Passion for Measurement & the Female Body

Where fully quantitative statistical analysis is not practical, we nevertheless seek to classify. Bureaucracies draw up elaborately formalized job descriptions, even though these may have only a loose relationship to what workers will do once hired. The most personal behaviors or peculiarities of individuals are catagorized and classified, and if they are considered inappropriate or unattractive, they are given names as psychiatric disorders with specified symptoms.

The passion for measurement has been applied, or misapplied, to women in a variety of ways. Whether it is hysteria or premenstrual syndrome (PMS), when women behave or seem to behave in ways that men do not immediately understand, men can give themselves a sense of understanding by classifying the behavior and giving it a name. They may subsequently learn, as they did in the case of hysteria, that the behavior in question is not after all peculiar to women. Or they may identify as a "syndrome" (implying a medical abnormality), something that is supposedly characteristic of most or all women, implying that the e

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e perceived need for measurement had not yet overcome the traditional barriers between a man and a woman's bodily zone of privacy. In the course of his medical practice, Storch recorded, in greater or lesser detail, on over eighteen hundred medical cases involving women (Duden, 1991, p. v). He carried out actual physical examination on very few of them. Some patients, indeed, he treated over a period of years without ever seeing in person; the patient described her symptoms in letters, and he responded with letters to recommend treatment. On the rare occasions when some physical examination was required, a patient's family member or friend was typically pressed into service to perform the examination and tell Storch what was found. Social barriers between the sexes do not alone account for this rare recourse to examination. In Storch's day, the interior of the living body was still a mysterious place, of "hidden activities;" and "people could speculate about its inside only with the help of signs that appeared on the body or emanated from it" (Duden, 1991, p. 106). Anatomical studies had revealed its overall structure, but the body was not yet conceived in a mechanistic way, subdivided off into "systems" that interacted with
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 3914
Approximate Pages = 16 (250 words per page)

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