OVARY

Oh! Darling.

Ovary hopped onto the semantic stage around 1658 meaning ‘the female organ of reproduction in animals, in which ova or eggs are produced’ (ova being the Latin plural form of ovum = egg). Eggs, of course, are now generally recognised as a crucial part of reproduction in all species (a chicken ovulates every day, fact fans), making the ovary rather important for the construction of little’uns. Straightforwardly, the word derives from ovarium: ‘ovum’ + ‘-arium’ (aquarium, oceanarium, planetarium, toastarium). Consistency: it’s helpful. But hold! 1658? Really? What about before? Was there some mass genital evolution in the late seventeenth century that made early modern cisgendered Woman so drastically different from her medieval sisters?

Hartsoeker's drawings of 'homunculi', or 'little humans' inside sperm. (1695)

Well no, but there was an evolution in what Scientists considered “Woman” to be. For hundreds of thousands of years previous, the established thinking had been that they were simply men ‘turned outside-in’: female genitals were held ‘up there’ by a colder body temperature than their male counterparts, and, thus, sex differences were a matter of degree. Women were men who hadn’t quite unfurled properly.

Oh My God

With this thinking, the vagina became an inverted penis, the labia a foreskin, the uterus a scrotum, and the ovaries testicles – and all these now-familiar gynecological terms date from the same period: the oft-maligned vagina (= ‘sheath’) is faux-Latin from 1680, labia (= ‘lip’) slightly earlier (1630s) and uterus the earliest, from 1610 (although, as already mentioned in these pixellated pages, it was conflated with the gender-neutral ‘womb’ or ‘belly’, its original Latinate meaning). Pre-seventeenth century ovaries were consequently referred to as ‘female testicles’ or ‘stones’, and the synonymity was so literal as to accept the possibility that if a girl got too hot through strenuous exercise, her entire reproductive system could accidentally pop out and turn her into a boy.

So if sex was a false distinction to make, how did male and female manage to breed? Seventeenth-century scientists approached this question firstly through Aristotle and his theory of epigenesis (= ‘origin through growth’). Aristotle reckoned male semen gave the embryo its form, and female menstrual blood supplied the raw materials.¹ The ‘soul’ enters the embryo at the moment the mother first feels the baby kick.

However, by suggesting new people can spring into being organically, epigenesis risks dispensing with divine involvement. Not cool. So a much more palatable alternative, for seventeenth-century scientists, was preformation (the idea that the parents’ seed already contained a miniature adult, so all the embryo has to do is increase in size). Bit creepy, right? Nicolaas Hartsoeker (1656-1725) was well into this idea and even claimed he could see these ‘homunculi’ through the microscope (above, right).

But once this had been agreed, there came the inevitable Swiftian debate about how you like your eggs, with scientists divided into ‘aminalculists’ and ‘ovists’: those who were with Hartsoeker in believing the ‘germ’ of life to be in the sperm, and those who preferred the ‘egg’ (= ‘the female’). Arguing in favour of the latter was the (understandable) confusion about why God would be so wasteful as to create thousands of Hartsoekerean sperm-germs to be lost on every egg-ward excursion for the sake of one single fertilization: from the outside, the female looked a bit more efficient.

Oh! You Pretty Things

But clearly, all this Knowledge was better on the subject of males than females (and even the women themselves were hard pressed to explain menstruation or recognise pregnancy): ova were still shrouded in mystery, and ovulation a great unknown – it was not even certain whether human females could conceive without orgasm, or if they were more like cats, rabbits, llamas (now known as ‘induced ovulators’) and, er, men. Official advice erred on the side of caution and recommended that both man and wife reach orgasm during procreation – as a side-effect, a rapist could get off scott-free if his victim fell pregnant, since, until the nineteenth century, the law worked backwards and considered conception to imply enjoyment and, therefore, consent.

It is William Harvey (1578-1657), most famous for ‘discovering’ the circulation of the blood, who is commonly credited with realising the importance of an ovary-thing, and the frontispiece to his treatise on the subject blazons the tag ‘ex ovo omnia‘ (‘everything from the egg’). But he was thinking less of a modern day ‘egg cell‘ and more of a ‘spirit’: an egg was the mother’s ‘idea’ of a fetus which was ‘ignited’ in her womb during sex. It was a general generative catalyst, not technical anatomy – as is clear from the image (below, left).

