That sounds like a myth to me. I’d have to see some primary sources before I’d believe it.
Bear in mind that women routinely hunted on horseback for centuries, galloping all over the countryside, jumping fences and ditches, etc. Especially wealthy upper-class women.
Might I suggest looking into the history of Ruth Bader Ginsberg? Livescience did an article about her and how she got her start. The very concept of “natural law” is discussed there.
Why would you think that such a belief was a “myth” just because it sounds ridiculous in modern times? People in Victorian and pre-Victorian times believed a lot of stupid things, particularly about new-fangled things as in the examples cited – about trains, and later automobiles and telephones. (A tradition that continues today, with a plethora of stupid conspiracy theories about nearly every major event, or the belief that the Large Hadron Collider will destroy the world, if not the entire universe!)
For example, here are cited examples of the Victorian-era belief that riding in trains caused lunacy:
On the uterus belief, there’s certainly evidence to suggest that at least some really believed it. This, for example:
The myth, however, could’ve developed before Dr. Gerson put pen to paper …
… “On the basis of no scientific evidence whatsoever,” McCrone writes, doctors of physiology related biology to behavior, figuring that women who “displayed symptoms of aggression, ambition and competitiveness were incompletely developed and prone to disease.” A woman who engaged in sport, therefore, could be sterile or transmit her unfavorable characteristics to her children who, in turn, would likely be degenerate.
The climate was clearly ripe during the Victorian era for the emergence of the falling uterus myth. But while the fable seems to have developed in the 1800s, what’s truly surprising is how long it has endured.
Genevieve Bell, anthropologist and director of Intel Corporation’s Interaction and Experience Research, says the burgeoning use of the steam engine in the early 19th century incited an unusual panic. Some “experts” believed that women’s bodies weren’t fit to travel at 50 mph. “They thought that our uteruses would fly out of our bodies as the train accelerated to that speed,” says Bell.
Different things. Science has the concept sometimes called Laws of Nature which usually means really the laws of physics dealing with things like gravitation, the speed of light, the properties of fluids, atomic decay, etc. “Natural Law” is a philosophical concept about “how things should rightly be” and it is often applied to things such as the right of property, armed self-defense, hierarchy of government, patriarchy/matriarchy, etc. that you can’t really measure in the lab.
“This person has XY chromosomes” = Science
“Therefore he must be assumed to be required to assume for life the role of a cishet male in a society where that is the privileged position, and he does not get to say otherwise” = Alleged to be “Natural Law” by some
I’m unconvinced by your cites. Sensationalist articles quoting other other sensationalist articles are not evidence.
I followed up a couple of the references to 19th century sources and found that they didn’t say anything like what was claimed.
There are incidents of crime on trains, and an incident of an insane person on a train, but nowhere is it claimed that travelling by train caused the insanity or crime.
It would be very strange if they did, since those articles date to the mid- to late 19th century when travelling by train was totally routine for millions of people every day.
It also doesn’t really help to quote theories by some random person that would have caused everybody to roll their eyes at time. Or articles in the 19th century equivalent of the National Enquirer.
This is really outside the scope of this thread, but if you have any solid evidence from 19th century sources (which is what I meant when I said primary sources), I’d be interested to see it.
Fine with me. But among the many things you’re dismissing are a number of direct quotes, including a 19th century medical paper, and the explicit corroboration by Genevieve Bell, who is a renowned anthropologist “best known for her work at the intersection of cultural practice and technological development”, and whom I quoted just above as confirming what I said earlier. You are certainly free to value your personal hunches over the historical knowledge of a renowned scholar.
An anthropologist focusing on Native American Studies and computer technology is not an historian.
Seems to me that if someone actually IS breaking a natural law then there would be subsequent natural consequences that wouldn’t require any sort of human intervention or enforcement. If breaking a “natural law” is consequence free aside from the voluntary enforcement by humans then you don’t have much standing to insist that nature requires one to obey it.
To be fair to the old folks, however, there is a long tradition in parenting of people taking up with fancy new ideas that, on closer examination, turn out to suck. Thinking of things like Ezzo/‘Babywise’ or the ‘modern, scientific’ theories of childrearing from the 30s as for instance here. And since raising a child is a long process with very little oversight, it’s not till they’re in therapy at 40 that you realise how much you screwed the pooch.
I don’t have anything in particular against the parents in the Time article, mind you.
Western civilization’s strong condemnation of masturbation. What the hell could be more natural than giving oneself manual sexual relief? Yet our society holds it to be sinful, wrong, weak, corrupting, even harmful. (“You’ll go blind!”) Absurd!
(What is the sound of one hand clapping?)
