My friends and I talk about our bodies all the time. We ask for advice; we ask for healing prayer. Some of our ailments are more general: ear infections, stomach bugs, clogged sinuses, tight shoulders. But many are particular to our womanhood. Periods can be painful. Sex can be painful. There is pain while breastfeeding; there is relief when the tears caused by childbirth heal.
These conversations are intimate. But women’s experiences of their wombs and breasts are anything but private, argues the new book Immaculate Forms, a “history of the female body in four parts” by historian and classicist Helen King. Public understandings of the breasts, clitoris, hymen, and womb have shaped how women are perceived and how women perceive ourselves.
King, an elected lay member of the General Synod of the Church of England, writes out of an interest in “how medicine and religion [have] worked together as gatekeepers over bodies.” The result of that interest is a sprawling compendium of quotations from gynecological handbooks, anatomical ephemera, and legends. Immaculate Forms is much too long and too uneven in its analysis of these texts, but it engagingly advances a couple of interrelated theses.
The first, and strongest, is that beliefs about bodies have “real-life implications for the people whose bodies they claimed to describe.” Now-discarded theories about blood flow, body heat, and a “wandering womb” have determined how women’s illnesses were diagnosed and treated through the centuries, with prescriptions of cold baths, scent therapy, and even “leeches applied to the labia.”
Medical hypotheses also shape social realities. Does the clitoris play a role in procreation, or is it solely for pleasure? Our answers influence norms around the “importance” of female sexual experience and the role a woman is imagined to play in conceiving her children. How necessary is a torn hymen in defining virginity? Answer “very” to that question and you’ll get bridegrooms displaying bloody sheets as proof. Are breasts for admiration or for nourishment? There’s a bigger question beneath that one: How can women be both lovers and mothers?
These debates run through the historical material King dusts off and details; she’s as able a guide to Hippocrates and Aristotle as she is to novels, myths, and manuals. If anything, Immaculate Forms suffers from overanalysis, an overflow of dates and names. But that’s not necessarily a problem for a reader in need of context, unfamiliar with the four-humors theory or ancient surgical practices.
When King turns to Christianity, though, her analysis isn’t too deep; it’s too shallow. That’s unfortunate, since many of the materials she cites—particularly regarding Eve and the Virgin Mary—are as fascinating as they are bizarre and occasionally upsetting. King includes stories of saints drinking Mary’s breast milk, early-church theologians and poets musing over the mechanics of a virgin birth, and theories about Eve’s egg count. She discusses post-Fall pain in childbirth and troubling accounts of clitoridectomies.
Too often, the conclusions King draws—from these texts and from the Scriptures she quotes—are oversimplified at best, glib at worst. Take, for example, her assertion that “Christianity praised breastfeeding,” rooted in a single 17th-century child-raising pamphlet and the prevalence of artwork depicting Mary feeding her infant. Or her comment that “the Judeo-Christian story of Eve make[s] clear that women are an afterthought to Creation,” judging from the order of events in Genesis. King is clumsy and inconsistent on complicated theology about the interplay between body and soul, Christ’s divinity and humanity. She includes asides—like the way “Christianity … queers its own imagery by thinking of Jesus as having breasts” and “the idea that Jesus had a hymen”—that feel like unnecessary provocations rather than helpful lines of inquiry.
King’s quips aren’t always incorrect, per se. But they’re less convincing when they seem to flow from an underlying animosity. Christianity, she asserts, has a “long history of seeing women as physically inferior.” While the religion has “had to manage the centrality of a womb in its foundation story, Christian writers still found ways to use this to denigrate women,” she laments. “In the 1990s, conservative Christian groups in the United States created ‘purity culture,’” she explains, “which expected everyone to abstain from sexual activity before marriage.” (The phrasing of this sentence implies King’s scorn not just of that culture, but of chastity itself.) “Despite the revolutionary tenor of the words of the Magnificat attributed to her,” she observes, “Mary can come across as a surprisingly empty character. The focus is on her submission to God.” Here, submission implies repression.
In her introduction to Immaculate Forms, King acknowledges that “women’s bodies and blood were never out of reach of the Jesus of the Bible” and that Christianity’s basis “in a man born of a woman means that it has always had at least the potential to see bodies in a positive way.” But by the conclusion, she is reiterating that men are “the human default” for Christianity, that “Christianity has never lived up to what it promised in terms of a positive view of human bodies in general, nor the body of the believer in particular,” and that Christian ideas about women’s bodies “have always been tied up with patriarchy.”
These lines comprise a second thesis: Christianity has never benefitted women or their bodies. It’s a thesis that takes the significant pain women have experienced at the hands of the church as an inevitability, not the painful result of sin. At the same time, it’s a thesis that disregards how the church has dignified us as women, valuing us not for our bodies’ ability to produce heirs but for our participation in the body of Christ. “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus,” writes Paul in Galatians 3:28. This is a radical declaration of equality, not patriarchy.
The Galatians verse was top of mind as I parsed King’s third thesis—the most interesting and relevant to our contemporary debates about gender and sexuality. “Understanding of these four parts [breasts, clitoris, hymen, and womb] has changed over time—positing at some times that women are basically the same as men, at others that they are entirely different,” she writes. “Neither a blanket insistence on difference nor an enthusiastic embrace of similarity is helpful for women.”
I think that’s exactly right. When women are classified as a strange human subtype, ruled by voracious wombs and swollen clitorises, spurting milk and falling into fits, then they’re “other,” treated with suspicion and even disgust. But when they’re proclaimed no different from men, they’re also done a disservice: Medicines are measured incorrectly. The symptoms of heart attacks aren’t noticed.
Despite her book’s framing as “a history of the female body,” King questions whether “any of my four parts [are] necessary for someone to be a woman.” I take her point. Women have mastectomies; women have hysterectomies. Those women are still women. Identifying gender has never been as easy as running down a checklist of body parts. A small percentage of people are born intersex. Hormone levels vary from woman to woman and man to man. Some people experience the pain of gender dysphoria.
And yet Immaculate Forms reads less as an argument for sex and gender’s irrelevance or inscrutability than an argument for their importance. Though King insists that “sex and gender identity have never really been clear from the body,” she’s presented an entire book about sexed body parts—womb, breasts, hymen, clitoris—that shape gendered experience.
King encourages readers to think of sex and gender “as a spectrum,” evidenced by the fact that “men have breast tissue, which can sometimes produce milk.” She also suggests that “the clitoris can be seen as a female penis” and that “Christian legends, too, included male pregnancy.” (To support this latter claim, she cites a single medieval poem about Saint Anne’s origins and speculates about Adam “as a pregnant man” because “his body opened to produce a new person.”) But her book is first and foremost a book about women, as people not limited, diminished, or “worse than” because of their bodies but irrevocably shaped by them nevertheless. Note the group chats between me and my friends.
Just as Scripture does not endorse breastfeeding over infant formula, it does not set objective standards for hormone levels or weigh in on delivery-room decisions about determining the gender of intersex babies. What it does “endorse” is that physical bodies matter. Male and female, God created us. And both difference and equality have their place for a people who are one in Christ.
Kate Lucky is senior editor of culture and engagement at Christianity Today.
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