Femininity (26 page)

Throughout Asia during the Middle Ages, women either were carried in a litter when
they journeyed a long distance or they rode on horseback, straddling the animal and
directing its
movements like a typical male rider. The ladylike custom of perching sideways, which
required a groom to hold the reins and lead the way, and its variation, riding pillion
on a cushioned seat behind a male rider, were conventions that arose in medieval Europe.
(The demure sideways perch appealed to generations of artists who chose the Flight
Into Egypt as a favorite theme. In this popular genre of Holy Family portraits, Mary
cradles the infant Jesus in her arms as mother and son are solemnly borne on a donkey
led by Joseph.) Exceptional women like Joan of Arc and Diane de Poitiers plainly straddled
their mounts with vigor and skill, but conventional ladies restricted their riding
to ceremonial occasions and some pleasant outings in the fresh air, and they rode
“aside” with their legs together. For its part, the patient horse could do little
more than walk in a measured gait under the precarious burden of its lopsided load.

Catherine de Medici, who is credited with popularizing the corset, is also thought
to have devised that ingenious feminine compromise the sidesaddle. According to one
historian of horsemanship, “She discovered it was safer than sitting sideways, and
more seemly than sitting astride, to hook her right knee round the high pommel of
a man’s saddle. It was an obvious development to move the pommel a few inches to the
left, so as to hold the rider’s leg in a secure and comfortable grip.” With variations
and refinements, riding sidesaddle persisted into the twentieth century, when the
suffrage movement, trail riding in the American West, and the acceptance of riding
breeches eased its decline.

The sidesaddle was popular for many reasons. Women were not believed to have enough
strength in their thighs to straddle a horse and maintain a good grip. Their legs
were too short, their backs were too weak, and a sustained bumping on the groin was
not only indelicate, it might also be injurious. In the words of Charles Chenevix
Trench, the horseman’s historian, “Moreover, the rounded contours of females were
considered inelegant when riding astride. Put bluntly, their bottoms were too big.”
But with the left leg dangling in a normal stirrup, the right leg crossed over to
the left side of the horse, and both legs covered by the drape of a skirt, the view
from the rear was asymmetrical and charming. The rider’s legs were as close together
as they could
be, and pleasurable contact between groin and saddle was deftly avoided. It remained
for the feminine student of equitation to compensate for the uneven distribution of
her weight on the left side of the horse by lifting her left hip and bearing down
hard on her right, while she twisted her torso to keep facing front. When mounting
or dismounting, two attendants were usually required: a groom to hold the reins and
a gentleman cavalier to lift her into and out of the saddle while she modestly arranged
her skirts. All of this accomplished, a lady could ride and not look or feel like
a man. She could even manage a small jump and a canter. She tired more easily than
her male companions because of the uneven stress and strain on her muscles, but ladies
were expected to tire and not be as strong as men. The important thing was that she
had preserved her femininity on horseback—at the expense of being a one-legged rider.

Prior to the twentieth century the athletic woman was required to accept a multiplicity
of handicaps that reduced the efficiency of her natural coordination and made her
specially vulnerable to injury from accidental spills and awkward, humiliating falls.
Riding in sidesaddle, ice-skating in long skirts, swimming in stockings and bloomers,
bicycling in furbelows, playing badminton in corsets, she gamely struggled to keep
her balance while preserving a modest deportment. It was not simply that love of sports
was somewhat mannish and suspect. She believed her body housed reproductive organs
that were morbidly delicate and debilitating by nature. One of her concerns was uterine
protection.

In the obsessive Victorian preoccupation with “the feminine sphere,” partial invalidism
and bodily frailty were assumed to be the female’s natural state—unless the female
was a servant or factory worker. A lady’s pregnancy was tantamount to an illness that
demanded a lengthy confinement, and menstruation was viewed as a chronic sickness
that could best be treated by inactivity and bed rest. In the words of Ehrenreich
and English, authors of
For Her Own Good,
“Medicine had ‘discovered’ that female functions were inherently pathological.” In
the doctors’ defense, these authors continue, “Women of a hundred years ago
were,
in some ways, sicker than women of today. Quite apart
from tight-lacing, arsenic nipping, and fashionable cases of neurasthenia, women faced
certain bodily risks which men did not share.” Chief among these was maternal mortality.
But beyond the very real risk of death in childbirth, proof of the morbid, sickly
state of the uterus was seen in the monthly flow of blood, and there is little evidence
that women differed with their doctors in this perception.

