Freda Coren

Empires of Sex

Christopher Roebuck

14 May 2015

The Making of the Modern Woman

A careful set of rules and regulations exist for women

living in the modern West. These include norms and expectations

of how women are to be groomed, cleaned, dressed, pleasured,

medicated, and so on. If and when women stray from these norms,

they can rightfully be constructed as deviant, ignorant, archaic,

unfeminine, or not women. I would like to clarify that this

paper, and the sources that I draw upon, refer to cisgender women

– those whose gender in adulthood aligns with the female gender

they were assigned at birth. While the narratives of transgender

women – those who were assigned male at birth but identify as

female – are certainly relevant to my discussion of the creation

and policing of the modern female body and would further

elucidate my arguments, I limit this particular exploration’s

scope to cisgender women and will henceforth use the identifier

“woman or women” to refer to cisgender women, with the

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understanding that this term does not encapsulate all people who

identify as such. In this paper, I trace the creation of the

modern female body, as it has been constructed in the West since

the late nineteenth century. Through close examination of soap

advertisements from the Victorian-era England, the advertisements

for feminine hygiene products in mid-twentieth century America,

and organizations formed in the United States in the last two

decades that seek continue the practice of coerced sterilization

of select groups of women, I argue that the modern female body –

constructed differently through time and space and via biopower –

is always already white, pathologized, and made invisible.

The branding of soap by imperial powers during the late

nineteenth and early twentieth century helped to create the image

of the Western person as opposed to the (brown or black)

colonized person; less explicitly, it also produced some of the

first public imaginations of who, exactly, the modern imperial

woman is. Soap, for Europeans at this time, stood in for

whiteness, domesticity, and purity. In examining the creation of

the expectations for women during this time, soap symbolically

ties together race, gender, and empire. In her book Imperial Leather:

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Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (1995), Anne McClintock

demonstrates how advertisements for soap – a new phenomenon at

the time – encapsulated the expectations that women were to be

visibly white and domesticated, but at the same time were

inherently deviant and made invisible. The realm of the domestic

and the so-called cult of domesticity were central to the

Victorian identity, both within and outside of the metropole

(McClintock 1995: 5). This cult of domesticity tended to be

conceived of, like sexuality or the differences between the

sexes, as part of the “private, ‘natural’ realm of the family,”

when in fact, McClintock argues, it was deliberately constructed

and “was a crucial, if concealed, dimension of the male as well

as female identities” (1995: 5). She claims that the images in

soap advertisements sought to erase women, and that they

demonstrate that “imperial domesticity is a domesticity without

women” – despite the enduring link between domesticity, the

family hub of the home, and women (McClintock 1995: 32). The

abundance of soap advertisements in which women are absent

attests to ambivalence in domesticity that at once relegates

women to the hearth and renders them invisible. Furthermore, the

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women who are present in these advertisements are often idealized

and mythologized figures dressed in neoclassical garb – lady

liberties freeing soap-users from their filth and debasement.

Since soap is associated with the domestic and “purportedly

belongs in the female realm of domesticity,” McClintock claims

that her social history of soap is a radical move against the

“erasure of women’s domestic value under imperial capitalism”

(1995: 209). Regardless of this political act, however, soap and

hygiene did erase and create women at this time.

Soap advertisements relied upon heavy symbolism, favoring

hygiene and cleanliness at the synecdoche for whiteness and the

desired body. Moreover, personal hygiene influenced and was

influenced by what Ann Stoler, in “Making Empire Respectable: The

Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in 20th-Century Colonical

Cultures,” terms “cultural hygiene” that regulated bodies at the

level of population (1989: 636). In the process of domesticating

women, women were first relegated to and then made invisible in

the home. Once this was accomplished and normalized within

Europe, it could be deployed to the colonies and applied to brown

and black bodies, specifically brown and black female bodies.

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Michel Foucault reminds us in The History of Sexuality that women’s

sexuality could be successfully pathologized through a vague yet

clearly sexist diagnosis of hysteria (1978). If white women were

hysterical, then their primitive colonized sisters were clearly

deviant.

