U

UTERUS

There are some letters in the dictionary that are more Latinate than others. In consequence, u, v and, to an extent, o are largely dominated by medical terminology (because doctors, bless ’em, love a bit of Caecilius est in horto).

In Utero

Sexy tudors. Henry VIII, after Holbein.

Uterus derives from a Latin homonym meaning ‘womb’ or ‘belly’, with reference to the proto-Indo European udero (= ‘abdomen’), and, possibly, a Slavic usage, vedro, meaning ‘bucket’. Much like the ‘bucket’ (and indeed the shape of the letter u with which the word commences), the first sense of uterus is as a vessel – ‘the organ in which the young are conceived, developed and protected till birth; the female organ of gestation; the womb’.

Much has been made of this ‘protective’ element – it has been frequently observed that the ‘fetal’ position babies adopt to fill the uterus endures into adulthood as a comforting or even instinctual reaction to anxiety, pain, distress or cold – a kind of retrospective communion with the mother’s body. This sort of thing, it seems, is not above a bit of marketing, and the uterus is often invoked as a place of calm, darkness and peace.

Opposed to this, we have the sort of ambiguity nowhere better demonstrated than through tanks. (yes, tanks). The Mark I tank, the world’s first combat tank, was renamed from ‘Big Willie’ to ‘Mother’ (…), and its successors were colloquially dubbed ‘Mother’ throughout both world wars. The reasons are obvious: the inside of a tank is small, hot and protective. Childlike, a crew could be forgiven for considering themselves invincible within it – yet once the fuel tank is hit, the men inside suffer a hideous, incestuous death, incinerated by their own machine. This sort of thing runs right the way through conceptions of the mother’s body, particularly in psychoanalysis, which is never tired of exposing the deeply conflictual nature of many mother-child relationships, and with mapping those onto the cisgendered female body – we might think particularly of Melanie Klein’s famous ‘good breast’ and ‘bad breast’. If we’re going there.

HOWEVER. BACK TO THE RENAISSANCE. In its early incarnations in English this ‘womb’ is rarely so clearly gendered (as you may remember, King Lear thinks he has one), and, true to its ambiguous etymology, early modern minds frequently considered the uterus to be a generic bodily pouch. Thus it was often conflated with the gender-neutral belly (ah, Isidore of Seville), and in this form it was thought to be proof of the body’s retentive faculties. So even when considered as a specifically reproductive organ, the thinking went, the uterus still resembles the digestive system in how long it takes to do its business, since it creates infants over a leisurely period of nine months. While I doubt it takes quite that long for your morning Alpen, digestion is certainly something of a gradual process – consider, if you will, the hangover.

Horn of Plenty

If you remember the Alphabet post on ovary (to which this is in many ways a companion), you may also remember that until the seventeenth century sex organs were considered to have analogues across the genders (penis = vagina, labia = foreskin and uterus = scrotum). Along with its reproductive and sack-like qualities – I am reminded of the beautifully named ‘Mermaid’s Purses‘ – in this model the uterus also matches the scrotum in its creative properties. After all, reproduction is six of one and half-a-dozen of the other.

But this was not just something tossed around in the Renaissance lab and subsequently ignored: the scrotum-uterus comparison actually spread into what we might consider a bizarre arena – fashion. I am, of course, talking about the codpiece, ‘a bagged appendage to the front of the breeches; often conspicuous’. This was a sartorial fave of Henry VIII (above, right), who clearly took his outfits very seriously – but I note that sexy Jonathan Rhys Meyers has avoided the sexy codpiece throughout the BBC’s Sexy Tudors. Too sexy?

Originally a modesty device to get round the, ahem, ‘shortcomings’ of the hose, this strange appendage quickly grew to a size that redefined it as a disturbing kind of hyper-masculine power-dressing. Yet the word derives from the Old English codd (+ piece), which came to mean ‘testicles’ in early Medieval times (quite possibly because of exactly this phenomenon) but originally meant simply ‘a bag, pouch or husk’. Indeed, the codpiece was frequently dubbed a belly, and, through fun with synonyms, the womb could become a cod: my good friend Thomas Laqueur highlights the Pardoner’s exclamation ‘O wombe! O bely! O stynkyng cod!’, in the Canterbury Tales, and also points out that the codpiece quickly started to resemble…(I like this bit)… ‘a finely embroidered and bejewelled horn of plenty’.

Horn.

So it seems that, while Henry VII might not thank you for it, we could observe that this most macho of garments is in fact drawing attention to the womb-like, generative, and retentive properties of what lurks within (which, of course, it also helped protect – gender-ambiguous Russian dolls, anyone?). Indeed, glancing at a couple of examples in portraiture, a lot of these men look rather like they have an artificially constructed uterus poised over their genitalia (love how he’s pointing, just in case we miss it). Less Blackadder, more… actually, I don’t know what that is.

Bag for Life

But, of course, eventually someone had to seize on anatomical differences to posit a definition of gender, and thus it that (around 1615) the uterus started to be considered something exclusively female – as regular readers will be aware, this was a chain that began with independent naming of the organ in question and eventually reached the pitches of hysteria in the nineteenth century. There is also a strange quasi-legal term, uterine, apparently first spotted in the seventeenth century but not dictionary-cited until 1816, meaning ‘related through the mother’. Thus, ‘the property devolves to his brothers or uterine uncles’, with the body of the mother here serving a dynastic link, since all these uncles can be proved to have shared a uterus. They could even be half-brothers, since an alternative meaning for uterine is ‘having the same mother, but not the same father’. Working on a similar premise, if you are particularly toolish, and your sister has a son, you would (in pre-paternity test times) have been best off leaving your money to your nephew: his link to you is purely uterine, unlike your link to your son, who could be anyone’s spawn.