Here is an article in Vol. 1 of the medical journal Lancet from 1906, discussing a claim from a female train passenger that a minor train accident caused her uterine prolapse, presumably from the sudden deceleration:
That is certainly not exactly the same thing as claiming that ordinary railway travel could make women’s uteruses literally “fly out of their bodies”. But it is definitely primary-source evidence that as late as the first decade of the 20th century, the general public and even some medical practitioners considered it plausible that the suddenness of motion in train travel could cause uterine prolapse.
Lending money at interest—originally, all interest was considered usurious —was considered “unnatural” as the lender did nothing to earn their money. From nothing, nothing should come. The argument was made as an analogy to sodomy, another unproductive activity. Interestingly enough, the Catholic Church relaxed the ban on interest but held fast on sodomy
Looks that way to me too.
It’s ‘natural law’ that humans can’t fly just by running fast and flapping our arms. Works for a lot of birds; doesn’t work for us.
It’s ‘natural law’ that humans don’t live forever, or even for, say, 500 years. There are people seriously trying to violate this one, but we haven’t needed to discuss human laws on the subject yet.
It’s ‘natural law’ that dogs and cats don’t learn to read. There have been human societies that had laws forbidding certain humans to read; nobody to the best of my knowledge has bothered to pass a law forbidding the cats to do so.
Basically, if people have to pass a law about it to try to stop it from happening, then I don’t see how it can be ‘natural law’.
Does the concept of “natural justice” have any place in this discussion?
When they first had anesthesia didn’t they refuse it to women in childbirth, because it went against God’s law that it was natural for a woman to have pain in childbirth?
Not really.
A woman had a uterine prolapse and was involved in a train accident at about the same time. She claimed that the train accident was the cause of the prolapse, and sued the railway company for damages. She found a doctor to support her claim, but both the railway company doctor and the doctor called in to arbitrate said it wasn’t possible.
They thought that cell phones caused cancer of the brain!
They thought that when the Large Hadron Collider was started up it would destroy the universe!
They thought that if computers became too powerful they would become intelligent and destroy the human race!
They thought that God would protect them from viruses if they went to church!
They thought that it was healthy for women to steam their vaginas!
To our modern minds, here is a fascinating and strange aspect about “natural law” arguments: an issue that seems crazy to us, but was a serious part of the womens suffrage movement a hundred years ago.
Because, ya know, nowadays we all agree that women should vote because they are equal, right? But not then! They wanted to give women the right to vote because women are superior to men, by natural law.
“The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom … thought that men were deeply irrational, and that women were just the opposite…”
These women felt that the most important thing was to … give women the vote so that there could be no future wars.”
These women argued very strongly… there could be no more wars, because women would never vote for war."
(Isn’t it fun to see how concepts which our grandparents took seriously turned out to be wrong? ) 
source of this quote :(the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council)
I’m not sure what you think this is supposed to prove. All of these beliefs (except maybe the last one, which I’ve never heard of) are perfectly valid examples of beliefs that some people hold. I even mentioned the Large Hadron Collider example myself, in post #23.
If your point is supposed to be that no one with any sense would believe any of these things, I disagree on two grounds. One is that you might be amazed at how many people don’t have any sense (cite: current American politics). The other is that, depending on interpretation, there are elements of truth in some of them. With regard to cell phones, for example, we can only say that no conclusive evidence has ever been found that cell phone radiation is a health hazard, but it’s impossible to rule out some probability of cumulative long-term effects.
The LHC? Enough people were worried about it that CERN had to put out an official statement of reassurance, and even so IIRC had to state it in terms of vanishingly low probability.
And on the third point, some pretty smart futurists have publicly worried about the potential dangers of stronger artificial intelligence, and possibly for very good reason – not that it will be malicious or tyrannical, but that we will be in its power because our modern technological world will depend on it, and indeed to a significant extent it already does.
But yes, we believe in a lot of stupid things, to which I could add 9/11 truthers, moon landing deniers, and climate change deniers. We also believe in wild exaggerations of things that may or may not contain a grain of truth. And I would venture to guess that in the Victorian era and prior, people likely believed even more stupid things because they were generally less educated and in any case science and medicine were far more primitive and public knowledge about the sciences almost nil.
So it’s hard to understand why you’d be skeptical about some of the ridiculous things some people believed back in Victorian and pre-Victorian times, or why you would doubt the statement of someone like Genevieve Bell about it. I never said she was a “historian”, by the way, I said she was a renowned anthropologist specializing in understanding the impacts of technology on societal beliefs and behaviors and is therefore a credible source of historical knowledge on these matters.
There was this one actor who was touting it not too long ago. I guess the premise is that the vagina is an icky, dirty place and though you can squirt lavender-scented water up in there to clean it out, hey, steam is even better than water to clean things.
Neither practice is recommended by anyone who has made a proper study of vaginal health, and the steaming practice, AFAIK, never really caught on, because, pretty as she may be, most people think that particular actor/huckster is a bit goofy in the head.