didn’t know what to do about it. In one of the versions that survived, from the Hippocratic treatise On Generation/Nature of the Child, she realized she was pregnant and told her owner, who in… Continue reading What women know about sex (and eggs)
Women have ways? Seeds, wombs and ‘legitimate rape’
In an infamous and much-repeated comment made in 2012, US Republican Todd Akin claimed that ‘if it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down’. Not surprisingly, he was ridiculed for the lack of knowledge of biology that this comment betrays. It didn’t take long, though, before history started to… Continue reading Women have ways? Seeds, wombs and ‘legitimate rape’
Pregnancy between East and West
(image courtesy of Archives and Special Collections, Library and Center for Knowledge Management, University of California, San Francisco) Sometimes you come across an image that really sticks in your mind. I recently attended a workshop on the representation of the womb across time, and one of the papers introduced me to this striking image… Continue reading Pregnancy between East and West
“Call the Midwife” – or knit your own womb
(this post develops an earlier version that first appeared in July 2013 on http://departu.org.uk) It was one of those moments that only happens when academics and practitioners are in the same room… For about a year, I had been thinking about the history of visual representations of body parts, and had been introducing audiences… Continue reading “Call the Midwife” – or knit your own womb
Mistaking histories 