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.

H

HYSTERIA

O, how this mother swells up toward my heart!
Hysterica passio, down, thou climbing sorrow,
Thy element’s below.
– King Lear, II.ii.246

No Reason To Get Excited

In its purest sense, hysteria simply refers to the womb, no more, no less; like all those other lovely hy- words, it comes from the Greeks, and specifically from their word hysterikos – hystera (= yes, ‘womb’. Think ‘hysterectomy’). There may be little trace of its origin in modern usage, but its ‘female’ signification is perfectly in line with the word’s association with legions of Anna Os, Doras and Victorian virgins, eyes rolling, bodies attractively prone.

Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare, c. 1781

But here we must pause, and take an exciting medical-historical diversion. The Latin equivalent of hysterikos is the homonymic ancestor of our modern term ‘uterus’, and means ‘womb’ or ‘belly’; and this last strangely ambiguous definition seems less odd when you realise that ‘womb’ itself, in its Old English form, refers not to the generative organ but to a ‘belly’ or ‘paunch’ and that history is full of scientists arguing that this now-feminized organ was gender-neutral, with the ‘female’ womb simply some kind of equivalent to the ‘male’ stomach. Well? It does have some kind of logic: both are cavernous places where you, er, store stuff, but the female of the species may be more creative than the male.

Oh, Mother.

So, grasping this information in our sweaty little palms, to Shakespeare. When King Lear complains of ‘this mother’ he is referring to, as he says, ‘Passio Hysterica’, or ‘the suffocation of the mother’ – mother here used as a synonym for ‘womb’, as in Edward Jorden’s Treatise on the subject. Contemporary medical belief held that there were circumstances (Jorden specifies ‘of a wind in the bottom of the belly’, but refuses to elaborate on whether this is indigestion or some meterological force) in which this sexless womb-stomach could physically wander round the body, where ‘it causeth a very painfull collicke in the stomack, and an extraordinary giddiness in the head’. Uh, yeah: ouch. Or, in Lear’s terms: ‘O me, my heart! My rising heart! But down!’

She’s Lost Control.

The development of  the female-specific womb may be a topic for another day, but hysteria meaning what we would understand by the term, ‘hysteric fits or convulsions, a convulsive fit of laughter or weeping’ was in use as early as 1727. In 1791, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote what is arguably the first attempt to put hysteria into musical form – with The Magic Flute‘s Queen of the Night, also a ‘mother’ – spectacular as the music is (and her arias in particular), its driving purpose is to contrast the hysterical irrationality of women with the enlightened forces of Men and Freemasonry (gendering hysteria explicitly female in the process).

One to be taken each night with a mug of cocoa

There is then a gap in the word’s lexical development until the medical issue resurfaces: hysteria as a diagnosable condition was first officially used in 1801, where, as the dictionary points out, it was in reference to a seeming epidemic of women Going Crazy – or, specifically, experiencing ‘a functional disturbance of the nervous system, characterized by anaesthesia, hyperaesthesia, convulsions, etc., and usually attended with emotional disturbances or perversion of the moral and intellectual faculties’. Covering all its bases, you could either have no sensation at all, or hyper-sensation. Brilliant. That’s exactly what today needed.

It’s Not Easy Being Green.

One explanation for its seeming explosion during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is its use as a catch-all term for Generic Women’s Troubles (hence calling it, essentially, ‘womb-problem’), and indeed, it does seem to have been partially conflated with chlorosis (a type of anaemia), which is perhaps better known to Renaissance drama fans as ‘green sickness’. Thus, in John Ford’s play ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore (you’d think you couldn’t top that title, wouldn’t you?) Annabella is thought to be suffering from ‘an overflux of youth’, in which case ‘there is no such present remedy as present marriage’. Translation: get a willy in her, quick.

Something along these lines, dubbed ‘pelvic massage’, was indeed considered to be a helpful course of action for hysterical women of later years, and this, bizarrely, is where the vibrator makes its entrance on the historical stage. Helped along in its retail life by widespread use of electricity in the home, this particular modern gadget was originally a time-saving device for hard-pressed, fee-jealous doctors with hundreds of hysterical women to bring to ‘hysterical paroxysm’ before lunch. It was a young medical man named Sigmund Freud who decided that the ‘talking cure’ might be more helpful, and his early work in hysteria underscored much of his subsequent work on psychoanalysis.

Pervert Doc Caged

In its post-medical life (unsurprisingly, it is no longer considered a valid diagnosis), hysteria continues to rejoice in its second definition, a figurative use, meaning ‘unhealthy emotion or excitement’ (1839). Its most common modern usage would probably be in reference to media hysteria, which does, alas, tend to be aimed at women: the Daily Mail, the archetypal screeching tabloid, was, from its initiation in 1896, a newspaper aimed at women, and to this day its readership is over 50% female. As such, it tends to focus on condemning threats to ‘traditional family values’ – primarily immigrants and those on benefits, but it also simmers with barely suppressed homophobia (‘Abortion hope after “gay genes” finding’ was a headline from 1993, and Jan Moir’s article on Stephen Gately more recently attracted justified ire from all corners).

This, sadly, does tend to suggest that in the eyes of People Trying To Sell Us Stuff, women are still very much the hysterical creatures they were considered in the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, this does not stop legions of women actually buying what they sell.

NEXT WEEK: I is for Infant.