Perhaps the first hoop to jump through while attempting to understand the cultural conception of the “female” body in Ancient Greece is to understand their approach to gender. According to Laqueur, in his Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, the “two-sex” body model that exists today is a relatively new phenomenon that began in Europe in the 18th Century. Predating this constructed anatomical binary was the “one-sex” body model, which essentially depicted men and women as different versions of the same sex. While this may sound shockingly progressive to a contemporary audience, the caveat to this body model was that people born with feminine genitalia were most often viewed as inferior to men. Moreover, this cultural conception of bodies informed somewhat of a gender spectrum, on which people where placed depending on their overall performance of masculine or feminine characteristics. For example, the Hippocratic treatises “On Generation” and “On the Nature of the Child” detail a two-seed system for conception, in which both parents donate a seed to form the fetus within the womb. The sex of the child was determined by the strength of the respective seeds, with weaker seeds combining to form feminine progeny and the stronger seeds forming masculine children. While this assertion may suggest that a person born with a vagina and womb would have the ability to reach the strength and therefore the masculine perfection of men, Hippocrates and other such male physicians were sure to qualify their arguments with details that kept such a situation from happening. Noting menstruation as a greatly unique qualities of feminine bodies, Hippocratic treatises elaborate that due to the nourishment that women lose through their menses, they would never be able to reach the physical potential of men. The physician fortifies his argument by detailing a new physis – “invisible nature” – of feminine flesh as more absorbent, wool-like, prone to hemorrhaging than the cotton-like, masculine flesh, using menstruation and lactation as evidence. Hippocratic physicians, in Diseases of Women 1, even claim that “the womb is the origin of all diseases in women.” Accepting these as truths, women would be entirely convinced that their feminine disposition prevented them from achieving the physical potential of men, and thus the ancient Greek society used the “one-sex” model to strengthen the construction that women were naturally destined for more passive, sickly, and limited lifestyles.
Other physicians of the time worked within the “one-sex” body model in different, yet similarly imaginative ways: Galen of the 2nd Century CE detailed the vagina as an inverted penis, Aristotle of the 4th Century BCE explained feminine bodies’ continuously failure to convert seminal residue into generative matter. In most every case, women of ancient Greece were told that they were the deformed and dysfunction versions of men that were deserving of the lowest societal positions and stagnant lives.