April 18th, 2008
by
Laura Q
So a frequent topic of conversation in my household the last few months has been the so-called “Braxton Hicks contractions“. Also known as false labor, these are contractions that women experience during the latter half of pregnancy. The uterus is practicing for labor, basically. Women have always known about these. Midwives have known about them. But they are named Braxton Hicks because of the male scientist who first “discovered” them.
Women: the undiscovered country.
Consider the Kegel exercise, named for Dr. Kegel who “invented” them. These are recommended for women for various reasons — help prevent some of the bladder issues that can develop during pregnancy, tighten the “squeezebox” to pleasure the boys during penis-vagina intercourse. Invented by Dr. Kegel. Because no woman had ever done this prior to the mid-20th century, and none of us ever figured it out on our own as kids.
So my partner & I got to talking this morning, and she started listing off some other body parts, and I started digging out my 25-year-old biology class memories, and actually it turns out that all of those female or pregnancy-related body parts that are capitalized with funny names — are named after men:
Fallopian tubes: named after 16th century Italian anatomist Gabriele Falloppio.
Barr bodies: Actually, it turns out these were discovered by a woman (although they’re named after a man). Mary Lyon discovered them in 1961 when she was in Murray Barr’s lab.“Gene Action in the X-chromosome of the Mouse (Mus musculus L.), ”Nature”, April 1961. Barr bodies are the condensed X chromosome that mammals have — the body shuts down, condenses, one of the two X chromosomes in each of female cells; this is dosage compensation, to prevent an overdose, if you will, of the stuff that the X chromosomes make. The process is called “Lyonization” (I love that), because she identified the process and identified that it was the X chromosome. Barr in 1949 had seen a chromatin mass. Lyon in her paper identified the masses and their function, and she called them “Barr bodies”.
Müllerian ducts: Embryonic structures that become the female reproductive organs (fallopian tubes, uterus, top of the vagina); they degrade in the male. They are named for the 19th century German physiologist Johannes Peter Müller.
We often think about colonization and the naming of things by the colonizers. But now I see that all the parts inside me have already had little flagpoles stuck on them — tags and labels citing the important and learned men who discovered them or invented them (or got credited for the discovery or invention).
There must be a great book somewhere that goes through all these naming things. I mean, hell, if you just looked at only those processes and parts named for male scientists and did some history, how many times would we find uncredited women in the story? If there isn’t such a book, there really should be.
If you like the history of medicine at all, you should read Deirdre English & Barbara Ehrenreich’s two pamphlets on women and medicine (Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers, and their related fuller-length book For Her Own Good.
…
Does anybody else ever wander about cities or campuses and notice all the buildings and streets and parks and statues (and busts and portraits) of men? I notice them and I often grumpily think, “These men earned a lot of money by exploiting workers, or inherited money from people who exploited workers, and then rehabilitated their names or maybe just got a tax break, by donating money for this. Now they have bought their way into history’s good graces like Andrew Carnegie.” Or, “These men got a break when women in their departments were forbidden from having faculty positions. And then they got admitted to the prestigious national academies and societies and won prizes because those things go to the people who are the heads of departments or the heads of labs, not the people (women) who have the perpetual research assistant positions.”
(I pause to note Melnea Cass, a relatively major thoroughfare in Boston named for a Black woman civil rights and labor activist. It’s notable because so rare.)
It makes me think of “She Unnames Them” by Ursula Le Guin. The power of naming. Patronymics and the various feminist SFnal efforts to address naming. Le Guin, of course — “The Naming Rule”, the assigned names in The Dispossessed. MZB’s Free Amazons with their matronymics. Tepper’s The Gate to Women's Country and Brin’s Glory Season with their female-named towns and how strange that sounds to the ear. The various attempts by revolutionary governments (I’m mostly thinking about revolutionary france) to re-name things, top-down, and how ineffective that is against the cultural accretions and history attached to names. That if you want to name things you have to get in at the beginning, before they are fully formed and fixed in our cultural mind.
I’m just kinda free associating here. Probably I should have just stuck with one topic and made a nice condensed post with a single point and several examples. But half the fun is the observations, and the other half is the connections and resonances and echoes.
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Laura Q at
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Filed under geek sexism, science | Comments (16)
When I was an undergraduate I lived for two plus years with a woman who had gone through the hell of medical school as one of the first — and few. She made it through the entire process, but it was hell. She was also divorced and the mother of three young children. The tales she told of what the teaching doctors and her male fellow students did and subjected the women entering the program in her class are harrowing. By the end of the 4 years, only she and one other woman remained to begin their internships.
It was educational in so many ways to be living within the female medical society and culture of Albququerque, and see what they worked out, along with the other women who had entered the medical professions around the same time become accepted practice, particularly around birth and gynocology. Though — the male ob/gyns continue, and continue still, the same way in terms of how the rooms look, their behaviors, their attitudes. Or so, at least, it seems to me.
These women were members of all the professions of medical care: physicians (my friend also became a practicing homeopathy physican as well as the AMA kind), mental health, counciling (a British woman speicalized in sexually abused children and rape victims — sometimes she came over to get a drink and be hugged, her day was so awful), nurses, nurse praticioners, and all of them taught as well.
There’s now all these tribes of medical women in New Mexico, who grew out of these women, I think.
That’s what your entry brought to mind over here!
Love, C.
P.S. It was impossible not to notice how devalued then, the medical profession became, when women entered it in significant numbers as physicians rather than nurses. The same thing is happening with law and professorships, it seems.