McClintock describes colonial land and space as “porno-

tropics for the European imagination” (1995: 22). She relays

white imperial accounts of native women as repulsive due to their

blackness and their supposed “sexual aberration and excess”

(McClintock 1995: 22).1 Stoler also points to the fear of

contagion inherent in the black female body, as “it was through

sexual contact with women of color that French men ‘contracted’

not only disease but debased sentiments, immoral proclivities and

extreme susceptibility to decivilized states” (Stoler 1989: 647).

Furthermore, as Stoler discusses, the tropical environment itself

was thought to be the site of germination for filth, excess, and

sterility, and thus directly links an incidental clime to

1 It seems to me that the fear that white men had of the sexual advances (they accused) native women of having towards them (McClintock 1995: 22) signals both their own taboo yet very real sexual desire for the Other and the strength of the white imperial ego (Fanan 1963; Foucault 1978).

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physical bodies and degeneracy (Stoler 1989). So, then, the

ultimate goal of soap is to erase that which is repulsive, namely

filth as it is equal to blackness. This goal is clearly visible

in a number of advertisements for soap at this time. In an ad for

Pears’ Soap (McClintock 1995: 213), a before and after scene is

shown. Before, a cherubic white child clad in a white apron

washes a black baby in a bathtub – he seems perplexed and

dismayed by his own blackness. After, the white child holds a

mirror up to the black infant, who now has a glistening white

body yet retains a black head, as the white child invites the black to

participate in a spectacle of self-admiration. Significantly, the

black child being washed is genderless – a liminal figure whose

genitals are absent both before and after. Soap, then, seeks to

remove gender and race from an ideal (clean) body. However, the

baby retains an essential blackness in his head, and the viewer

knows that a gendered genitals lie beneath the white sheet. Thus,

soap can never erase those essential markers of otherness is

implicated in helping to create and strengthen them.

The repercussions borne of soap’s symbolic power in the

Western imagination, is hinged in Foucault’s idea of biopower.

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Foucault draws upon the modern incarnation of the power that

rulers (until relatively recently) had over the lives of their

subjects, where “power in this instance was essentially a right

of seizure: of things, time, bodies, and ultimately life itself;

it culminated in the privilege to seize hold of life in order to

suppress it” (1978: 136). Biopower, derived from this definition

of power, replaces the empowered sovereign with an empowered

social body (a democracy) (Foucault 1978: 136). Biopolitics,

according to Foucault (1976), is the manifestation of biopower

and operates on both the level of individual human bodies and the

populations that they make up (243). Soap, then, is a

manifestation of biopower in its ability to wash away corporeal

filth at the same time that it whitewashes the colonial subject

at large.

Similarly, the techniques for menstruating in the West

(specifically the United States) in the twentieth century

intervene at both individual and societal levels. Foucault claims

that one technology for regulating bodies is “disciplinary; it

centers on the body, produces individualizing effects, and

manipulates the body as a source of forces that have to be

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rendered both useful and docile” (1976: 249). Another technology

is centered “upon life: a technology which brings together the

mass effects characteristic of a population, which tries to

control the series of random events that can occur in a living

mass” (Foucault 1976: 249). Advertising for and widespread

adoption of particular technologies and techniques of

menstruation normalized a particular kind of menstruating body,

and in doing so enabled power and control over menstruating

bodies.

In Modern Period: Menstruation in Twentieth-Century America, Lara

Freidenfelds provides a historical context for the onslaught of

products marketed to menstruating women in the early part of the

twentieth century. According to Freidenfelds (2009), shame, fear,

and secrecy surrounded menstruation in the late nineteenth and

early twentieth centuries, and most women were taught to hide the

physical evidence of menstruation and any pain and discomfort

that it caused. Furthermore, as Chris Bobel claims in New Blood:

Third Wave Feminism and the Politics of Mestruation, even “when menstrual

pain is not pathologized to justify women’s subordination, it is

trivialized and interpreted as ‘just in their head,’

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psychosomatic proof of women’s frailty and instability.” (Bobel

2010: 36). Feminine hygiene products that appeared in the early

1920s, then, perhaps reversed this trope as they (claimed to)

enable women to be mobile, active, and discrete during their

menstrual periods (Freidenfelds 2009). Despite the freedom that

the products marketed by brands like Kotex, Playtex, and Tampax

seem to have provided women, they in fact reinscribe the creation

of modern, acceptable female bodies and experiences as – again –

white, pathological, and invisible.

