Normal Women, page 51
[And Cover] From Physiology for Young People Adapted to Intermediate Classes and Common Schools, A.S. Barnes & Company, 1884, p. 84 (Public domain)
Ladies reported shortness of breath as their lungs were compressed, constipation and painful indigestion. Over time, the corsets could cause more serious injury: ‘bent or fractured ribs, displacement of the liver, and uterine prolapse (in some cases the uterus would be gradually forced, by the pressure of the corset, out through the vagina)’.109
So-called doctors, physicians and scientists had viewed elite women as ‘naturally’ more frail than men for more than a century. But in the nineteenth century new diseases and new diagnoses suggested that elite women were not only fragile, they were unfit for life.
The genuine frailty of elite women, created by avoiding healthy food in sufficient amounts, little or no exercise, no sexual pleasure, extreme repression and painfully low mental stimulus, could now be observed in their daughters who had fasted and rested all their lives, under tremendous psychological stress from repression and social anxiety. From about 1900, research into menstruation showed that it was unique to women – and therefore a sign of weakness. Doctor and sexologist Havelock Ellis wrote, ‘Even in the healthiest woman a worm however harmless and unperceived, gnaws periodically at the roots of life.’110 It was evident to male doctors and scientists that women’s bodies were ‘naturally’ prone to failure. Women’s normal state was to be sick.111
It was true that elite women’s lives made them sick. Not only did they starve themselves and take no exercise, they were exposed to diseases by close contact in unventilated rooms. Women were thought to be especially vulnerable to tuberculosis, which was generated by poor housing and hygiene in the crowded slums and spread easily from servants and sweatshop workers to their employers and clients. In nineteenth-century London, a quarter of all deaths were caused by tuberculosis and in the last half of the century millions of people died from consumption in England.
It became identified as a ‘tragic’ disease. Patients tended to behave with frantic energy or with melancholy exhaustion – rather like the heroines of the Romantic novels, now a behaviour associated with ladies of sensibility. The progress of the disease could be slow, giving patients time for deathbed farewells – which were often recorded in prose, poetry, fiction and paintings. It was nicknamed the ‘Romantic Malady’ and the typical patient’s appearance – pale skin and flushed lips – became so fashionable that even healthy women reproduced the feverish flush with white powder and rouge. The belief that consumption was linked to masturbation in women gave the disease an extra taboo allure.112 The novel The Lady of the Camellias, by Alexandre Dumas, tells the story of a beautiful high-class courtesan who (spoiler alert) dies tragically of consumption and was adapted into a successful stage play and then the opera La Traviata by Verdi, confirming the link between female sexuality, illness and death, in high art.
The ‘tragic’ disease: consumption
‘The Common Lot’, lithograph by Jules Bouvier, c.1842–65 (Public domain)
Women’s mental health was said to be further weakened by menarche, menstruation, the menopause, the spontaneous wandering around of the womb inside the body and sexual arousal. There was no discreet silence about sex, usually attributed to the Victorians – they had a constant heated discussion about pornography, masturbation, sexual release as essential for men and dangerous for women. Male commentators endlessly remarked on the dangerous sexuality of the working classes, the dangers of corruption to the young and that sexual ignorance was not a state of unknowing but the greatest virtue.113
Advisors to upper- and middle-class women continued to insist that they did not orgasm but now believed they experienced no pleasure at all. A 1918 advice book, Conjugal Happiness, states: ‘Sensible and fine feeling women, who are devoted to their husbands . . . would willingly submit to their spouses’ demands, even though sexual intercourse may give them little or no pleasure.’114
As late as 1928, a question in a private medical questionnaire about the sexual feelings of wives was considered shocking and inappropriate, because sexual feelings were generally understood to be abnormal in married women.115 Even so, wives were expected to volunteer for regular sexual intercourse to conceive children and satisfy husbands, who otherwise would be driven to rape, turn to adulterous sex with more obedient women, or be forced into unhealthy masturbation.116
Elite women’s gynaecological health continued to be an area of mystery and great interest to male doctors, partly because of the tremendous fees that could be earned by persuading women that they were both physically sick and mentally disturbed. Removal of the clitoris as a cure for masturbation, sexual appetite, or almost any behaviour that fell outside the doctor-defined limits of elite female behaviour, was probably widely recommended by family doctors and discreetly performed by surgeons. Isaac Baker Brown was criticised not for performing female genital mutilation on his patients but for publishing On the Curability of Certain Forms of Insanity, Epilepsy, Catalepsy, and Hysteria in Females in 1886. He recommended removal of the clitoris in patients whose husbands or families reported that they were interested in sex, or who had been caught masturbating, or who were regarded as over-emotional in any way at all.117 Removal of both ovaries was tried from 1870 and was regarded as an instant success in curing what was known as ‘failures of femininity’: not just physical but nervous disorders – and any symptoms for which doctors had no ready diagnosis.118
Believing gynaecology to be directly linked to female mental health, doctors continued to experiment on disturbed, unhappy or rebellious patients. Dr Bennet, a famous English gynaecologist, advocated placing leeches on the vulva or inside the vagina on the neck of the uterus, although he warned any doctor doing this to count the leeches as they dropped off when satiated and might be lost inside the vagina. He remarked that he had known adventurous leeches to advance into the cervical cavity of the uterus itself, saying: ‘I think I have scarcely ever seen more acute pain than that experienced by several of my patients under the circumstances.’119 (This is a reputable gynaecologist who lost leeches in the vaginas of ‘several’ patients – who exactly was crazy here?)