Can of worms... The frontispiece to Harvey's Treatise on Generation (detail). Image from http://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/visibleembryos/

Oh My Gosh

After kicking around for just over a century, ovary suddenly became enshrined in anatomy books as an independent organ that somehow encapsulated ‘woman’: in 1844 Achille Chereau declared that ‘it is only because of the ovary that woman is what she is’ (oh dear). In part, this was to do with a retreat from the previous centuries’ idea that women and men were anatomically the same and an advance towards the notion that sex equalled gender (a surprisingly modern invention, if you listen to Thomas Laqueur). With this came an increasing focus on specifically ‘women’s’ problems via hysteria (= ‘womb trouble’), and, neatly (if disturbingly) a favourite cure for this pre-Freud was the bilateral ovariotomy, also dubbed ‘female castration’: removing a patient’s healthy ovaries to man them up a bit (just as men become ‘feminized’ through removal of the testicles). The ovariotomy would thus, it was believed, act not just as a cure for hysteria, but also for behavioural pathologies including nymphomania, and even general aches and pains. Of course, it also stopped menstruation, rendered women infertile and carried risks endemic to c19th surgery methods. WE DON’T KNOW WHAT THIS DOES, SO LET’S JUST TAKE IT OUT.

It was not until the 1930s that scientists got near a hormonal understanding of ovulation, how it worked and how it could be controlled. Here we really should give a nod to that symbol of 1960s sexual liberation: the combined oral contraceptive pill, a great source of division between parents and children, as epitomised in the backstory to the seminal Beatles song She’s Leaving Home (1967). See, children of the 1920s and 30s must have found the idea of their daughters silently and imperceptibly controlling their ovulation terrifying, whereas the children of the 1960s saw such control as simple empowerment. In miniature, this gives us the whole history of ovary and its linguistic cognates: what cannot be seen is inevitably free for appropriation by a host of meanings. Meaningarium.

Further Reading:

• Making Visible Embryos – an ‘online exhibition’ from the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. And Thomas Laqueur, of course (as linked).

NEXT WEEK: P is for Pussy

1. Yes, menstrual blood.

N

NANNY

Sonic Nurse

After the army of Important Academic Languages, and their Distinguished And Layered Relationship With Modern English, we reach this. Nanny has no real relation to Latin, Greek, French, Middle or even Old English, but derives from ‘a child’s corruption of the word nurse‘, tellingly akin to mamma. Nurse, it must be granted, has slightly more pedigree: it derives from the twelfth-century Old French term norrice, via the Latin nutricius (= ‘that suckles, nourishes’). It first appears in 1530 as a verb ‘to suckle’, and as a noun fifty years later, where it has the meaning we probably use most often: ‘one who takes care of the sick’.

Hattie McDaniel as Mammy, in Gone WIth The Wind. Image from http://www.gonemovies.com/

Nanny is first cited as an independent word meaning ‘a child’s nurse-maid’ in 1795, whence it proves itself as fluid as you would expect, also encompassing a quasi-proper name, Nana (Cf. Katy Nana in Mary Poppins, and the Newfoundland dog in Peter Pan). In 1830s America, we meet another deviant form of the same idea: mammy, a dialect corruption of mamma referring to ‘a black woman who looks after white children’. In extended form, mammy refers to a racial stereotype: ‘the loud, overweight and good natured black woman’, epitomised (in proper name form) in Gone With The Wind, and controversially brought to life in an Oscar-winning performance by Hattie McDaniel (above, right). And it’s not all the Americans: this phenomenon has certain similarities to the British use of native women as nursemaids in colonial India, ayahs, so named in reference to the Hindi word meaning ‘nurse’.

Dude Ranch Nurse

All this leads back to one place: the whistleblowing potential of an infant’s cries, in this instance naming the truly maternal figure in their formative years. But then, of course, until the late eighteenth century (the nineteenth, in France), no fashionable woman would even consider nursing her own child: on the contrary, wet nursing (sending your kid out to be suckled by a hired breast) was so common as to be automatic. Newborns were generally sent away for up to two years to be nourished, at a rate of anything from a few shillings a week to between £25 – 50 a year.

