Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Contributors
- 1 Introduction
- 2 ‘Difficulties, at present in no Degree clear'd up’: The Controversial Mother, 1600–1800
- 3 Monstrous Issues: The Uterus as Riddle in Early Modern Medical Texts
- 4 Surveilling the Secrets of the Female Body: The Contest for Reproductive Authority in the Popular Press of the Seventeenth Century
- 5 ‘Made in Imitation of Real Women and Children’: Obstetrical Machines in Eighteenth-Century Britain
- 6 Transcending the Sexed Body: Reason, Sympathy, and ‘Thinking Machines’ in the Debates over Male Midwifery
- 7 Emma Martin and the Manhandled Womb in Early Victorian England
- 8 Narrating the Victorian Vagina: Charlotte Brontë and the Masturbating Woman
- 9 ‘Those Parts Peculiar to Her Organization’: Some Observations on the History of Pelvimetry, a Nearly Forgotten Obstetric Sub-speciality
- 10 ‘She read on more eagerly, almost breathlessly’: Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Challenge to Medical Depictions of Female Masturbation in The Doctor's Wife
- 11 Mrs Robinson's ‘Day-book of Iniquity’: Reading Bodies of/and Evidence in the Context of the 1858 Medical Reform Act
- 12 Rebecca's Womb: Irony and Gynaecology in Rebecca
- 13 Representations of Illegal Abortionists in England, 1900–1967
- 14 Afterword: Reading History and/as Vision
- Index
10 - ‘She read on more eagerly, almost breathlessly’: Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Challenge to Medical Depictions of Female Masturbation in The Doctor's Wife
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Contributors
- 1 Introduction
- 2 ‘Difficulties, at present in no Degree clear'd up’: The Controversial Mother, 1600–1800
- 3 Monstrous Issues: The Uterus as Riddle in Early Modern Medical Texts
- 4 Surveilling the Secrets of the Female Body: The Contest for Reproductive Authority in the Popular Press of the Seventeenth Century
- 5 ‘Made in Imitation of Real Women and Children’: Obstetrical Machines in Eighteenth-Century Britain
- 6 Transcending the Sexed Body: Reason, Sympathy, and ‘Thinking Machines’ in the Debates over Male Midwifery
- 7 Emma Martin and the Manhandled Womb in Early Victorian England
- 8 Narrating the Victorian Vagina: Charlotte Brontë and the Masturbating Woman
- 9 ‘Those Parts Peculiar to Her Organization’: Some Observations on the History of Pelvimetry, a Nearly Forgotten Obstetric Sub-speciality
- 10 ‘She read on more eagerly, almost breathlessly’: Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Challenge to Medical Depictions of Female Masturbation in The Doctor's Wife
- 11 Mrs Robinson's ‘Day-book of Iniquity’: Reading Bodies of/and Evidence in the Context of the 1858 Medical Reform Act
- 12 Rebecca's Womb: Irony and Gynaecology in Rebecca
- 13 Representations of Illegal Abortionists in England, 1900–1967
- 14 Afterword: Reading History and/as Vision
- Index
Summary
In the early to mid-nineteenth century, medical accounts of female masturbation were strangely contradictory. In the many legitimate as well as quack medical treatises on reproductive health that were in circulation in this period, female masturbation was either utterly unimportant or it was a much more devious vice than the same habit in men – and therefore a subject of the utmost importance. Some texts argued that women had little to no sexual feeling, as William Acton sought to establish in Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs (1857). Some included discussion of women as a minor and sidelined element of their work, as does George Drysdale in Elements of Social Science (c. 1854–55). Others saw female masturbation as the temptation to a whole range of other forms of vice, as in Samuel La'Mert's Self-Preservation (1841) and Tissot's New Guide to Health and Long Life (1808). In discussions of masturbation in each of these texts, examination of the practice of male masturbation was dominant. Female masturbation is only ever presented as an aside, subordinated to the much more pressing issue of managing male indulgence in the practice. Though their titles suggest a much more encompassing range of interests, it was not until the later decades of the century that female masturbation came to be widely studied in its own right.
One of the striking similarities of all of these texts is that male masturbation was portrayed as an affront, in its wasteful inefficiency, to capitalist ideology. The male masturbator is continually described as wasted, dried, and weak because seminal fluid is repeatedly expelled to no productive (or reproductive) purpose. Curiously, though, these texts do not discuss the female orgasm in such determinedly physical terms. This was partly because many medical professionals assumed that women seldom masturbated. But it was also due to the fact that if no bodily fluids were repeatedly wasted, the female body would be less affected. The discussion of female masturbation in these texts, when it appears, commences at a further remove from the body than discussions of male masturbation: more specifically, at the point of moral transgression.
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- The Female Body in Medicine and Literature , pp. 148 - 168Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2012