A modern review of the mental health of nineteenth-century elite women suggests that many suffered from depression, caused by ‘sexual harassment, subservient domestic roles that required self-sacrifice and internalization, feelings of helplessness due to lack of social power, diffused sense of purpose following the Industrial Revolution altering the role of wives and mothers, gender-biased psychological treatments that were harmful, and perpetual pregnancies, which often involved complication.’120
The mental health of elite women deteriorated so badly during the years of expansion and prosperity for England that historians describe an ‘epidemic of hysteria’.121 One highly regarded authority, Dr Henry Maudsley (1835–1918), the leading British psychiatrist of his day, was clear that young women could not study, their ‘nerve centres being in a state of greater instability, by reason of the development of their reproductive functions, will be the more easily and the more seriously deranged’.122 American doctor Silas Weir Mitchell diagnosed hysteria in men and women in the 1850s and prescribed male patients to take regular and frequent outdoor exercise. But for women exercise was not the answer – they must have the ‘rest cure’:123 ‘For approximately six weeks the patient was to lie on her back in a dimly lit room. If her case was particularly severe, she was not even permitted to get up to urinate. She was to be fed soft, bland foods to gain weight daily and have a daily massage on the entire body, increasing in vigour as the cure went on.’124 Anything the woman enjoyed must be kept from her. Virginia Woolf was not allowed to write and during the course of her ‘rest cure’ gained three stone in weight. Her husband, Leonard, consulted five of the best British doctors of mental health and said they knew ‘practically nothing’.125
By the middle of the nineteenth century, the condition of hysteria proved the diagnosis when almost any character change was observed in women, especially sadness, boredom or fatigue. It was only when the intolerable terror of modern warfare in the Great War produced symptoms among officers and men similar to those that had been called ‘hysteria’ that doctors had to reconsider the condition and the name. Enlisted men showing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder after the horror of trench warfare were diagnosed with the female condition of ‘hysteria’. But officers from the upper classes could not be labelled with a condition that was typical of distressed women. By 1916, elite men showing symptoms of mental illness were diagnosed as suffering from ‘neurasthenia’, a different name for the same disease of their inferiors.126
It was evident to doctors that ladies of the upper and middle classes were too weak and delicate for anything but the gentlest exercise, sexually frigid and incapable of concentration on any task, but working-class women were robust, sexually active, fertile and fit for hard labour with no psychological weakness.127 The opposite was true. In reality, working-class women – with poor diets and housing – died earlier and were more often ill. They were underfed even in breadwinner households because of the tradition that men and boys ate first. Working-class women could not rest before or after childbirth, and infant mortality and low birth rates were caused by the disease of rickets – triggered by a lack of vitamins which made bones twist even in the pelvis, obstructing labour and sometimes causing the deaths of mother and child.128
Some working-class women escaped puerperal fever because they could not afford an expensive doctor or to go into the fee-paying hospitals. Only 15 per cent of women went into hospitals for birth in 1927. The safest births were those in rural areas with a midwife or practitioner who stayed with the mother throughout labour, did not attend other infectious patients and avoided intervention.129 In 1914, free school meals began to be made available for children, and poor families started to receive greater health and welfare support. By 1920, infant mortality rates had fallen.130
Upper- and middle-class families suffered from disproportionately high infant mortality and death in childbed because their wealth and high status exposed them to the infections that were carried by fashionable and expensive medical practitioners from one patient to another. The maternal mortality rate in middle-class areas of Leeds was nearly double that of poor neighbourhoods – as middle-class women were attended by doctors with poor practices of hygiene; but the poor continued to give birth at home, sometimes without any professional attendance.131 Dora Russell coined the phrase ‘it’s four times as dangerous to bear a child as to work in a mine’, comparing the maternal death rate in 1920 of 4 per 1,000 births with the deaths in mining accidents of 1 in 1,000 miners.132 Safety in childbirth would not improve until the 1930s when practitioners – including the expert obstetricians – understood that they were spreading infections.
Working-class women, afraid of dying in childbed or feeling that they could not raise a child, continued the folk tradition of ‘bringing on’ bleeding – causing abortion. Drugs said to bring on bleeding were advertised in newspapers and sold openly. Methods of abortion included scalding hot baths, gunpowder mixed with margarine, slippery elm and penny royal herbs. In 1905, doctors reported seeing blue lips in patients who had tried to bring on a miscarriage by poisoning themselves with lead.133 Secret abortions, and the many women and babies who died when they went wrong, were not recorded.134
Rubber condoms were cheaply available from the 1900s, replacing animal skins. Contraception was associated with men who wanted sex for pleasure without conception or disease, and the women they used for sex, not with wives who were not thought to take pleasure in sex, and who only endured it to conceive children. Many wives associated condoms with prostitution: an applicant for a divorce in 1872 – Louisa Birch – included the complaint that her husband insisted on using a condom with her.135 Feminists opposed them because it meant that men could have sexual intercourse safe in the knowledge that they would neither get an infection nor conceive a child. Husbands who had planned their families by abstaining from sex could use condoms and demand sex every day of the month, even from frail, invalid and disabled wives.