The reasons were as varied as the price, spanning the apparently trivial (social custom, and the desire to return to public life ASAP); the medical (fears for the mother’s health after the strain of lying in sans twenty-first century advantages), and the ‘medical’ (the widespread notion that sex with a nursing woman would damage her milk and therefore the child, and the belief that conception was impossible during this time anyway). It also seems possible that rampant infant mortality may have contributed: parents would send their children away until they had survived their most dangerous years, rather than invest emotional energy in a little’un who might well leave you before their first birthday.

That said, the enduring influence of the nanny qua mother-figure lasted long into the twentieth century, albeit mostly among the mega-aristocracy: The King’s Speech (2011) imagines the future George VI to have been closer to his nannies than his family; one of these, Charlotte Bill, was famously also an effective mother to his autistic and epileptic younger brother, Johnny (re-created in the 2003 BBC serial The Lost Prince).

Maggie’s Farm

Louis XIV of France painted with his wet-nurse, by Charles Beaubrun (c.1640)

The women who actually did all this nursing were inevitably of a lower social class than their clients – if not a different race – although they could earn good money (and possibly a nice pension) in the process. Here we tumble into a parallel nanny universe: the word in its more formal sense originating from another proper name. Through a bit of shuffling, good old Ann became first Nan and then Nanny, in which incarnation, around 1788, the word came to simply connote femininity, as in Nanny-goat (= ‘a female goat’, on which see also ‘Jenny Wren’ and ‘jenny-ass’). Like Doll, Nan’s trajectory suggests commonness, generic feminine identity, and while the dictionary is specific on the two nannies‘ separation, its stated origin in an infant’s mouth is by definition uncertain, language development fluid, and the connections between milking and the farmyard in need of little exposition – compare the nineteenth-century term baby farmer, a lower-class wet nurse happy to let her charges die because her one-off fee encouraged little else. The term was always pejorative, and synonymous with the dangerous, non-nurturing female.

In contrast, we have the nannies who stayed with one family for generations (like the mammy and the ayah abroad): these last are inevitably conventionally ‘older’ than their baby-farming colleagues, and presumably played a more extended mothering role. It is these strange insider-outsiders who appear in literature as bawdy and decrepit old women, inevitably depicted as their job title suggests: firmly on the side of the children they raise, to the extent that they will happily aid their improper sexual dalliances. It is thus that the Nurse appears in Romeo and Juliet, and in Keats’ The Eve of St. Agnes. The suspicion inevitably directed at these figures is certainly class-based: wet nursing’s detractors had been arguing for years that by withholding mothers’ milk parents risked their children absorbing working-class mannerisms – and criminal tendencies – from their surrogate teats.

Na na na na na.

The next stop for the nanny is in the inter-war years, with representatives including P.L. Travers’ Mary Poppins, the poems of A. A. Milne, and Noel Streatfeild‘s legion of sexless ‘cottage loaf’ Nanas. Streatfeild’s children are almost invariably orphaned, and their Nana-figure keeps them nourished through ‘nursery ways’, a stubborn lack of sentimentality, and a feeling of permanence sadly lacking in the increasingly fragmented world of war-torn Britain. A similar idea is repeated in the 1964 Disney film of Travers’ novel, which makes the significant decision to backdate events to 1910, when the focus is on ‘moulding the breed’ for future colonial greatness:

A British nanny must be a general!
The future empire lies within her hands.
And so the person that we need
To mould the breed
Is a nanny who can give commands!

Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins (1964)

In so doing, Disney’s film situates the nanny as part of ‘tradition, discipline and rules’, nurturing Britain’s future rather than its children, and flying in the face of its very etymology.

Mr Banks’ song does, however, lead us to the final stop on nanny’s childishly simple word-journey: its modern incarnation as the Dreaded Nanny State (first appearing some time between the fifties and sixties). Always an opprobrious term (attempts to re-appropriate it have met with derision)  critics of government intervention ranging from the welfare state to the smoking ban hark back to the nanny to point up ‘mollycoddling’, the infantalisation of the people (who are presumably thus reduced to the baby-talk of the nursery) returning to childhood with a fussy female at the helm. Wash your face, dearie.

NEXT WEEK: O is for Ovary