Interesting post. The first thing I did was look up G-spot on Wikipedia. Sure enough!
Thanks for this. I had so many Braxton Hicks contractions when pregnant. So many I was eventually put on bed rest because of my — and this is the medical term — “irritable uterus”.
For years, there was a small maternity/gyno hospital in Edinburgh, with two wards, one of which was named the “Sophia Jex-Blake Ward” – the first woman to graduate as a doctor from a British university, the University of Edinburgh School of Medicine, under her own gender. (The first woman known now to have graduated as a doctor from a British school of medicine was “Dcotor James Barry”, who was not discovered to be female till after her death. She also went to Edinburgh, oddly enough.)
Sophia Jex-Blake was pelted with bread rolls by the other medical students, but she graduated, and I’m more than slightly resentful that the only memorial to her was one ward in a small hospital that was closed down years ago. The building is now a student union.
Also there have been a number of medical schools started by women, for women. Yoshioka Yayoi began the Tokyo Women’s Medical University; Sophia Jex-Blake, mentioned above, founded the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women; I’m not sure about the history of the London School of Medicine for Women; and there was also the “Female Medical College of Pennsylvania” later “Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania”.
See Women in medicine @ wikipedia.
I read a book once by Josephine Lowndes, who wanted to rename the clitoris “The Lowndes crown” because it would describe its extent and renaming was important to re-visualize it — and though it was her name too, turned out she was naming it AFTER HER DAD. I did kind of enjoy the book. Can’t find a web page for her or her theories, but here is an amusing article: “The Archeology of the Orgasm”.
Elizabeth Garrett-Browning. And her sisters were pretty cool too.
Do you mean Elizabeth Barrett-Browning? And what were her sisters to this post?
In context, I think Jennie must mean Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, who qualified to practice as a doctor via the Society of Apothecaries in 1865, but was not permitted to take a medical degree in England: she got her doctorate at the University of Paris some years later. (And the Society of Apothecaries changed their rules immediately after Elizabeth Garrett had sat their exam, ensuring that no other woman could take the same route.)
Elizabeth Garrett’s younger sister Millicent was involved in the establishment of Newnham College at Cambridge and became President of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies – the “conservative” wing of the feminist campaign to get women the vote, as opposed to the direct action methods of the Women’s Social and Political Union.
Millicent married a Liberal MP, also a feminist, Henry Fawcett: it is ironic that the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, which still exists as an organisation (it now campaigns on “women’s representation in politics and public life; pay, pensions and poverty; valuing caring work; and the treatment of women in the justice system”) was renamed “the Fawcett Society” rather than the “Garrett Society”…
PS: The London School of Medicine for Women was founded in 1874 by a group of women involved in medicine, including Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Elizabeth Blackwell, and Sophia Jex-Blake. For many years Elizabeth Garrett Anderson was evidently regarded by the (male) British medical establishment as the big exception – she was allowed to join the British Medical Association, but they formally changed the rules as soon as they’d let her in to make sure no other woman could follow her.
Ah – yes, she’s amazing. Spartacus encyclopedia has more interesting details than wikipedia.
There was a book (I cannot remember the publisher or the author) about Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, pioneering woman doctor, which gave a child’s-eye view of her life story. I recall another in the same series on Louis Pasteur – I assume it was some kind of “people’s hero” series for children. I had read both before I was twelve… certainly before I had myself consciously realised I was a feminist.
I like the theme of this post, btw.
Hey! I wonder if your Mary Lyon was named after the Mary Lyon that founded Mount Holyoke College (then Seminary) or if it’s just a coinky dink.
Yonmei
Are you thinking of Value Tales? Those were awesome. My sister and I both adored the one about Nellie Bly. I do remember one about a female doctor named Elizabeth, but all I can find is this one about Elizabeth Fry. I could be thinking of a different series from you, though. Plus, they aren’t all listed on that site. It looks like they are reprinting them, but only have some of them out so far.
… I don’t think it can be the same Mary Lyon. Mary Lyon the biologist is still alive — publishing as recently as a coupleo f years ago, I think.
Are you thinking of Value Tales? Those were awesome.
I don’t think so – at least, the books at the site you linked to bear no resemblance to the books I remember.
I know it wasn’t the same Mary Lyon – and not a direct descendant either, since I believe she never married. I was thinking a grand-niece or something like that.
Somewhat OT, but it’s interesting how young the idea that “every body part must be named after someone who ‘discovered’ it” (as if people didn’t know about the part for years but just didn’t think of naming it after someone) sinks into one’s mindset.
When my young brother and I were kids (i.e. in elementary school), one of his favorite things to do to irritate me was to stick a cold piece of whatever (an ice cube, a chilled lego) down the back of my shirt. One time he asked me how I liked it, to which I replied “not in the least bit”.
Except I was eating something at the time, so my mouth was full (c.f. “heffalump” from the Winnie the Pooh stories) and the words came out “not in the Leisch pit”.
Even as an elementary school kid, my brother figured that I meant I didn’t like it particularly when something cold happened to fall into that pit between the shoulder blades (as if I would be ok with a piece of ice anywhere else) and that the pit was named after some anatomist named “Leisch”.
To this day, we still call that part of the body “the Leisch pit”.
*
OTOH, (and back on topic) isn’t there a difference between “colonization” via naming things like “the G-spot” or “Kegel excercizes” or even “Braxton Hicks contractions”, which have been known to women for quite some time and names like “Fallopian tubes” for things not necessarily known to either women or men. Certainly in the latter case, sexism was involved, but more in the general matter that certain careers used to be relatively closed to women?