The effect of menstruation on mobility has been underrated by those who seek to explain
why men evolved as far-ranging hunters while women preferred to gather the fruits
and seeds and stay closer to home. Childbearing, nursing and a limited musculature
obviously combined to determine the historic direction of gender-related roles, but
menstrual blood itself may also have been a significant factor. With lions it is the
female who does 90 percent of the hunting; among cheetahs the female, not the male,
ranges far and wide across vast stretches of land. Female rats, as well, are more
exploratory and fearless than males and roam over a wider range. There seems to be
nothing in femaleness
per se,
nothing in being the sex that bears and cares for the young, that handicaps movement
in the lower species. But higher on the evolutionary ladder, the estrogen-dominated
reproductive system grows increasingly complex, and seemingly more burdensome. Some
other primates have menstrual cycles, but only the human female is subject to a copious
flow of blood that needs to be stanched by external means.

How did they respond to their periods, those Plio Pleistocene ancestors of ours, those
hominid precursors along the track to Homo sapiens? At what point in human evolution,
at what stage in the development of what goes under the rubric of Early Man, did Early
Woman discover she had a bloody problem at “those times” of the lunar cycle? In what
eon of prehistory did her menstrual flow increase from an insignificant trickle to
an alarming rush down her thigh? Did she grab a handful of leaves and stuff them into
her vagina? Were animals attracted to her smell? Did she suffer from cramps? Did she
think that something was dreadfully wrong?

Because of frequent impregnation, continuous nursing, nutritional deficiencies and
the daily stress of staying alive, the
menstrual cycle must have been irregular as a matter of course in the prehistoric
age, but irregular or not, with a profuse effluence of blood, it was dramatically
immobilizing in comparison to other primate species and especially in comparison to
the carefree reproductive system of the human male. Menstruation, gestation, childbirth
and nursing the young were a continuum of physiological reasons for avoiding the big
hunt among foraging peoples whose chief sources of food were roots, seeds and fruit.
The female’s fertility, her awesome periodicity, and the fertility of the land were
connected in the earliest Goddess myths; the connection was real.

Primitive menstrual taboos were not necessarily a male invention. Seclusion in a menstrual
hut, avoidance of sex and of men in general, and relief from agricultural and cooking
labors were pragmatic ways of dealing with cramps and a copious flow. In a practical
sense, menstrual taboos meant time off on those days when a woman had reason to feel
unclean, unwell, immobilized and cursed.

Depending on what was available in a given climate, a variety of porous fibers were
used (and still are used in most countries) to stanch the monthly blood: makeshift
paddings of roots and husks, homemade tampons of wadded paper, cotton or wool, and
reusable diapers fashioned from folded lengths of heavy cloth, the shameful, bulky
menstrual rags of my grandmother’s generation that were furtively scrubbed in cold
water and left to dry in a secret place. “The rag” persisted as the routine, cumbersome
method of sanitary protection in advanced Western society till the 1920s, when rolls
of gauze and cellulose filler developed for bandaging wounds during World War I were
cut to standard size and sold commercially in the United States. The marketing of
disposable pads with acknowledgment of “the hygienic handicap” and “the days a woman
used to lose” (these quotes are from a full-page ad for Kotex that appeared in the
elegant front section of
Vogue
in 1926) coincided not accidentally with such changes in fashion as the abandonment
of the full corset, the shortening and slimming of skirts and a new, eager interest
in trousers. Throwaway absorbent tampons with no extraneous belts, loops, safety pins,
bulky shape or revealing out
line, which truly afforded normal freedom of movement on “those days,” including swimming,
did not reach the market until 1933.

In
Menstruation and Menopause
Paula Weideger has written that the physical reality of menstruation is not considered
an attribute of femininity but rather “a fall from feminine grace.” While a woman
with irregular periods may suffer from the belief that she is “not feminine enough”
and while a woman in menopause may associate the end of her childbearing years with
“a feminine loss,” there is another worrisome concern that occurs thirteen times a
year for more than thirty-five years, if one is on an average 28-day cycle. The menstrual
flow, despite its testament to female fertility and to gender, runs diametrically
counter to the prized feminine virtues of neatness, order and a dainty, sweet and
clean appearance.

