In this article, Müge Yetener demonstrates how the historical development of medicine is linked to the birth of patriarchal capitalism and how it feeds off patriarchy as an ideology and consent apparatus and reproduces patriarchal prejudices.
Müge Yetener / Çatlak Zemin
In this article, I will mainly try to demonstrate how the historical development of medicine is linked to the birth of patriarchal capitalism – and thus, its intrinsic connection to patriarchal prejudices – and how it feeds off patriarchy as an ideology and consent apparatus and reproduces patriarchal prejudices.
It is beyond any doubt that aesthetics, beauty industry and nutrition fall under the domain of women’s health for their connections to the medical industry, media, and patriarchy. Medicine feeds off from the media, which is another consent apparatus like itself, and sustains sexist prejudices in the media. Nevertheless, they fall beyond the scope of this article since I intend to focus on the links between women’s health, its invisibility, and the historical roots of patriarchal capitalism.
Witch hunts and the history of estrangement of women from their bodies, and the birth of medicine
Healer women, who obtained medicines from plants by observing nature since the 1300s, possessed the knowledge on how to heal wounds, relieve pain, stop bleeding, treat labor pains, vulvar abscesses, prolapsed uteri, infertility, and prepare pregnancy prescriptions, and germicidal lotions. They treated the sick and witnessed births and deaths. During the Middle Ages, midwifery was designated only to women.
The healer women were massacred between the 14th and 17th centuries. This Witch Hunt includes the Renaissance, and lasted until 1775. In Germany alone, 100,000 “witches” were burned. It has been documented that more than 200,000 women have been killed across Europe.
In 1486, the book “Malleus Maleficarum” [Hammer of Witches] was published by two inquisitors, in which they accused women and described ways to torture them. 30 editions were made of the book that suggested it is more plausible that women are witches because they are not as intelligent or as strong as men; their faith is easily corruptible, and they are prone to conversion; and they enjoy carnal pleasures while being insatiably lustful.
Although women possessed the knowledge of their bodies first, they were estranged from it through witch hunts and kept away from medical education until 1850. It was said that women were very good nurses and midwives, but could not practice medicine (Achterberg, 2009). The witch hunts that continued throughout the Renaissance and ended with the murder of hundreds of thousands of women, most of them healers, weakened women’s control over their bodies and pregnancy, and institutionalized state control over the female body necessary for the reproduction of labor power.
It was inevitable that birth control and abortion would be linked to witchcraft during the categorization and criminalization of witchcraft as a threat to capitalism. Witches, according to the state and the church, were trying to take away the reproductive power of humans and animals, perform abortions and sacrifice children to the devil. The period was particularly alarming for economists and statisticians that observed the European population and the labor power that the capitalist system required to function. This alarmism had a direct influence on the witch hunts and encouraged them (Mies, 2008). As the witch hunts were spreading across Europe, laws were enacted that sentenced adultery with death, deemed extramarital birth illegal, criminalized abortion by including it in the category of death row crimes. The intent was to prohibit all kinds of sexuality that did not comply with capitalist rationality, that is, did not have reproductive purposes, and stigmatize them as an enemy of society and demonic activity.
The determination of women’s duty as reproduction, that is, motherhood, also meant that women were excluded from the production process. By confining women to housework, a gender-based division of labor emerged. In this way, a capitalist patriarchy was constructed that made women dependent on both capital and men.
One of the pillars of the historical transition experienced in the 18th century was the egalitarian ideology of the Renaissance and French Revolution. By breaking away from the social hierarchies, patriarchy/male dominance, as a form of social status inequality, could not be defended anymore. Within the framework of modern/capitalist patriarchy, male domination had to exist within a legal organization that relied on equal rights. Within the discourse of equality, it was through the development of natural differences discourse that gender hierarchy could be legitimized. Therefore, both genders were constructed as fixed, natural categories (Acar Savran, 2009).
Medicine construes its own ideology through various branches of science that lays its foundational rhetoric. Ideology -which is partial and distorted to a certain extent- as the totality of beliefs serving to certain private social interests, reproduces power relations (Bourdieu, 2007:101). This reproduction is the oppression exercised upon a social agent with his or her complicity through an instrument that does not involve physical violence. Bourdieu calls this phenomenon “symbolic violence”. To paraphrase Bourdieu’s definition of symbolic violence, under certain conditions and in return of paying for its price, it can serve as a more effective tool than political-police violence. (Bourdieu, 2007: 166, 171).
Gender and all relations of inequality are internalized and accepted as natural in the hierarchical society’s mind, through the meanings and perceptions engraved on bodies.
If we were to perceive the masculine power of medicine independent from social and economic relations, we would be confronting its self-proclaimed abstract power free from these connections. That would lead to assigning a role of power to medicine that is independent from the political power itself, which then will inevitably bring us to an ahistorical position. No science that comprises modern medicine is independent from ideologies, or class and gender relations. Perceptions and attitudes that contribute to submission of individuals are reproduced and re-reproduced through ideological apparati of the state (Althusser, 2003).[1]
Gender constructs hierarchical relations and it gets continuously reproduced through capitalist constructs such as family, education, religion, and science institutions (Acar-Savran, 2004: 233).
“Passive, childbearing, waiting”: these definitions are based on stereotypical gender perceptions of women and are reconstructed through biology. Even in a number of scientific findings, the woman is described using passive elements whereas the man is assigned active ones. For instance, in the scientific description of fertilization of an egg, the egg is assigned female characteristics by waiting passively, whereas the sperms are active, adventurous, and masculine agents that fertilize the egg (Mutlu, 2018).
However new findings demonstrate that the egg cell almost orders sperm cells to stick and penetrate via the proteins and molecules it produces. Projecting the patriarchal social order on animal behavior, and then reprojecting nature on roles of women and men lay the foundation to accept these roles as natural (Kılınç, 2007: 48).
Medicalization or invisibilization of the woman’s body?
Medicalization is the definition of a non-medical or social issue as a medical problem, illness, or condition that needs to be treated. In other words, medicalization is the expression of a subject, problem, or situation as a condition to be treated with medical intervention, in medical terms using a medical language, within a medical framework (Sezgin, 2022).
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