Read Online Flow: The Cultural Story of Menstruation by Elissa Stein, Susan Kim - Free Book Online

thought. Not that using sex to placate an angry organ was exactly what one would normally call rational; yet it was better than the Catholic Church’s position on hysteria, which was that it was caused by possession by evil spirits.
    During the Middle Ages, which lasted from the fifth century to the sixteenth, things previously taken for granted, like science, medicine, democracy, and philosophy, were flung out the window like so much offal as the Church tightened its already mighty grip on society itself. Any undiagnosable illnesses or instances of bizarre behavior were now diagnosed, conveniently if not constructively, as having been brought on by the devil himself. So instead of being summarily married off, women unfortunate enough to merit the diagnosis of hysteria were instead tried in Church courts and often prosecuted as witches.
    To be honest, the Church during the Middle Ages seemed to be particularly down on all women, and not just hysterical ones. Midwives in particular seemed to merit an especially hairy eyeball, what with all that spooky healing knowledge, those eerily effective herbal remedies, and that life-saving familiarity with childbirth, contraception, and other gynecological matters. Clearly in league with You-Know-Who, they too were frequently prosecuted by the Church as witches.
    Fortunately, there were still intrepid individuals who bucked the oppressive religious trend and furtively continued to explore science. Not swallowing the idea that demonic possession was responsible for any kind of pathology, these men began once again to question how the body actually worked, theorizing about its many systems.
    It’s important to keep in mind that throughout virtually all of history, even in supposedly enlightened times, a woman’s body and mind were considered significantly inferior to and less evolved than a man’s: designed for bearing children, but still weaker, feebler, and more poorly made. An 1848 obstetrics text wrote that “she (woman) has a head almost too small for intellect, but just big enough for love.” What’s more, her body was a total mystery, as well, both intimidating and scary: periodically bleeding, producing children, and so on. Until the 1700s, female genitalia was considered to be all lumped together, without distinct vocabulary to distinguish its different parts.
    In the nineteenth century, however, Jean-Martin Charcot, one of the earliest modern neurologists, put forth the first scientific argument against the centuries-old wandering-womb theory and suggested that hysteria was instead a brain-based phenomenon, with physical manifestations. Two of his students, Pierre Janet and Sigmund Freud, went on to posit that hysteria was psychological in origin, with symptoms arising from the subconscious. In other words, unresolved conflict manifested itself symbolically as physical symptoms. This theory was a huge step forward in many ways, as well as a disturbing step back.
    Freud himself, who once wrote that “women oppose change, receive passively, and add nothing of their own,” clearly had issues of his own when it came to unresolved conflict, especially with regard to women. He freely projected his own sexual insecurities while attributing possible causes of hysteria: he suggested penis envy, the Oedipal complex, and castration anxiety, all of which indicate, to us at least, a certain infantile phallocentrism. But he ultimately came closest to the mark when he concluded that hysteria represented unresolved sexual conflict. To his mind, many women, if not most, were sexually frigid.
    These weren’t quite the fightin’ words then that they are now. The Victorian era was almost cartoonishly repressed and repressive, especially for middle- and upper-class women, and it was the rare female who could actually get jiggy in the bedroom. The ideal woman of Freud’s day was passive, modest, restricted with heavy clothing, and uninterested in sex. In fact, hygiene manuals actually