One of the major draws of disposable feminine hygiene

products was their invisibility by design. Where previous methods

of absorbing and/or disposing of menstrual blood tended to be

less physically accommodating than the “modern” designs of

sanitary napkins or tampon and often carried with them a telltale

odor or visibility, sanitary napkins and tampons were contiguous

with the menstruating body – affixed to underwear or inserted

directly into the vagina (Freidenfelds 2009: 125). Public

knowledge of menstruation was still seen as shameful, something

to be hidden from public domains. Modern women were meant to

present themselves a certain way, and women learned that a

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visible pad (affixed with pins and a belt and not the adhesive

and winged design used today) or the unmentionable odor of

menstrual blood were something to be embarrassed about and avoid

at all costs (Friedenfelds 2009). Discrete, disposable, small,

and portable, feminine hygiene products enabled a greater stigma

and silence around menstruation. Thus, “the modern, middle-class

female body promoted in menstrual product advertising was a well-

managed body, which at the same time did not display evidence of

its modes of management” (Freidenfelds 2009: 125). This concept

of the erasure of a grotesque process in favor of a neatly

packaged result parallels the erasure of women’s domestic work in

soap advertisements (McClintock 1995: 218). McClintock claims

that the image of mirrors so common in soap advertisements

enables “objects [to] multiply without apparent human

intervention in a promiscuous economy of self-generation” (1995:

218). The erasure of menstruation without the erasure of

pregnancy and the production of offspring recreates this pattern.

The modern woman whose menstruation is erased is expected to be

beautiful, clean, and docile, and certainly expected to be a

dutiful wife and mother. The irony in this image of a modern

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woman lies in the impossibility (at least during the earlier part

of the twentieth century) of a biological mother who does not

menstruate.

Even the language of “feminine hygiene” is wrought with the

same anxieties and fears about women’s bodies that are tied up in

soap. The euphemism of feminine hygiene erases the biological and

communal experience of menstruation while still signaling

directly to that which is unhygienic in the feminine – that is, a

vagina that expels blood and tissue, that bleeds. This

simultaneous silencing and obvious visibility of menstruation

recalls Foucault’s repression hypothesis in The History of Sexuality, in

which he claims that the constant discussion and analysis of the

repression of Western sexuality actually reveals the pleasure and

abandon with which “we Other Victorians” speak about sex and

sexuality and the central place it occupies in thought and

practice (1978: 3-35). Indeed, “menstrual activists assert that

menstruation’s uneasy place in both the private and public

spheres reflects a detachment from the body” while at the same

time linking the body and the advertised products (Bobel 2010:

30). Thus, in the 1920s and 1930s, when disposable feminine

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hygiene products began to be sold in pharmacies and advertised

widely, they were at once hidden behind euphemistic phrasing and

carefully designed packaging and occupying a significant place in

American’s fields of vision, wallets, and imaginations

(Friedenfelds: 2009). Despite this implicit visibility, the public

rendering invisible of menstruation (as opposed to a private

rendering invisible of decades prior) made women’s (always

already primitive) bodies slightly more civilized. An ad for

Kotex’s sanitary napkin product read: “At first you will not be

able to believe in the freedom . . . the comfort . . . the poise

Tampax makes possible. And soon, like thousands of others, you

will wonder how you ever existed before this civilized method of

sanitary protection was perfected” (Friedenfelds 2009: 120) (emphasis

mine). Civilization, of course, was available first to those who

could afford and were entitled to it – white middle class women.

The concept of feminine hygiene and hygienic practices were

largely limited to women with the time to spend bathing and

grooming and with the disposable income to spend on what can be

construed as luxury products (Friedenfelds 2009: 121).

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Menstruating as a woman of color or as a poor woman during

the early and middle parts of the twentieth century was imbued

with racial stigma in addition to the inherent stigma of gender.

Friedenfelds reminds us that the “management of [African

American] bodies projected class status,” and that women who did

not properly manage and regulate their bodies (particularly

during menstruation) were not striving to better themselves

(2009: 156-157). That is, there is something wrong about a black

person who is not actively trying to mirror whiteness. Bobel

claims “women of color, already socially constructed in white

supremacist culture as ‘animalistic’ and ‘out of control,’ can

approximate legitimacy only if they deny their embodiment” (Bobel

2010: 30-31). This argument recalls Stoler’s descriptions of the

ritualized control that colonizers implemented over black and

brown bodies as they constructed complex racial categories and

dictated the colonized subject’s range of motion (1989). The

arrival of European women in the colonies, for instance, made

taboo previous forms of prolonged social interactions with people

of color, led to the segregation of colonizer and colonized, and

enabled the constant surveillance of black and brown bodies

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(Stoler 1989: 642). The self-consciousness that accompanies the

constant surveillance of non-white bodies extends to black

women’s menstrual practices during the 1950s and 1960s.

Friedenfelds claims that her African American interlocutors were

more likely to use deodorants and sprays designed specifically

for disposable feminine hygiene products during their menstrual

cycles (2009: 154). This self-regulation by women of color is

actually a byproduct of Foucault’s concept of the technology of

discipline in the realm of biopower (Foucault 1976: 252). Thus,

legacies of colonial control remain in the technologies of

control over particular bodies via the technologies of

menstruation.

If menstruation indicates the wielding of biopolitics in the

twentieth century, then the practice of sterilizing particular

women in the United States in the twentieth and into the twenty-

first centuries while ignoring or warping informed consent

represents a particularly sinister manifestation of biopower.

Foucault refers specifically to the image of the sexual deviant

when he claims that “at the level of the body, of the

undisciplined body that is immediately sanctioned by all the

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individual diseases that the sexual debauchee brings down upon

himself” (1976: 252). Yet, this sentiment of regulation applies

to any person whom society deems as deviant – even for the

transgression of not being white. Furthermore, “debauched,

perverted sexuality is assumed to have a heredity. Their

descendants will also be affected for generations…This is the

theory of degeneracy” (Foucault 1976: 252). Again, this applies

to the regulation of reproduction of particular kinds of bodies,

and not only ones that are deemed sexually deviant. Journalist

Harry Bruinius’s book Better For All the World: The Secret History of Forced

Sterilization and America’s Quest for Racial Purity (2006) details the United

State’s explicitly racist views on who should and should not be

allowed to reproduce and form America’s populace. American

endorsement of eugenics as a legitimate and beneficial practice

aligns with and reproduces colonial fears of degeneracy. Stoler

claims that for Europeans who feared the mixed-race child and

(alleged) sterilizing effects of the tropics, “like the discourse

on degeneracy, the fear of sterility was less about biological

survival of whites than about their political viability and

cultural reproduction” (1989: 650). The practice of forced and

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coerced sterilization of particular bodies, black bodies in

particular, in the Untied States recapitulates this fear, but

with a difference. Here, the political viability and cultural

reproduction of black bodies motivated the (individually and

communally) traumatic practice of sterilizing black women.

The people most often sterilized in the early twentieth

century in the United States fell into “ ‘the three D’s’:

dependency, delinquency, and mental deficiency” (Bruinius 2006:

9). These categories recall the “four great lines of attack” that

Foucault points to in History of Sexuality – namely the sexual child,

the hysterical woman, the person who practiced birth control, and

the psychiatrically perverse (Foucault 1978: 146-147) – that

modern sexuality sought to repress and eliminate. The language of

the “three D’s,” in addition to its overlap with the groups that

Foucault saw as targeted, tended to target women from lower

socioeconomic classes in the United States, and especially black

women. However, Johanna Schoen claims in “Between choice and

coercion: Women and the politics of sterilization in North

Carolina, 1929-1975,” “the eugenic sterilization program

ironically offered rare access to a form of birth control women

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desired” (2001: 132). As health care and reproductive choice has

historically disadvantaged minority and impoverished women, some

were actually able to control their reproductive choices through

this imperfect system. However, despite the opportunities that

this program afforded some women, its inceptions and legacies are

mired in racism, sexism, and classism.

The organization Project Prevention is an entirely legal,

modern inception of these very legacies. Project Prevention,

founded in 1996 and also known as Children Requiring a Caring

Kommunity or C.R.A.C.K., is an organization that pays former or

current drug and alcohol-using women $200 to be sterilized or use

long-term contraception (Paltrow 2003: 18). Its official mission,

as written on its website, “is public awareness to the problem of

addicts/alcoholics exposing their unborn child to drugs during

pregnancy” and “seeks to reduce the burden of this social problem

on taxpayers, trim down social worker caseloads, and alleviate

from our clients the burden of having children that will

potentially be taken away” (Project Prevention 2011). Without

even knowing its mission statement, one can infer that this group

does not operate outside of racist and sexist logics. Of course,

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its acronym recalls the demonization of crack, black people and

especially black mothers simultaneously in the war on drugs of

the 1980s (Paltrow and Flavin 2013: 334). The implicit connection

between women who expose their fetuses to drugs and alcohol could

be made without the misspelling of the word community, and the

effect of the acronym would not be lost were it appear as

C.R.A.C.C. However, the intentional and political move of forcing

the acronym C.R.A.C.K. by misspelling a word perpetuates and

legitimizes a view of black people as illiterate and ignorant.

While the founder of this project specifically refutes critiques

of her program as racist or misguided, “many people … have also

challenged this program as a violation of informed consent,

exploitive, coercive, racist and a form of eugenic population

control” (Paltrow 2003: 12). Furthermore, Lynn M. Paltrow, the

director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, claims in

her 2012 critique of Project Prevention that “much of what

C.R.A.C.K. says about its clients is untrue or unsupported.

Instead of research, legitimate data, and honest inquiries,

C.R.A.C.K. too often presents anecdotes, false information and

horrific images of bad women who not only do not deserve to have

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children, but also do not deserve any form of compassion or

support” (14). Although C.R.A.C.K. hides behind its claim that

its services are not catered to any particular race or class and

that any woman could seek its services, the very fact that it

advertises in impoverished neighborhoods supports Paltrow’s claim

that “its mission might be better understood as one designed to

stigmatize certain people and to make them seem appropriate

targets for sterilization and other forms of population control,”

and, according to Paltrow, assuming that compensation is the only

motivation for this procedure is inherently classist and

implicitly racist (2003: 23). This program, then, is the very

culmination of biopower’s regulatory goals. Certain women – brown

and black women, women who menstruate – are coerced into altering

their individual bodies while population-level degeneration is

avoided.

The modern female body is that which is clean, white, and

invisible yet always already pathologized, deviant, and

uncontrollable. This vision has changed since it entered the

public and commodified realm of soap advertisement in the late

nineteenth century, yet its core implications have remained

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fairly constant. Furthermore, soap, the regulation of

menstruation, and the coerced sterilization of poor black and

brown women form a contiguous timeline of a progressively more

modern woman. A woman, relegated to the home (and further

relegated to the intimate privacy of her bathroom), washes

herself clean with white British soap. This same woman,

reincarnated several decades later, erases her menses in the

stall of a public bathroom at her workplace through the insertion

of a scented tampon. And, even farther in the future – in our

present – this same woman sees an advertisement for C.R.A.C.K. in

the bathroom stall of a methadone clinic. She receives $200 for

undergoing a sterilization procedure, and will never again

menstruate or find need for scented tampons or white soap to wash

away the odor of womanhood. She is truly modern.

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References

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Menstruation. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Bruindius, Harry. (2006). Better For All the World: The Secret History of Forced

Sterilization and America’s Quest for Racial Purity. New York:

Alfred A. Knopf.

Fanon, Frantz. (1963). The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove

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Foucault, Michel. (1978). Right of Death and Power over Life. The

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Foucault, Michel. (1976). “17 March 1976” Society Must be Defended. New

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Freidenfelds, Lara. (2009). “The Modern Way to Manage

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McClintock, Anne. (1995). Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the

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“Objectives.” (2011). Project Prevention. Retrieved from

http://www.projectprevention.org/objectives/.

Paltrow, Lynn M. & Flavin, Jeanne. (2013). “The policy and

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Palrow, Lynn M. (2003). “Why Caring Communities Must Oppose

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Propaganda and Undermines the Health and Well Being of

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http://www.fwhc.org/pdfs/caring_communities_oppose_crack.pdf.

Schoen, Johanna. (2001). “Between choice and coercion: Women and

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