Sex and Childbirth

Masturbation and the Dangerous Woman

by Lisa Smith April 30, 2013

By Lisa Smith, W&M Contributor Remember all those playground stories about masturbation causing hairy palms and blindness? Those tales go way back. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, much ink was spilled on the devastation that masturbation would cause. Men’s frequent self-pleasuring would destroy the fibres of their penis, and the masturbator would become effeminate, [...]

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Love, Sex and Cuddly Cupids

by Holly Tucker February 14, 2013

By Vicki Leon (W&M Guest Author) Mid-February in the U.S. brings mushy greeting cards, the overpowering scent of chocolate, and cupids. Lots of cupids. Call me a cynic, but I don’t buy that old saw that our Valentine celebrations arose from early Christian activists (all named Valentin) whose bloody martyrdom made this a holiday. And [...]

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A Short History of Valentine’s Day

by Mary Sharratt February 10, 2013

By Mary Sharratt The origins of Saint Valentine’s Day lie shrouded in obscurity. Saint Valentine himself, a third century Roman martyr, seems to have nothing to do with the romantic traditions that became associated with his feast. Dr. Douce, in his Illustrations of Shakespeare, cited in The Book of Days, writes: It was the practice [...]

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The history of menstruation

by Helen King February 10, 2013

Julia Margaret Cameron’s Hypatia By Helen King (W&M Regular Contributor) Everything has a history. I suppose it was only a matter of time before I wrote about menstruation here; my doctoral thesis was on menstruation in classical Greece. One of the questions I couldn’t answer there was ‘What did women actually do about the [...]

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The Hottentot Venus

by Lucy Inglis January 14, 2013

Throughout Georgian London there are many ‘freaks’, whose main source of income was displaying themselves: tall or strong women, tiny people, the prematurely aged (probably suffering from progeria) and ‘mer-people’. Sexual freaks such as bearded ladies or hermaphrodites were particularly popular. Anything exotic or ‘other’ caused queues to form in the street outside the chosen [...]

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The Mummy returns

by Helen King January 10, 2013

By Helen King Have you seen the Egyptian mummies in the British Museum? Even if you’ve never been to London, you may have caught the travelling exhibition, ‘Mummy: The Inside Story’, which focuses on the priest Nesperennub, and has so far been seen by nearly 2 million people. Mummies are endlessly fascinating. They give nightmares [...]

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Women and humour in history

by Helen King November 10, 2012

By Helen King Do men always get the best punch-lines? I was recently at a conference where one of the speakers illustrated his points about gender in ancient Rome by referring to a story about Winston Churchill and Nancy Astor. Quick-witted, the first woman Member of Parliament, Nancy Astor’s reputation has been tarnished by her [...]

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Two Medieval Women Physicians

by tracybarrett October 20, 2012

by Tracy Barrett Most people think of medieval women healers—if they think of them at all—as herb-women, maybe midwives, basically uneducated even by the standards of their time. But as I reported earlier, there’s evidence that a few women in the Middle Ages managed to get the same kind of training as their male counterparts. [...]

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Seeds, wombs and ‘legitimate rape’

by Helen King September 10, 2012

By Helen King! W&M Contributor Last month, in a much-repeated comment, Todd Akin recently claimed that ‘if it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down’. Not surprisingly, he has been ridiculed for the lack of knowledge of biology that this comment betrays. It didn’t take [...]

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Diana, Callisto and Philip II

by Helen King August 10, 2012

By Helen King Between 1553 and 1562, Titian painted a number of mythological scenes for Philip II. Among these was a painting of Diana and Callisto. In the story, told most famously by the Roman poet Ovid, Callisto is one of the unmarried girls forming the virgin goddess’s entourage. Jupiter catches sight of her, and [...]

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Midwives as murderers in 17th century London

by Helen King July 10, 2012

By Helen King In my last post for Wonders & Marvels, I introduced you to my favourite historical character, the ‘Popish midwife’ Elizabeth Cellier. When I was researching her for the first time some years back, I came across another midwife who was in London at precisely the same time: Mary Awbry, or Hobry. Like [...]

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Midwifery and ventriloquism: did Elizabeth Cellier write her own books?

by Helen King June 10, 2012

By Helen King Possibly my favourite historical figure of all time is Elizabeth Cellier, the ‘Popish Midwife’ who was involved in one of those complicated ‘plots’ of late seventeenth-century England; the ‘meal-tub plot’, in which a list of plotters turned up in her kitchen. Was it genuine, or planted by those who wanted to represent [...]

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The vulva goes on pilgrimage

by Helen King May 10, 2012

In a recent post, W&M contributor Tracy Barrett mentioned in passing the pewter badges worn in the hat during the Middle Ages, and in a moment of recognition I felt compelled to respond with my favourite one, showing a vulva wearing a jaunty pilgrim’s hat. I found out about these tiny objects when I was [...]

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The Chocolate Baby

by cjones May 8, 2012

One of the strangest anecdotes to emerge from the already larger-than-life annals of Louis XIV’s reign concerns a perfectly forgettable woman, the Marquise de Coëtlogon, who lives on in infamy because she (apparently) had a chocolate addiction and the famed letter-writer Madame de Sévigné found out about it. As the epistolary paparazzi of her age, [...]

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Imaginary body parts

by Helen King April 10, 2012

I’ve been thinking a lot about imaginary body parts recently. The Queen’s Gallery is opening a new exhibition of the anatomical drawings of Leonardo da Vinci in May; put it on your ‘to do’ list if you are in London – http://www.royalcollection.org.uk/exhibitions/leonardo-da-vinci-anatomist - and I have done some work for the audio guide and the [...]

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