Secrets of Women: Rethinking Gender in History

Fairy tales don’t have to make sense to be meaningful. They follow their own logic and readers – or, traditionally, listeners – get so enraptured in the story that no one…

Percivall Willughby (1596–1685) despised the midwives of his time. In his 1670s book, Observations in Midwifery, he intended to ‘inform the ignorant common midwives’, whose brutal methods were responsible for so…

How old was Little Red Riding Hood? In the earliest, 16th-century versions of the tale, she was around the age of puberty. Other details you might not know include the wolf…

One of the silliest historical myths out there is that people in the past were somehow ‘dirty’ and had poor hygiene, especially compared to today’s standards. Of course, I’m generalising; each…

Everybody was talking about hysteria in late 19th-century Paris. Hysterics appeared in novels and plays; they were painted, photographed, sculpted and drawn. People crowded the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris to attend…

Giving birth in early modern Europe was a dangerous rite of passage, one which most women would go through, and some would not survive. Women were largely defined by their domestic…

In the early modern period, an impotent man might be prescribed boiled orchid roots. But why? Well, they resembled testicles and were consequentially believed to be useful in improving male potency….

On a cold winter evening in 1600, Peter Chamberlen the Younger found himself attending to a labouring woman on the outskirts of London. The mother-to-be had been in labour for over…

Have you ever wondered where the word ‘Easter’ comes from? Let me introduce you to the Germanic goddess of dawn and spring, Eostre, after whom Easter was possibly named. (Historians and…

If there’s one person who thought and wrote about penises a lot, it was Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the ‘father of psychoanalysis’. Like many nineteenth-century intellectuals, Freud was interested in sex and…

Is there anything more enlightening than listening in while women discuss their role in society? As the recent adaptation of Miriam Toews novel Women Talking shows, this is a pretty fascinating…