Women’s Health as Baffling Mystery
In this chapter from The Nature of Their Bodies: Women and Their Doctors in Victorian Canada, three main aspects of women’s reproductive health — puberty, menstruation, and menopause — were framed as “mysteries” to doctors and patients. Written in 1991 by Wendy Mitchinson, a Canadian historian at the University of Waterloo and a Canada Research Chair in Gender and Medical history, The Nature of Their Bodies and specifically “Three Mysteries: Puberty, Menstruation, and Menopause” focused on how women’s health was consistently viewed as a puzzle to be solved.
Physicians were uneasy about puberty, menstruation, and menopause. They were somehow ‘strange’ phenomena that the male body did not undergo.
Mitchinson focused primarily on how doctors were distinctly uncomfortable with the question of women’s health as it was a drastic departure from men’s health. Defining women in opposition to men has persisted from ancient times through the 19th century even to today. The physical changes that accompany puberty, menstruation, and menopause were different than men’s experiences, Mitchinson argued, and therefore were seen as unfamiliar and even harmful.
Furthermore, these three different phases each connected to hysteria — puberty led to the possibility of hysteria, menstruation was a time of heightened emotion and hysterical outburst, and menopause came to be seen as one of the only “cures” for hysteria. Mitchinson stated that some doctors viewed menopause as a “real boon” to hysterical women; this challenges the view that marriage, penetrative intercourse, and pregnancy were the ultimate cure to hysteria.
Underlying all the descriptions of pubescent, menstruating, and menopausal women was the sense that these people were not like men and that men’s bodies were somehow the way bodies should be. Women deviated from men, men did not deviate from women.
Written primarily as a book on gender and medical history, The Nature of Their Bodies questioned historical beliefs in the one-sex/two-sex models and the medical validity of hysteria in “Three Mysteries: Puberty, Menstruation, and Menopause.” Mitchinson’s writing was explanatory yet persuasive, showing her understanding of the subject as well as her rejection of the misogynistic and reductive historical assumptions of women’s health.
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