Put squarely, menstruation is a nasty inconvenience, no matter how positive one’s
feelings are toward having children. Cut through the menstrual taboos and their primitive
origins, and menstruation is still a nasty inconvenience. Brush aside the abhorrence
of some men at the thought of a menstruating woman, and menstruation remains a nasty
inconvenience, a dripping, bloating, congestive mess. Even the periodicity itself,
the inexorable regularity of a cycle that runs like clockwork, is an order of disorder,
a disruption of the everyday routine, an imposition of cautious caretaker concerns:
secure protection, check against leakage, carry the extra tampon, change the pad,
or suffer the mortification of the drip, the gush and the stain. This “untidy event,”
as Simone de Beauvoir called it, forces women to pay minute attention to the inner
workings of the body in a way that men find difficult to comprehend. A healthy system
must be monitored and managed, and the concentration on details cannot be avoided
or put off for another hour, for the consequences will be public embarrassment, a
telltale odor and a pile of soiled clothes. It is hardly feminine or polite to stain
the back of one’s skirt or the bedsheet and mattress, even though the oozing blood
is normal and female, indeed is a prime expression of biological femaleness in its
reproductive role. Neither is it desirably feminine to be besieged by a monthly eruption
of
pimples, lank hair, a bloated stomach, painful tenderness in the breasts, dull cramps,
irritability and tension. As Beauvoir remarked, “It is not easy to play the idol,
the fairy, the faraway princess, when one feels a bloody cloth between one’s legs;
and, more generally, when one is conscious of the primitive misery of being a body.”

It is not easy, either, to play the jock with a bloody cloth between one’s legs, and
at the critical moment in adolescence when the young boy revels in his developing
musculature, the girl may appear at school with a note that excuses her from gym.
To swim or not to swim, to run or not to run, to take the calisthenics class or skip
it? To go ahead with plans for the week-long camping trip or to try and switch the
date of departure, taking into account the solemn warning of the calendar? Menstruation
asserts itself as a negative force to be overcome by the physically active woman.
Even for those with an easy period, feeling logy or lethargic is not unusual. The
proverbial note to the gym teacher, the female biological exemption, resides in the
back of the head as a possible option. Grace Lichtenstein, who wrote a book about
professional tennis, acquired enough evidence to report, “Menstrual cramps were literally
the curse of the women’s circuit,” and more than one championship player, she noted,
has dashed off the court in mid-game for a change of tampons.

The twentieth-century female athlete has placed herself on the cutting edge of some
of the most perplexing problems of gender-related biology and the feminine ideal.
Although she exercises to build up her body (while other women still exercise to slim
down theirs), she may never break the international records set by male athletes in
most events because of the genetic limits on her musculature. Her breasts and hips
are no asset in running and sprinting; she will move more efficiently with a figure
that is “boyish.” Loose, flowing hair, that trusty feminine emblem of such strong,
fleet maidens as Atalanta and the Valkyries, must remain in the realm of myth for
the real-life track star. Beautiful, free hair would only slow her down and get in
her eyes. Even a normal manifestation of strenuous exertion like working up a good
sweat runs counter to a feminine image.

How to look feminine while competing is a problem that
haunts the psyche of the American female athlete. High school coaches regularly complain
that their best girl runners show up at the track wearing heavy bracelets and dangling
earrings, and championship tennis players work to improve their on-court image with
mascara, eye shadow and designer dresses. At times the mental conflict spills over
into highly defensive verbal expression. An American Olympic swimmer groused bitterly
to the press about the unfeminine big shoulders of the East German woman who beat
her in the water. A champion runner took to wearing a T-shirt that proclaimed, “I’m
a Lady first, I’m an Athlete second.” The ambivalence of these athletes is rooted
in cultural expectations, for while we have come a long way from the time when riding
a bicycle was considered dangerous to the female constitution, the track-and-field
star knows that her sweaty tank top does not fit the conventional image of glamour,
and the swimmer understands that a poolside bathing beauty in a string bikini cuts
a sexier figure than the rubber-capped winner of the 400-meter freestyle event.