This article was written by Committee Member Flo Jarvis. To propose your own article, get in touch via contact@camreprorights.com.
Anti-abortion rhetoric of the 21st Century serves to bifurcate the sexes. But what about 18th, 16th, or even 2nd Century Western approaches to sex, gender, and the political significance of the body? Thomas Laqueur’s book, Making Sex: body and gender from the Greeks to Freud reveals much on this topic.
Published in 1990, Making Sex charts what Laqueur calls a “shift” from a “one-sex” model to a “two-sex” model. The two-sex model is one that will be familiar to 21st Century readers. It identifies two distinct and mutually exclusive categories of reproductive organ which form the basis for two genders. In the two-sex model, differences between the sexes are hyper-emphasised and those within them are under-emphasised. For example, there was a fascination with the difference between the ‘soft’ female chest and the ‘hard’ male one, which was taken as evidence that women were biologically destined to nurture children and therefore to stay at home. This brushes over the variation within the category of female chests. It establishes an insurmountable binary which it was believed could be applied to all human beings. Scientists carried out research to provide evidence of this binary and their findings were rewarded lucratively. New anatomical textbooks were published, which Laqueur examines in his book. Laqueur argues that the shift in favour towards this conception of sex aided the subordination of women in that it seemed to provide empirical evidence for it.
However, older thinkers more commonly subscribed to a one-sex, or “vertical” sex model, which, as the name suggests, placed sex on a vertical plane – almost a ladder. Females were considered to be ‘incomplete’ or ‘imperfect’ males, possessive of similar organs that did not differ as profoundly as the two-sex model presented, which is consistent with popular Christian doctrine. In other words: males and females were seen as variations of one sex. According to Laqueur, until the beginning of the 18th Century this mindset was favoured and hence informed the worlds of medicine and philosophy. Galen (a physician and philosopher who wrote in the 2nd Century CE) even believed that the reproductive organs were the same in men and women, but were merely positioned differently, with the vagina being a kind of inverted penis, and the ovaries being an internal scrotum. The anatomical drawings of Vesalius (writing in the 16th century) reflect this idea and were highly influential. Aristotle, whose work is dated to the 4th Century BCE, believed that male and female organs were “similar”, with the exception of the uterus, which males simply did not possess. Completely at odds with current popular belief, Laqueur claims that in pre-18th Century Western intellectual thought there were many genders but only one sex.
Also key to the one-sex model was the concept of the four humours – hot, cold, dry and moist. The levels of each of these humours in the body was what was believed to determine gender, with females being largely cold and moist, and males being hot and dry. This formed more of a duality of sexes than a binary – two more vague groupings into which most but not all could be sorted. Laqueur also discusses reproductive fluids and the understanding of the female orgasm (especially the distinction between clitoral and vaginal pleasure) as facets of the one-sex theory of sexual difference.
His work does not go unchallenged, with the key issues of other scholars being over the timeline of Laqueur’s findings. Michael Stolberg’s campaign to shine a light on discussions of a two-sex model took place long before Laqueur accounts for, while Helen King argues that both theories were researched and evidenced all throughout history. Joan Cadden makes all of these points and more, but most importantly finds the idea of a distinct and confined “shift” across the whole of the West to be unrealistic. Robert Nye and Katharine Park even claim that Laqueur misunderstands some early anatomical sources. In general, I agree that there is a problem of cherry-picking of evidence in the book, and equally some conflation of anatomical and political understandings of sex and gender from vastly different periods – as one might expect from such an ambitious piece so broad in scope. For the purposes of this article, many of the above quibbles can be set aside, though, because what I wish to draw attention to is how the body and political status have interacted throughout history.
Laqueur attempts to argue that the two-sex model was almost invented to justify the exclusion of women from the public sphere. He notes that the surge in discussion of a two-sex theory coincided with revolution and reform in the 18th Century which necessitated a new political order with new rules – particularly over who could participate in it. To use a cause-and-effect lens on this link is overly simplistic, but certainly there seems to be correlation. From around the 18th Century it became especially prevalent that female anatomy was used in the debate over the rights and political status of women. This was not the case in older political orders, which considered the body almost inconsequential.
In the current political climate not only are issues relating to gender discussed at an exceptionally high rate (Prof Paul Baker’s research finds that articles written about transgender people increased threefold between 2017 and 2019, a trend that has continued), but the physical body is also considered fundamental. This crops up constantly in the discourse over reproductive rights, which has surged in recent years. What Laqueur’s work teaches us is that this biological essentialism is centuries old and almost never politically neutral. There is a well-established trend of weaponizing female reproductive organs against women, even though reproductive rights are not just about women – we all lose if bodily autonomy is compromised.
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