Having read the fascinating collection of essays in this volume, I am struck afresh by two fundamental and enmeshed questions: how ‘history’ is produced and what that production may be seen to offer us. For what immediately became clear to me in considering these essays together is that the constitutions of the female bodies in the texts under consideration here, from early modern to twentieth century, on the one hand provide a reading of pasts which, seen retrospectively, may often seem unscientific, ignorant, or sexist compared to our present in terms of their claims to knowledge of female reproduction and sexuality; while on the other hand those problematic aspects may seem at once entirely current and pertinent to our present. I would suggest that this double effect may be attributed both, or either, to reading history as a production of the past in, and as, the present (as many thinkers have famously argued), and/or to seeing the fundamental issues around female sexuality and reproduction that are further illuminated in the essays in this volume as remaining as pressing and relevant in our present as in the pasts examined here.

For across the essays two related issues recur insistently, to my reading: first, the positions of male authority, knowledge, and professionalism in relation to female authenticity, experience, and knowledge; and second, the crucial role of vision in securing male authority over female experience.