Masculine Old Women or Feminine Old Men? Rethinking Gender and the Ageing Body in Early Modern English Medicine

Abstract

This article challenges the almost universal historiographical claim that women's bodies were thought to become increasingly masculine as they aged in early modern English medicine, especially after menopause. It is not surprising that this 'masculinisation hypothesis' has endured with very little critical appraisal, as there have been few in-depth studies into medical conceptions of ageing womanhood. Drawing on c.140 English vernacular medical and popular health texts published between 1570 and 1730, this article interrogates and refutes key claims for the corporeal 'manliness' of old women. Instead, it argues that while medicine undoubtedly depicted old women and men as growing closer in bodily constitution as they aged, this generic ageing constitution had more 'feminine' corporeal attributes than 'masculine'. Exploring references to 'effeminated' old men within medical books, it then questions the impact of these medical gender associations within wider cultural contexts.Once women were too old to conceive children, medical works published in early modern England generally lost interest in them. Before the late seventeenth century, specific references to old women were relegated to what Daniel Schäfer has called the 'marginalia' of surviving texts on senescence. 1 Even after a publishing boom in women's health and midwifery from the mid-1600s, only a handful of books addressed possible health concerns during or following the age-related cessation of a woman's monthly 'courses', what modern medicine might call menopausal symptoms. Rather than referring to old women as patients, medical writers were far more likely to mention the 'illiterate crew' of ageing female healers. 2 Perhaps, as a consequence of this dearth of contemporary comment, there has been very little in-depth research into published medical conceptions of ageing women's bodies, and one ubiquitous assertion has endured with very little critical appraisal. Histories of medicine, old age and gender have almost universally interpreted the rare passages on this subject to mean that women grew more 'masculine' as they became old. 3 This assertion stems from three main sources: the conflation of specific non-menstruating women -who were described as 'manly' in the texts -and post-menopausal women; the link between manliness, gout and old women; and gendered readings of ageing bodily characteristics such as 'dryness'. 4 Drawing on English vernacular medical and popular health