Vaginal pessaries were available from pharmacists (and also home-made) from about 1880. But after the First World War, theories about eugenics – in particular the low birth rate of the officer class and the increase of their social inferiors’ – led sociologists to recommend controlling the population of the poor. The heroic work of Marie Stopes in bringing reliable contraception to working married women was partly inspired by the desire to prevent ‘unfit’ people from breeding.136
Paleobotanist Marie Stopes (1880–1958) published an advice manual, Married Love, in 1918 after the failure of her first marriage. Inspired by female sexual pleasure, which she described in idealistic and spiritual terms, Stopes fervently believed that pregnancies should be spaced in a family and people that she called the ‘worst end of the community’ should be discouraged from growing faster than her own class. She founded the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress in 1920, supported by former suffragettes, and opened free clinics to married women, offering the cervical cap, which had the massive advantage of being re-usable and under the control of a woman. Stopes opposed abortion, favouring sterilisation of people that she thought unfit to breed.137 She opened the first clinic for married women in Holloway, London, in 1921.
Middle- and upper-class families were using contraception from the 1920s to control the size of their families but fear of working-class women’s sexuality meant that it would not be until 1930 that the Ministry of Health allowed publicly funded nurses and doctors to give contraceptive advice to poor married women and then only on medical grounds.138
One of the heroines of the history of contraception and sex education for women was Annie Besant. Born in 1847 to an evangelical middle-class family, she married a clergyman and bore two children in three years. She described her youth in her autobiography: ‘I feel a profound pity for the girl standing at that critical point of life, so utterly, hopelessly ignorant of all that marriage meant, so filled with impossible dreams, so unfitted for the role of wife.’
After the marriage broke down, Annie moved to London, taking only her daughter, Mabel. She worked as a governess, wrote short stories and delivered a lecture on the political status of women. Put on trial for obscenity for republishing a contraceptive pamphlet with her friend and comrade Charles Bradlaugh, she defended herself and walked free from court but with her reputation in tatters. Her husband took her daughter from her because of her poor moral character. In 1888, she worked with the women matchmakers of the Bryant and May strike, saying: ‘Better remain silent, better not even think, if you are not prepared to act.’
Prolific writer, speaker and activist Annie Besant (1847–1933) campaigned for exploited workers, education on birth control, and Irish and Indian home rule
[And Cover] Annie Besant by unknown photographer, 1888 (Public domain)
Besant converted to the philosophy of theosophy, travelling as a missionary for the religion to India, where she campaigned for education and Indian independence, becoming the first leader of the Congress Party, adopting an Indian boy who she believed to be the messiah.139
Single Women
The deaths of 700,000 British men in the First World War increased the proportion of single women in the population, especially among the officer classes where mortality was high. As educated and literate social commentators, women were quick to observe: there were more middle- and upper-class single women than there were men to marry them – most of them would never be wives.140 By the time of the 1921 census, there were 1,158,000 unmarried women and 919,000 unmarried men between the ages of 25 and 34.141
Many women were shipped out by their hopeful families to the imperial lands in Africa and India, with the ambition of marrying an officer of empire, surviving the posting and retiring wealthy to England. Known as the ‘fishing fleet’, the women entered a deeply hierarchical racist clique and most of them did nothing to improve it.
Single women who remained in England were blamed for their failure to marry:142 the lifelong ‘spinster’ was suspected of man-hating,143 and some feminists confirmed their disdain. Christabel Pankhurst said: ‘There can be no mating between the spiritually developed women of this new day and men who in thought and conduct with regard to sex matters are their inferiors.’144
The idea that a single woman might think of herself as the equal to a man was derided by the late nineteenth-century radical thinker and poet Edward Carpenter, who said in 1897 that spinster feminists were ‘out of line . . . Such women do not altogether represent their sex; some are rather mannish in temperament; some are “homogenic”, that is inclined to attachments to their own sex rather than the opposite sex; such women are ultra-rationalising and brain-cultured; to many, children are more or less a bore; to others, man’s sex-passion is a mere impertinence, which they do not understand, and whose place they consequently misjudge.’145
Despite condemnation by the radical left, the misogyny of the sexologists, and condemnation by the conservative right, many unmarried women created interesting and worthwhile lives for themselves as single women choosing to marry late or not at all. Women took pride in the friendships of other women as their main source of emotional life. The Victorian emphasis on women’s lack of sexuality elevated women’s friendship as more ennobling and more pure even than marriage.146 The lack of financial profit between equal elite friends further raised the status of the relationship in a society that was uneasily obsessed with profit. The friendship of ladies who had nothing material to gain from each other and were idle together was the doctrine of the separate spheres in action: domestic, profitless, workless, detached from reality, spiritual, emotional, effortless.
