Imagine that it’s 1554, and you’re the father of a young girl who is unwell. You write to a friend of yours, who is a physician, describing her symptoms, which include her being ‘pale, as if bloodless’. And this is the reply you get: The doctor continues, writing that the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates suggests that So… the solution for …
When discussing divisive subjects such as abortion, it is common for people to reference ‘historical reasons’ to justify their appalling politics. There are two problems with this kind of argument. Firstly, this ‘history’ is often an oversimplified version of the past, in which facts are not only bent to serve a political agenda but completely rewritten.
According to the United Nations (UNFPA-UNICEF), there are 4.2 million girls around the world at risk of being subjected to female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) in 2022. FGM consists of cutting or removing the external female genitals, and it is often performed without anaesthesia by untrained people, resulting in life-long physical and emotional problems for the person who undergoes it. FGM is a human rights violation and ending it is a deeply feminist fight.
In the 1920s, Virginia Woolf famously described how the history of women was unknown: ‘It has been common knowledge for ages that women exist, bear children, have no beards, and seldom go bald, but save in these respects […] we know little of them and have little evidence upon which to base our conclusions.’ Woolf was writing shortly after women were granted the vote in the UK (1918), after an arduous campaign by the suffragettes. This first feminist wave, associated with the political women’s suffrage movement, did not prompt historians to investigate women’s history with a few exceptions.
According to the UK’s National Health System, ‘Being overweight or obese’ is considered a risk factor for infertility. Pregnant people who are fat are often told about higher risks of complications during pregnancy and may have their birth choices limited due to their size. The fat acceptance movement have shown how fraught the relationship between health systems and fat, pregnant bodies health can be, and how pervasive and harmful fat shaming is. Unfortunately, it is also an issue that overweight people have dealt with for millennia.
In her 1671 midwifery manual, the English midwife Jane Sharp defined the art of midwifery as ‘doubtless one of the most useful and necessary of all Arts, for the being and well-being of Mankind’. A midwife should combine theoretical and practical knowledge, even if the former was harder to obtain in a world where women could not attend universities and …
