ABSTRACT
The menopause provides another example of medicine’s tendency to denigrate the female reproductive body. ‘The pill’ works by overriding the complex hormonal system governing the female reproductive body. Its production and packaging encouraged the notion of a universal female reproductive body. The impact of the revolution on the male reproductive body however was almost negligible. In 1933, the isolation of progesterone, the steroid hormone which prepares the uterus for reception and development of the fertilized ovum, marked the final phase in the transformation of the female reproductive body. The recognition that ovulation occurred mid-cycle provided women with new ‘scientific’ techniques of managing their reproductive body: the Knaus-Ogino ‘safe period’ method of avoiding conception; and the establishment of the ‘fertile’ phase of women attempting to conceive a child. In the 1930s, when medical texts began to incorporate gonadal hormones in accounts of the structure and functions of the female reproductive body, their influence was described mostly in negative terms.