As we draw near the end of the Alphabet series, threads begin to resolve themselves. Uterus has been the final word of three (hysteria and ovary were the other two) all of which address the issue of mapping the cisgendered female body. Following the three, we have seen a model of sex and gender that does not conform with what many experience as the current status quo. Conversely, the distinction between genders does not seem to have been primarily based on the body until the nineteenth century (or even later). Thus, we have seen women turning into men with comparatively little contemporary comment, the female orgasm (and in some cases her entire sexual appetite) vanish from the everyday realities of heterosexual sex, and now, and perhaps most bizarrely, an epidemic of hyper-masculine men apparently walking around with giant uteri affixed over their genitalia. (Yes, I did just say ‘uteri’). Perhaps this is worth thinking about…

NEXT WEEK: V is for Vitriol

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.

F

FEMALE

Are you all sitting comfortably?

‘Well, well,’ I thought, as I cast my eye over the (now somewhat bedraggled) series of scrawled lists of letters for the Alphabet shoved into my pockets, bursting out of purses and sketchbooks and rotating in scarcely less tatty form in my head. For the question was obvious: What am I going to do for F? Because, you see, Z, Y, X, all those, they’re not actually that hard. They don’t have that much riding on them. But F … well, from the various incarnations of the F-word onwards … a headache.

Because, you see, the word feminism just isn’t that interesting.

Or rather, its interest lies in its power to evoke wide-ranging, frequently violent reactions while remaining semantically straightforward. Feminism gets precisely a centimetre of a three-column page in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Because it means two very simple and uncontentious things: in rare form, ‘the qualities of women’, and as it is more commonly understood today, ‘advocacy of the claims and rights of women’, first used sometime around 1895. All those extra things, the bad reputation … those are add-ons, and not linguistically valid ones, either. So I turned my attention away from feminism, and thought that perhaps I would go back to basics. After all, how often do we think about what female means?

Hey ho, let’s go.

From http://www.edbatista.com/. Used with permission.

Well, it derives from the Middle English ‘femelle’ via the Latin ‘femella’ which is in turn a diminutive of ‘femina’ (= ‘woman’ – yes, another diminutive. They keep popping up, don’t they?) In its most basic incarnation, female simply means ‘belonging to the sex which bears offspring’. This does not have to involve birthing: let me tell you of the seahorses.

Despite his undisputed ‘masculine’ role, the male seahorse receives a parcel of eggs from the female. Upon doing this, he sets out on an aqueous pregnancy-journey, bearing his unborn sea-foals in a pouch specially evolved for the purpose. During incubation, the female what knocked him up visits him each day for a brief catch-up (approximately six minutes), during which time they revisit the rituals of their courtship (holding tails, doing a little pre-dawn dance, smoking that bud and chillin’).

[Here, you must listen to The Sea Horse by Flanders & Swann. I’ll wait here.]

Unlike words like woman and lady, female therefore has a very precise biological meaning that underscores its subsequent development: it is unsurprising that the next place it shows up in the dictionary is in botany (1791), where it refers to the parts of the plant that bear fruit, or, in reference to ‘a blossom or flower’, ‘having a pistil and no stamens; pistillate; fruit bearing’ (slightly later: 1796). Of course, ‘perfect’ plants are ‘bisexual’ in that they possess both male and female parts (this latter, the ‘gynoecium’, literally meaning ‘woman house’). GCSE Biology ftw.

Alongside this specific development is an extremely general one: ‘consisting of females’, ‘pertaining to women’ (the dictionary quotes Pope on ‘the force of female lungs’), and then ‘characteristic of womankind’ in the seventeenth century and ‘womanish’ in the eighteenth. It is curious that the usage here should be ‘womankind‘ rather than ‘femality’ (of which more presently), since woman seems pretty clearly human, and therefore arguably more subjective, than a simple reference to the egg-bearing species.

How low can you go?

It is exactly this sort of little shift that leads to female‘s seventh meaning, as an epithet of ‘various material and immaterial things, denoting simplicity, inferiority, weakness, or the like’ (one wonders with alarm what ‘the like’ might be). Here, of course, we have the realms of the ‘feminine rhyme’, which, while often weaker, are nonetheless much harder to pull off (and more effective, when successful) than any number of the old Moon and June. And mechanics also gets a shout out: female is there applied (as of 1669) to ‘that part of an instrument or contrivance which receives the corresponding male part’. (I love the dry non-specifics of ‘instrument or contrivance’.) However, it should come as no surprise to find that female eventually passes into apparently exclusively negative use: ‘as a synonym for ‘woman’ now only contemptuous’.

They are no ladies. The only word good enough for them is the word of opprobrium – females.

– Anonymous (1889)

‘Female’ … A circular hole or socket having a spiral thread adapted to receive the thread of the male screw.

– Anonymous (1669)

By way of a postscript: some now rare variants on the word. Femality can be both ‘female nature’ and ‘unmanliness’; feminality refers to ‘a knick-knack such as women like’, and Feminie is ‘Womankind; especially the Amazons‘. We like it when things stay self-referential.

NEXT WEEK: G is for Girl