Opinion
It’s not often vaginal prolapses are in the news. It’s not often they are spoken about in public. Or even, much of the time, in private. They are hidden, swept away, kept quiet. Even though millions of women suffer from them.
Queen Victoria didn’t speak of hers. She had nine children but it was not until she was examined on her deathbed that her doctor, Sir James Reid, found she had a prolapsed uterus, which must have been the source of considerable pain for many years.
As her biographer, I wondered if it was simply stigma that had prevented so many other historians mentioning this, along with a sense that it would be considered impolite, prurient or vulgar to do so. But it makes sense of the last decades of her life: her reliance on strong servants to carry her, her use of a rolling chair, the fact that she sat outside St Paul’s Cathedral in her carriage for her entire Diamond Jubilee ceremony. Little wonder she had a hand-operated lift installed in 1893 in her holiday home – Osborne House on the Isle of Wight.
A prolapse may not have been the sole cause of this behaviour – she also had a ventral hernia and rheumatism – but was surely a crucial contributing factor.
I felt for her – no wonder she got so grumpy sometimes. And no wonder she decried childbirth, how it made her feel like “a cow or a dog”.
Now, 125 years after her death, it is evident that while medical advances have been significant, there is still shame, silence and stigma associated with something remarkably common.
Which is why so many applauded Senator Jacqui Lambie when she stood in parliament – while arguing for subsidised healthcare for veterans – and spoke about the vaginal and bladder prolapse that had caused her to have surgery and take five months off work.
Most prolapses occur after childbirth, but can also be caused by heavy lifting, exertion, sport, combat training or, in Lambie’s case, injuries that occurred during army service.
Lambie argued that the Department of Veterans’ Affairs did not provide adequate compensation for such conditions. “You want us to have babies for the country,” she said, “but you’re not interested in supporting our reproductive systems … Australian women’s vaginas are not made of Australian steel.”
And it’s also why it was such an obvious mistake for Pauline Hanson to initially refuse to apologise for the “Please Explain” cartoon that mocked Lambie’s condition. In it, the animated character of Lambie keeps clutching her crotch and says she can’t laugh because of her prolapse.
At first, Hanson said it was satirical and Lambie should “get over it”. The backlash was swift.
Hanson has since said the cartoon went up without her seeing it, and she had not known of its content. “I respect people’s views and opinions out there,” she said “and it wasn’t as tastefully done as it could’ve been and I do apologise for that.”
It was foolish to mock and dismiss something so many women suffer from.
Like much of women’s health, prolapses are under-examined, so prevalence studies are thin and vary greatly, but it’s clearly widespread. Lambie claimed one in 12 Australian women have had a similar condition, while Johns Hopkins Medicine states almost half of all women between 50 and 79 have “some degree of uterine or vaginal vault prolapse, or some other form of pelvic organ prolapse”.
One study found prolapses had a strong impact on women’s ability to parent, do sport, “their own perceptions of their ability as mothers”, and their mental health, made worse by stigma and “expectations placed on women to put up with their symptoms”.
Younger women are done with suffering in silence, and angered that their mothers, grandmothers – even queens – felt forced to do so.
Not only did Queen Victoria deal with bodily pain, she was also the object of far more violent attacks than the kings who reigned before her – a total of eight assassination attempts by seven men. The first, in 1840, told police he didn’t think a woman should reign over a great country like Britain. The poet Elizabeth Barrett (later Browning) bemoaned “this strange popular mania of queen-shooting”, telling a friend she was “very angry” that Victoria was targeted while George IV was left alone. A former soldier struck Victoria in the face with a brass tipped cane, leaving a welt that remained for years.
The “undercurrent” Barrett spoke of remains the same today – a heightened, increasingly violent antipathy towards women in positions of power. The violence is not simply gendered of course – abuse and attacks have been directed at all MPs – but research has consistently shown violent threats against female MPs are more frequent and brutal than those against their male colleagues.
We have somehow managed to normalise and accept much of this ugliness as part of having a public position. As NSW Greens MP Amanda Cohen said in these pages, “Rape and death threats shouldn’t be dismissed as a normal part of my job.”
As we gather to digest the awful attack on the beloved Helen Haines this week, and try to work out what to do about the rise in vicious, violent, real threats, this weighting against, and weirdness about women, needs to be a part of any conversation about safety, security and respect. We like to blame modern times and modern platforms, but answers, too, can be found in our long history of insisting that women quietly endure.
Julia Baird is a journalist, author and regular columnist. Her latest book is Bright Shining: how grace changes everything.
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