Wandering Womb: A Cultural History of Outrageous Beliefs About Women

The Wandering Womb is a provocative tour through four thousand years of Western civilization and its outrageous beliefs about women. In ancient Egypt, for example, the womb was regarded as an entity unto itself capable of "wandering" throughout the body if sexually unfulfilled, crowding the other organs and causing tissue damage, suffocation, and a variety of illnesses. As author Lana Thompson points out, these and similar ideas became entwined in centuries of medical ignorance and religious superstition. But this is not an exclusively "ancient" or "primitive" phenomenon: As late as the nineteenth century, many doctors opposed the use of anesthesia in childbirth because women had been condemned by God to "bring forth children in sorrow." The Wandering Womb is a fascinating, amusing, and sometimes infuriating romp through the bedrooms, birthing rooms, madhouses, menstrual huts, and ivory towers of Western civilization. Throughout its richly illustrated pages, Lana Thompson recounts how and why women came to be, in a very real sense, sexually "enslaved."