Made In America - Bill Bryson [197]
Foreign visitors almost unfailingly ran aground in the shallow waters of American sensibilities. Frances Trollope noted the case of a German who stopped a roomful of conversation, and found himself being brusquely hustled from the house, for innocently pronouncing the word corset in mixed company. Elsewhere she discussed how a rakish young man tried to tease from a seamstress the name of the article of attire she was working on. Blushing hotly, the young lady announced that it was a frock, but when the young man pointed out that there wasn’t nearly enough material for a frock she asserted it was an apron. Pressed further, she claimed it was a pillowcase. Eventually, she fled the room in shame and tears, unable to name the object. It was in fact a blouse, but to have uttered the word to a man would have been ‘a symptom of absolute depravity’.
For women in particular, this rhetorical fastidiousness was not just absurd but dangerous. For much of the nineteenth century, ankles denoted the whole of a woman’s body below the waist, while stomach did similar service for everything between the waist and head. It thus became impossible to inform a doctor of almost any serious medical complaint. Page Smith notes a typical case in which a young woman with a growth on her breast could only describe it to her physician as a pain in her stomach.13
Physical examinations were almost unknown. Gynaecological investigations in particular were made only as a last resort, and then usually in a darkened room under a sheet. One doctor in Philadelphia boasted that ‘women prefer to suffer the extremity of danger and pain rather than waive those scruples of delicacy which prevent their maladies from being fully explored’.14 Death, in other words, was to be preferred to immodesty. Given the depths of medical ignorance, it was probably just as well that the medical men kept their hands to themselves. Such was the lack of knowledge in regard to female physiology that until the closing years of the nineteenth century it was widely believed that the touch of a menstruating woman could turn a ham rancid. (The British Medical Journal ran a lively correspondence on the matter in 1878.)15 Nor was it just male doctors who were profoundly innocent. As late as 1901, in a book entitled What a Young Wife Ought to Know, Dr Emma Drake was informing her readers that during pregnancy they might experience uncomfortable feelings of arousal. This, she explained frankly, was ‘due to some unnatural condition and should be considered a disease’.16
Not surprisingly, sexual ignorance was appalling. On the eve of her wedding, the future novelist Edith Wharton asked her mother what would be expected of her in the bridal chamber. ‘You’ve seen enough pictures and statues in your life,’ her mother stammered. ‘Haven’t you noticed that men are made differently from women?’ and with that closed the subject.17
Those who sought enlightenment from sex manuals were left little wiser. The two best-selling guides of the day were What a Young Boy Ought to Know and What a Young Girl Ought to Know, both written by a clergyman named Sylvanus Stall. Despite the books’ titles Stall was at pains to make sure that his young readers should in fact know nothing. To deal with the inevitable question of where babies come from, he suggested parents memorize the following roundabout answer:
My dear child, the question you have asked is one that every