Title:	Making sex : body and gender from the Greeks to Freud
Authors:	Laqueur, Thomas
Keywords:	Sex differences-Social aspects-History
Issue Date:	2003
Publisher:	Harvard College
Description:	This book began without my knowing it in 1977 when I was on leave at St. Antony's College, Oxford, doing research for what was to be a history of the life cycle. I was reading seventeenth-century midwifery manuals-in search of materials on how birth was organized-but found instead advice to women on how to become pregnant in the first place. Midwives and doctors seemed to believe that female orgasm was among the conditions for successful generation, and they offered various suggestions on how it might be achieved. Orgasm was assumed to be a routine, more or less indispensable part of conception. This surprised me. Experience must have shown that pregnancy often takes place without it; moreover, as a nineteenth-century historian I was accustomed to doctors debating whether women had orgasms at all. By the period I knew best, what had been an ordinary, if explosive, corporeal occurrence had become a major problem of moral physiology
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/46589
ISBN:	0-674-54355-6
Appears in Collections:	Gender

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