Stones Like Women's Paps: Revising Gender in Jane Sharp's Midwives Book

I argue that Jane Sharp's images of male and female bodies in her Midwives Book (1671) mark an intervention into the rhetorical constructions of gender and patriarchy in the early modern period. While there was more than one ideology around which bodies were constructed in the early modern period, the parts Sharp most explicitly refigures were central to an especially pervasive imagining of the male body as a site of patriarchal masculinity: men's testicles and penis, and the neck of the womb. In revising these specific parts, Sharp does more than manipulate a tradition of masculinist anatomical rhetoric: she intervenes in the production of patriarchy—a production that involved the deployment of restrictive, gendering metaphors of the body. I argue that Sharp's biological theory is rooted in her strategy of normalizing women's bodies and experiences while measuring men against these female models; and that, furthermore, this strategy epitomizes her larger professional project. Sharp reworks the images of male and female bodies that she found in her main sources in order to create both midwives and the human anatomy in her own image—that is to say, as bodies that are, at their most original and ideal, sexed female.