All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women's Bodies and Why It Matters Today

by Elizabeth Comen

It haunts our footsteps as we navigate the medical maze of women’s health that was built by men whose ideas about women, while sometimes well-intentioned, were limited at best, paranoid, misogynist, and abusive at worst.

The women’s rights movement was beginning to pick up steam in Europe and North America, which was a sinister development in Broca’s view: women reformers seemed set to interrupt the natural order of things, cause a “perturbance of the races,” perhaps even divert evolution entirely. But if doctors and anthropologists could point to scientific evidence of women’s natural inferiority—a destiny literally written into the curves of their skulls—surely these intemperate ladies would see reason, go home, and cease their silly agitating for things like voting rights, temperance, or an end to child labor.

Osteology has long since evolved past the notion of women as inherently skeletally primitive. So why, then, do we still refer to poor athletic form as “throwing like a girl”?