Feminists For Choice

I’d like to talk ancient Greece this week (I promise I won’t be focusing solely on antiquity). I watched Hercules and Xena all growing up and I was utterly fascinated with the models of ancient Greece and Rome they presented. Kick ass women! Lesbianism, or at least the appearance of it, totally accepted! There was even an episode where a transvestite won a beauty pageant.

Unfortunately, this was all fantasy. I was one betrayed-feeling little girl the day I found that out. But the sad reality is ancient Greece was yet another culture where women were regarded as property and given little thought.

However, this didn’t stop those always-curious Greeks from coming up with theories and ideas about women and their bodies. Even that great father of medicine, Hippocrates, and his followers (who actually wrote the majority of the text accredited to him) explored and attempted to explain female phenomena in the Hippocratic Corpus.

Like most of the ancient world, the Hippocratics saw women as inferior, specifically because their bodies were often curvier and softer than the male body. The reason for this, they believed, was because women had a excess of blood and their flesh soaked it up. Once a month, this extra blood would make its way to the womb where it would be flushed out of the body. If a woman was pregnant, the extra blood would be directed to the fetus. It was believed women needed to have the perfect balance of blood, and that having an excess or deficit would lead to problems.

What sorts of problems, you ask? Physical problems, which would then lead to insanity and possibly suicide.

As Hippocrates describes it, if the body fills the womb with blood and then keeps producing it, the extra blood will have no where to go, and so start making its way to the heart and lungs. This engorges them with blood, makes them more sluggish, and creates a “numbness.” He describes this numbness as being the same as when one’s legs fall asleep. Unfortunately, it cannot be quickly cured by standing up and moving around – blood flows very slowly from the heart and “phrenes” (mind; Hippocrates placed the mind with the heart and lungs, not in the brain) because “there the veins are slanted.” This numbness causes insanity, the Hippocratic Corpus tells us. It goes on to describe a condition that sounds like it could be schizophrenia or severe clinical depression; sometimes “visions” that “order her to jump up and throw herself into wells and drown, as if this were good for her and served some useful purpose,” sometimes a desire “to love death as if it were a form of good.”

This Hippocratic Corpus observes that this condition most often befalls – get ready for this – virgins! Specifically, virgins approaching the age of their first periods.

I’d like to interrupt to note that one’s period beings when one has achieved a particular weight in conjunction with a particular amount of protein in their diet – with childhood obesity and enriched diets it may be common for girls as young as 9 or 10 to start menstruating, but back in 400-200 BCE the age was closer to 14 – an age in which, while still considered early, it is not uncommon for symptoms of unbalanced brain chemistry disorders like schizophrenia and clinical depression to make their first appearances.

It’s noted that oracles often directed these women to go give offerings of valuables to the goddess Artemis. Hippocrates knows better though. What these depressed and/or mentally ill young women REALLY need is marriage, sex, and childbirth! “…when virgins experience this trouble, they should cohabit with a man as quickly as possible. If they become pregnant, they will be cured.” I’m certain these “superior” male doctors were thinking only of the ladies when they wrote out this prescription.

Pregnancy wasn’t the cure for only virgins though. The Hippocratic Corpus continues, “among married women, those who are sterile are more likely to suffer what I have described.” How convenient.

Sources:

American Psychiatric Association. (Ed.). (2000). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders: dsm-iv-tr. diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. American Psychiatric Association.

Hanson, Ann Ellis. (1975). Signs 1. Excerpt pp 575-576 in DiCaprio, Lisa., & Wiesner, Merry E. (2000). Lives and voices: sources in european women’s history. Houghton Mifflin Co..

Pence-Brown, Amy. (2003). Dress, gender and the menstrual culture of ancient greece. Retrieved from http://www.mum.org/greekmen.htm