Nikki

“And, over time, urban-industrialized society would become increasingly responsible for controlling people whose differences might have been tolerated at home.21”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“Until the late 1700s, there wasn’t even a separate anatomical lexicon for the female genitalia. The clitoris was called a penis, the uterus an internal scrotum. The ovaries were testicles, the vulva and labia were foreskin, the vagina was an inverted penis, and the fallopian tubes were the epididymis. In fact, as any twenty-first-century biologist will tell you, these are indeed homologous pairs of organs, and the male and female genitalia look virtually identical in the first trimester of a fetus. There were, of course, two genders—man and woman—but those identities came from society not nature. When Marie Garnier became a man, her gender changed but not her sex.”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“This rather abrupt change from one sex to two sexes was not the result of any new knowledge of the female or male body. Scientists knew little more about human anatomy in 1800 than they did in 1700. What changed was the demand for a division of human beings into stable categories, a demand that was essential for social order in an increasingly industrialized Europe. Science, in other words, didn’t change anything on its own but rather did the work of culture by defining a new reality. And in this world, there was little room for any idea that sex was a spectrum or continuum along which humans could move. A clear-cut distinction between male and female roles, and between the home and work, the private and public spheres, was essential, even if in most industrial English working-class families both men and women worked. An ideology of manliness, male privilege, and superiority also fit well with the new image of the strong, independent male worker who was at no risk of becoming as soft and vulnerable as men believed women to be. In the one-sex world,”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“Nor were there insane asylums, just general asylums for the lawless and unproductive. Some of the first insanity laws in Italy and England during the nineteenth century stipulated that harmless mentally ill patients should live with their families, even if it meant they were confined to a small outbuilding or chained to a tree.17”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness