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THIS CHAPTER CONSIDERS the biological indications of changes of status in women’s lives as set out in medical treatises. With their emphasis on women bleeding at a series of biologically defined and sometimes socially dictated points, these biological occurrences also assumed cultural and social significance, and were sometimes included as part of a social rite of passage. For example, in the marriage rite of passage, the biological bleeding of the first intercourse, the defloration, should occur. A female’s movement from childhood through the virginal state and marriage to the socially desired destination of bearing children indicated her transformation from a parthenos to a gyne through rites of passage.
Some of these rites of passage allowed for, and indeed, required, biological indicators. There are social expectations of a woman’s role that combine the purely biological with the purely social, as in the purely biological menarche with access to social status in the social institution of marriage and the biological and social act of procreation. The combination of the biological with the social can be understood in the gynaecological texts when viewed with the concepts of the rites of passage and the division of the female’s life into different categories.
Men depended upon women for future heirs and the polis depended upon them for future citizens. This dependence is recognised and facilitated by the social structures instituted to aid women through their biological transitions. Through the devices of myth and ritual, working together to provide a release for awkward and difficult transitions, society was “mapped.” That is, an understanding of women’s movement from the role of child to maiden to mother was implicit in Greek society. The roles are preserved but the individuals move from one role to another, passing through different destinations on the “map.”
The normative structure of the lives of Classical Athenian women can be separated into various age-categories or stages tied to the females’ sexual status as follows: 1) childhood, 2) virgin before menarche, 3) virgin, after menarche “unspecified, yet creative,” 4) wife, before the birth of any children, 5) wife, “sexually specified, childbearing woman,” and 6) widow. The category of “wife” is split into that of before the birth of the first child and that of after the birth of the first child, for the transition from virgin to wife was not considered truly complete after the loss of virginity and the shedding of blood in the marriage bed, which is the end of biological virginity. Rather the transition from virgin to wife was completed only with the lochia after the birth of the first child, which is the end of social virginity. Women’s social identification corresponds to their various biological states.
The ideal total passage of a female in her life span can be summarised as follows. Some young girls, like those aged 5-10 who performed the arkteia ritual, were undergoing an example of a rite of separation, as the girls were physically and symbolically removed from the rest of society. This rite of passage can be seen from the point of view of the total passage of the female as rite of separation, indicating a female’s entrance into the liminal phase. The bleeding of the first menses, the menarche, within the liminal phase indicates that the female is capable of bearing a child. The liminal phase ends after the bleeding associated with the first intercourse in the rite of passage that is marriage. This marriage rite of passage and the bleeding in the first intercourse which occurs in it indicates the end of biological, or physical, virginity.
Finally, the bleeding associated with giving birth to the first child can be thought of as an aggregation, a re-entering into society of the fully-fledged gyne, ending social virginity. These categories will now be considered more closely.
While marriage, defloration, and to a certain extent, conception, might be able to be controlled and brought about by social events, that is, those events in which men play a fundamental role, society was not able to affect the biological onset of menarche. The socially dictated event of the first bleeding in marriage awaited a parthenos at the end of her transition, but the beginning of that transition, the menarche, was uncontrollable. It was dictated by individual biology. Sourvinou-lnwood believes that social control over the menarche was enhanced by ‘the arkteia, a rite of - culturally controlled - entrance into the (socially determined) period characterised by the (biological and social) maturation process culminating in menarche.” The uncontrollable biological sign of maturation, the menarche, was enclosed within socially controlled rituals (such as the arkteia, a rite of passage which indicated also a rite of separation, in which young girls would serve as bears of the goddess Artemis at her sanctuaries at Brauron and Mounichia), before menarche and marriage soon after menarche.
The rite of separation, like the rite of passage of the arkteia, indicates that the female has moved into the liminal phase. This period is characterised by the fact that the female does not produce a child during it. Before the menarche the female was biologically unable to produce a child. After the menarche, the female was still unable to produce a child according to the dictates of society until she was socially contained in marriage.
In the classical period, marriage soon after menarche, which occurred about the fourteenth year of life, when the girl was 13-14, was the ideal and norm. The menarche itself, a biological ‘rite’, signified the girl’s biological capability to bear a child. During this liminal phase the female is no longer a child, but she is not yet a fully-fledged gyne with a child. She is (normatively speaking) shedding her own blood, which signified that she is physically capable of bearing children. However, a woman after menarche has no normative potential to produce offspring, as she is not yet contained within the institution of marriage, the only normative state in which a woman should bear children. In marriage, the bleeding of the women is ‘controlled’ by defloration. Once the woman bleeds within the cultural arena of marriage in the first intercourse, she is no longer liminal. The social act of marriage and the physical act of the loss of virginity means her sexuality is hemmed In, controlled and contained by the socially constructed institution of marriage.
Once married, the women’s potential to produce is no longer considered troublesome vis à vis the structure of status society. If she falls pregnant after marriage, it would not contradict or upset but support the status social standards. Marriage, then, is the cultural imposition or enforcing of the biological fact of maturation at the uncontrollable first bleeding of menarche by the first ‘controllable’ bleeding of sexual intercourse and subsequent bleeding associated with giving birth. Athenian society seems to have viewed the transition of a woman from a threat as a parthenos to a participant in the social order as a gyne as the successful integrating of this potentially worrisome being into the social structure of the polis in order to create future citizens. The married woman is no longer liminal, as her potential to produce is culturally contained within the marriage institution. The female has moved through the rite of passage of marriage and emerged ready to bear a child and become a complete gyne.
The married female is still a social virgin, however, until she bleeds in childbirth. Childbirth is event which signifies a female’s aggregation into society. At this point, the woman has fulfilled the telos of her existence in Athenian status society; she is a fully-fledged gyne. The extent to which females’ identities were connected to their sexual status is revealed through this terminology: to be a woman, a gyne, is to be a wife and mother. As a gyne then, the female is considered by society to be safe, controlled, and controllable.
The series of transitions which faced a girl, with their corresponding bleedings, was both biologically and socially necessary and oftentimes proved physically and socially dangerous for the girl. Both the maiden and the newlywed wife without a child were in the same category as the parthenos iphigeneia until their cultural role of the perpetuation of the husband’s oikos, and through it, the perpetuation of society, was achieved. Social control of women’s sexuality and biological bleeding nature through the rituals like the arkteia and the institution of marriage also defines the role of women in status society. As Burkert believes, “sexual behaviour is ritually redirected to demonstrate power and differences in rank. In order for the normative sexual, social and cultural goal to be reached, maidens had to move into the category of wife and mother
The word parthenos described the status of a female who had not yet married: the maiden. While it did not implicitly mean that she was a virgin, it was certainly the normative state, as her marriageability was at stake if she were not a virgin (to deflower was διαπαρθενεύω). This term implies, however, that the female it describes is ready for marriage. The use of the word parthenos to refer both to a sexually untouched girl and an unmarried mother tends to suggest that the word was an expression of social position. The derivatives of the adjective parthenos, the noun parthenia and the verb noted above inform the relatively ambiguous adjective, suggesting that the notion of “bodily integrity and sexual purity” were both covered by the adjective. King cautions that the precise meaning of parthenos is shaded by its use and context. The term seems to imply not physical (or biological) virginity, but the social state of being unmarried. Perhaps the word nymphe is a more appropriate term to indicate females socially ready to be married but who are not yet married, or as Clark suggests, the term nymphe can represent the girl who is married but as yet childless. Dowden suggests that kore is a more specific term to describe a young unmarried girl. This word means the same as parthenos but also carries the extra connotation of the girl in relation to the male who had authority over her. The parthenos, then, is “an object to be defined and situated in the framework of female roles within the city.”
In status society the concept of the gyne contrasted with the concept of the parthenos. The word gyne meant woman, wife and mother and “it was as a wife and mother that a woman was most fully brought into male culture.” The parthenos must move out of this state to become a gyne, to bear children in marriage. A gyne was considered the positive role of the female because in this capacity she could serve to reproduce within the institution of marriage.
Athenian society, through both myth and ritual, accepted the role of the producer for women, the gyne. Status society had difficulty with those who had the potential to rebel against this role, that is, the parthenos. According to Athenian status social perception, the gyne with children was the most easily accepted female. The most worrisome female was the parthenos, with her mysterious sexuality untapped yet ripe, on the boundary of becoming a gyne.
Women were a necessary element in a society, but also potentially troublesome, as their sexuality was deemed wild and out of control. Fear of women’s sexuality and reproductive powers, and more specifically, the fear that women might withhold these powers, led not only to certain myths like that of the virgin sacrifice, but also to comparisons of women through metaphor both to animals and agriculture which required taming to be useful.
Some girls undergoing the transition to prepare them for marriage and motherhood enter a liminal period at a shrine assigned for this purpose. These girls “become, in a sense, another category of sacred animals,” and some myths “associate them with sacred animals and can even metamorphose them into animals.” In this liminal period, for example, girls become “bears” of Artemis and are under her protection. Such rituals, in which girls leave the world in one state and re-enter society in another, stress the social necessity of the transition, both for the good of society and for the good of the female who needs to take her social place in that society.
The institution of marriage, with its sexual ‘domestication’ of the female, made the former virgin tame. Since the male heads of oikos arranged marriages, the institution itself was male-controlled. Girls without sexual knowledge from a marriage relationship were considered wild and untamed, preferring life after the fashion of the virgin goddess Artemis to domestication. The “sexually initiated” woman had been settled down, was civilised, into her childbearing role as wife and mother. Menander gives what is taken to be a traditional formula for betrothal used in Athens in his Dyskolos. This formulaic custom (with the dowry here increased for comic value) reveals that the purpose of marriage is, of course, to produce offspring.
Xenophon considers the parthenos a type of untamed animal whose taming came through marriage to a man. Ischomachus answers Socrates’ question on what was the first thing he taught his new bride. It was the institution of marriage that made the former virgin «χειροηθής». The gyne in marriage and the mother represented controlled reproduction for the status society. The social institution of marriage was perpetuated by this concept of domestication of a wild virgin through marriage. Included in this belief was the idea that a female’s virginity was unripe, while the next phase of her life led to her ripe maturity. This distinction probably had more to do with the social belief that biological virginity was ‘unripe’ because in this period women who were not married could not produce anything useful for male society, i.e., citizens who were legitimate heirs for an oikos. Her enclosure within marriage made it socially acceptable and indeed necessary for her to bear a child. Through the institution of marriage, society gained mastery over the wild nature of women. Their husbands were the agency through which this civilisation, via the institution of marriage, was achieved. This “civilising” of women, traditionally accomplished by marriage, was accompanied by defloration and, the ideal, the loss of blood from the virgin-bride.
An image and association which is often found in myth and ritual describing the female in her journey from parthenos to gyne, and which is also used by the medical texts, is that of comparing women to fields in need of a ploughing, as in the marriage oath reported by Menander, or to ripening fruit. In Sophocles Antigone Creon claims that besides Antigone, other arable fields remain for Haimon to marry. Unmarried virgin girls of the age for marriage are ‘ripe for marriage,’ Aeschylus Suppliants speaks of virginity as tender ripeness and compares virgins to ripe fruit. “An unmarried but deflowered girl (and note our word!) is ‘rotten fruit', ‘corrupted’, ‘gone off,”’ as in Aeschylus.
Women were systematically associated with the earth, and, by extension, its creatures. Goats and sheep were common sacrificial animals. It follows, therefore, that virgins in a sacrificial context are often compared to these animals. Iphigeneia, about to be sacrificed, is compared to a she-goat, as in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon 231-238. Later in the Agamemnon 1412-1418 Clytemnestra complains that Agamemnon sacrificed Iphigeneia as if she were one of his many sheep. In Euripides IT 359-360 Iphigeneia complains that she was slain like a calf with her father as the priest. In IA 1080-1084 Iphigeneia is compared to a heifer; Cassandra is compared to a heifer driven on to the altar by a god by the chorus in Aeschylus Agamemnon 1295-1298 and Polyxena compares herself to a heifer in Euripides Hecuba. Talthybius compares Polyxena’s struggling to that of a young calf in Hecuba 525-526.
The parthenos is also compared to a filly which is broken in by marriage to a man, and girls dancing are compared to fillies in a Bacchic context, girls are compared to the foals of mares and colts. In Euripides’ Helen, Helen compares herself to a racing steed. Homer has the image of the unmarried virgin Artemis as untamed, and he calls Nausicaa παρθένα αδμής. To compare a young girl to a fawn implies a wild or untamed nature.
It was not uncommon, then, for maidens in this period of liminality to be compared to and thought of as animals as a ripe virgin, she is taken as a wife and submits, via marriage, to the yoke provided by the sexual actions of her husband. These creatures are wild and need taming, which naturally came at the hands of men, as Xenophon’s statement in his Oeconomicus implies. Women needed men to aid their social transitions, as men needed women to be established in society as heads of oikos. But the difference between their dependency upon each other is that women needed men to help not only with their social transitions, but also with their biological transitions; to help them bleed in defloration in marriage and to tame them out of their wild state into domesticity by impregnating them, as well as having regular intercourse with them to keep them healthy.
The use of agricultural and animal metaphors when describing women in literary sources is mirrored in medical texts, where women’s health issues all derive from the spongy nature of the female’s flesh, her wet nature, and her bleeding nature. Women’s nature is naturally wet and spongy according to the Hippocratics.
Since women do not do as much physical activity as men, their bodies also retain more of the moisture from their diet than men’s bodies do. Just as it is men, through the socially proscribed institution of marriage, who make females ‘tame,’ it is men, through the social institution of the practice of medicine, who lame’ women’s bodies. In either case, women are never accepted as they are; they require external intervention for their very biological and social health.
Although males also had to undergo transitions in Athenian status society, women, because of their biological nature, had to undergo them in order to become useful members of that society.
These transitions are, in effect, an expression of the "otherness" of the female condition, of the “liminality or even alienness of women’s existence.” Virgins, on the brink of transferring into the next category of “wife,” exist in the amorphous and undetermined liminal phase. Mythology summarily depicts such virgins as transformed into animals and plants or as victims of murder, sacrifice or suicide.
There was a great deal of stress laid upon blood and women bleeding in a productive manner. The importance placed upon blood to indicate both the physical health of the female and to indicate social transitions highlights society’s concerns that a virgin become married and bleed in order to procreate society. The bleeding of defloration is yet another difficulty encountered in the transition from a parthenos to a gyne, but a difficulty which is socially instigated. It is an event controlled by the male and contained in the normally male-controlled marriage situation. Hanson believes that a parthenos, a “troublesome creature” became a gyne the instant she bled in first intercourse, while King believes that any one of the times that a female bleeds (menarche, defloration, marriage or childbirth) could indicate that the female has passed from the realm of the parthenos to the realm of the gyne. We believe that after the first intercourse in marriage, the female was no longer a parthenos and therefore no longer liminal. She was still a social virgin, however, until the birth of her first child. In our conception of the total passage of women, the woman was only considered a complete gyne after the birth of her first child and the lochia which accompanied that birth. She had then fulfilled her telos and social expectations of her role in life. She was a more complete member of her husband’s oikos which had been foreign to her before her marriage once she has provided it with a baby. All the major transitions which are socially important and the rites of passage which indicate them revolve around the biological transitions women make and are associated with women shedding their own blood. In medical conception, these bleedings are crucial for the woman’s biological health.
In medical texts, the concern for women to produce progeny is evident by their representation of a series of bleedings as integral to a woman’s health. If she does not bleed regularly, she cannot produce children and her health is at risk. The many texts in the collection which is known as the Hippocratic Corpus were not all written by Hippocrates (ca. 460- ca 370 BO), but are a collection of summaries and information from a variety of sources first recorded between the 5th and 1st centuries BC. Out of the approximately sixty texts in the Corpus, ten can be considered gynaecological: The Nature of Women (Nat. Mul.), Diseases of Women I and Diseases of Women 2 (Mul. 1-2), Barren Women (Sterii.), On Generation (Genit.), The Nature of the Child (Nat. Puer.T On Young Girls (Vjrg.), Superfoetation (Superf.), The 7th/8th Month Child (Septim./Oct.), and Excision of the Foetus (Foet. Exsect.). Women are also mentioned in the rest of the Corpus, most importantly in the seven books of the Epidemics. The Peri Parthenon, or Virg., about young girls, will prove to be integral in the study of the importance of the first bleeding. This work also dates from the 5th-4th century BO and, like the entire Corpus, has been modified many times. These treatises are the most important source of medical information for this study. What is valuable about the gynaecological texts from the Corpus and elsewhere is their reflection, not just of medicine, diseases and treatments, but of the values and norms of the society in which the texts were produced, employed and confirmed."’
Aristotle provided some gynaecological information in his biological texts, History of Animals (HA), Parts of Animals (PA) and Generation of Animals (GA) written in the second half of the fourth century BC. Aristotle, writing later than most of the Hippocratics were composed, often seems to argue against the Hippocratic view. Sometimes passages and arguments are copied directly from the Corpus.
Soranus, a Greek practising in Rome at the end of the first century and the beginning of the second century AD wrote the Gynaikeia. which survived only partially in the original Greek but in two Latin versions. Galen, born in Pergamum, is another medical writer who was active in Rome in the latter half of the second century AD, and a great deal of his work is preserved. He is a valuable ancient commentator on the works of the Hippocratics and Aristotle. Because of their later date and the time frame of this study, Soranus and Galen will be relied upon only for confirmation and expansion of earlier views.
Medical standards and the standards of society, which supported and reinforced each other, deemed that it was extremely important for the female to bleed. Biologically speaking, it is in the female nature to bleed at certain times and to bear children.
Athenian society viewed such biological operations as requiring external social intervention; that is, from men, in the form of treatment to maintain women’s health. Beyond bleeding in menarche, which society tried to control by the rituals of separation on one side and the defloration accomplished by the husband in marriage on the other side, males were also needed for the continued health of the female. The medical authors also emphasised the importance of intercourse (in the forum of marriage, of course). Intercourse was recommended as therapy for a plethora of problems a female might encounter in her female organs, because it was believed that intercourse would straighten out any bent, folded, or closed organs.
A woman’s bleeding was considered so biologically and socially Important that it was medically approved and required. Menstruation was integral to a woman’s health, and if the woman did not menstruate (If she were not pregnant, that is) she was seriously ill. This condition, if prolonged, was fatal. Menstruation was seen as a natural purging, and the removal of the blood by other means, such as nosebleeds or vomiting, was justified if the menses were suppressed. Marriage, however, and intercourse in it were recommended as the cure for suppressed menses because sex would straighten out blockage. Medical attitudes towards the menstruating female express social attitudes.
If, by the time society deemed the girl at puberty, she was not menstruating, then it was assumed that the menstrual blood was somehow sealed within her body. According to Virg., at puberty it was believed that the female body contained more blood because of the nature of her flesh and the fact that her body did not use all of her food. The Hippocratic Virg. describes a condition arising from an excess of pent-up menstrual blood in a pre-menarche girl. This blood, after filling her uterus, spills into her body proper. This excess blood puts pressure on the other organs, thus making the victim have thoughts of suicide, most typically of hanging herself or throwing herself down a well. Virgins and the childless were considered much more prone to certain diseases, and were generally thought to be more ill than their more favourable counterpart, the gyne and mother. Both young widows and old virgins, those not experiencing regular sexual intercourse, were especially susceptible to uterine suffocation, the cure for which was intercourse. The therapy, then, involved intercourse. Likewise, it was thought that if the menstrual blood could not get out of the woman’s body, then no male seed could get into it.
It is debatable whether a hymeneal membrane existed in classical medical conception. There seems to be some confusion whether a virgin’s sexual organs were thought to be initially sealed by a hymen until opened up by the male through intercourse. The writer of Hipp. Virg. appears to believe that a female’s uterus is sealed, to be opened by sexual intercourse, but this belief may have more to do with the thought that with the first intercourse the veins and mouth of the uterus become dilated. The necessity of intercourse and the bleeding which it entailed makes sense when it is considered that the hymen was believed to have sealed the virgin’s uterus. If, however, the Greeks did not believe that it was sealed, as is suggested by the medical writers’ lack of discussion on this issue, then the Greek urge to hurry parthenoi along into sex in marriage which would facilitate bleedings can also be explained as a social need to control their biological nature.
Traditionally and medically, it was favourable for a virgin to be married soon after menarche. However, the existence or nonexistence of a hymen membrane notwithstanding, the wedding can be conceived of as a kind of dramatised execution. Aristotle never describes a membrane covering the sexual organ, as “no natural barrier is thought to obstruct that which is essential to the health of a woman's body: the tissue through which the purifying flow of menstrual blood issues is not conceived as a closed wound.” It seems that the first reference In the extant texts to a virginal hymen is in Soranos, who denies its existence and offers an alternative explanation for the blood that comes from a virgin at first intercourse.
The female’s womb was envisioned as a vessel and Hanson suggests it was seen as an upside-down jug. Elsewhere it is likened to a swollen wineskin. Images of defloration can be discussed in the same terms used to describe unsealing a wine jug or breaching a city’s walls. Hanson identifies a correlation between the extended secondary meaning of this term as the metaphor of unsealing a wine jug to refer both to the defloration of a virgin and to the penetration of a city’s defences. In Euripides Hec. 536-538, Polyxena will bleed pure blood as she offers her :upper” neck at 549 when sacrificed.
In tragedy, when women hang themselves, the word most often used to denote ‘neck’ is δέρη meaning the front of the neck, or throat. According to Loraux, this front of the throat, the neck, is the most vulnerable location on a woman’s body. King points out the fact that although sacrificial blood from animals would seem a proper analogy with any blood that comes from wounds, either male or female, this analogy is, on the whole, reserved for comparisons with women and their bleeding nature, be it menstrual or lochial. In both the Hippocratics and Aristotle, menstrual blood is often compared to the quality of blood from a sacrificial animal.
This social view of the importance of women producing for their biological health is supported, and deemed necessary, by the gynaecological texts. Not only were myths and rituals used to help society feel less anxious about women, but medical texts and treatments also highlight the fact that women were viewed with “tension, anxiety and fear”. Like menstruation, childbirth was extremely important for the health of the female. Childbirth could actually aid difficulty with menstruation by opening up the passageway and the stoma which, in a childless woman, were narrow. Childbirth also made the flesh looser, widening veins carrying the blood to other parts of the body. Indeed, Plato believes that a womb not being occupied will cause disease. Above it was shown that men could aid women troubled by a lack of menstruation by having intercourse with them. Indeed, men are needed not only for women to fall pregnant, but also, according to Aristotle, to bring about labour by having sex with their wives.
Menstruation can sometimes stop because the womb has moved to another part of the body, ostensibly in search of moisture. This condition is called uterine displacement. Like all perceived defects in women shedding their blood, this condition was considered serious. The Hippocratics advise a parthenos with this condition to marry. Plato describes the uterus is an animal needing to produce children and when unused, causes many problems like pain and general sickness through its movement. The Hippocratics often give examples of the womb moving about the body and attaching itself to other organs. According to the Hippocratics, the womb needs moisture or pregnancy to keep it in place. Without moisture provided by sexual intercourse or a foetus to anchor it, it will move about the body. Those not having regular sex were seen to be especially at risk. Again, the cultural and normative meets the medical in the anomaly that was the female body.
In the Hippocratics the womb was seen as the cause of all of a female’s medical troubles. It appears that a lack of menstruation, rather than the womb itself, was seen as a greater problem because the regular purging by menstruation kept a female healthy. If a woman fell ill, then, it was because something was wrong with her feminine anatomy, either with her womb or with improper or insufficient menstruation.
Childbirth was helped in certain circumstances by men. Either men would have sex with their wives or doctors would bleed women at the ankle to begin labour. The Hippocratics advise bleeding a woman if the lochia did not appear after birth, although it seems that the Corpus would prefer a female to bleed naturally in menstruation, lochia or vomiting rather than being bled. Childbirth was a difficult and dangerous time for a woman. According to the Hippocratics, after the birth of a boy the lochia could flow for 20-30 days and for 25-42 after the birth of a girl, and Aristotle HA 587b4-6 states that the upward limit was 40 days. As with menstruation, if the lochia does not flow, some form of human intervention must take place. Intercourse was discouraged during the lochial flow. It was discouraged not because it was considered polluting but because intercourse too soon after childbirth was identified as a cause of the prolapsed womb. The lochia is described in the same terms as the menstrual blood, as like that which flows from a sacrificial animal.
Delivering any child, not necessarily her first, was a liminal time for a woman. A gyne without other children who died in childbirth actually failed to complete the transition from parthenos to gyne. Women who died in the birth of a child other than their first, that is, those who had completed the transition from parthenos to gyne, were under the auspices of Artemis when they gave birth. Artemis not only guided girls to become women, she also guided women through the transition of being pregnant to giving birth. Thus, any woman who died in the liminal period childbirth was associated with maidens who died before marriage, such as Iphigeneia. Their garments were often dedicated to Artemis at one of her shrines. Whilst in the Hippocratic text the women who recovered dedicated their garments, in Euripides IT women who actually perished had their garments brought to Artemis' shrine as well. The goddess Artemis was seen as a patron of women; in the Hippocratic Virg. women suffering from maladies relating to menstruation and a lack of it sometimes dedicated their clothing to Artemis when they had recovered.
Who bleeds, when and why, and the social attitudes towards this event provides clues to the relationship between the status of parthenos, marriage and myths of perverted transitions, such as the myths of the ritual of virgin sacrifice and Amazons. “Civilisation is a function of boundaries,”' and when the Greek attitude towards women is considered, anxiety over boundaries, which women seem to cross more than men, informs their views. These boundaries for women involve blood; the retention of it or the loss of it is cause for either alarm or relief.
The Hippocratic medical theory supported social customs of status society which needed women to produce children in the legitimate arena of marriage by associating women’s biological health with their bleeding and production of children. Menstruation is a biological necessity for a large portion of the life of a female. But she need not, biologically speaking, engage in intercourse or bear children in order to maintain her health. Sex and childbirth were socially necessary, and this necessity was explained in terms of a biological Imperative for the female. King points out that “the power of medicine lies in its ability to make the social appear natural.” Menstruation, Intercourse and childbirth were essential to the female’s health in the Hippocratic texts. In the gynaecological texts, absence of menstruation was a serious ailment and often fatal.”
The structure of a female’s life, as outlined with reference to her shedding her own blood, has been equated with the social transitions or rites of passage the female was expected to move through in status society. The social and biological imperative to bleed placed on a female in the gynaecological texts established an ideal conception of how a woman was meant to live in society. It is difficult to separate the biological from the social. Perhaps this exercise would be meaningless if accomplished, because both combine to indicate what a woman should do. She should begin menstruation, marry, lose her physical virginity, fall pregnant, and bear a child, thus losing her social virginity.
The complex combination of the social and biological revolves around the production of blood and its issuance from the woman’s body in order to achieve the desired and necessary effect: her health and society’s continuation and replenishment with citizens. Even in the normal social and biological rites of passage as outlined above, Artemis serves as the female’s guardian, as the object of the woman’s worship prior to menarche or marriage or in childbirth. Artemis is the goddess who is connected with and surround by the blood occasioned in each experience in the woman’s life.
Chapter 3
