Medical misogyny is the long-standing tendency within medicine to treat women’s bodies, pain, testimony, sexuality, and reproductive lives as less credible, less autonomous, or less worthy of serious study. It is not just individual sexist behaviour by doctors; historically, it has been built into medical theories, institutions, research practices, childbirth systems, and legal regulation.
A useful thesis is:
Medical misogyny developed through the repeated medicalisation of women’s bodies as unstable, reproductive, emotional, and unreliable, while male bodies and male expertise were treated as the norm.
1. Ancient roots: the womb as explanation
One of the oldest forms of medical misogyny was the idea that women’s health was governed by the womb. The very word hysteria comes from the Greek hystera, meaning womb, and ancient and later medical traditions often explained women’s physical or emotional distress through reproductive anatomy. The Royal College of Nursing notes that the linguistic connection between gynaecology, hysteria, and the womb reflects a long history in which women’s health was treated as mysterious, dirty, or abnormal.
This matters because it created a durable medical habit: when women reported symptoms, those symptoms could be interpreted as the product of femininity itself rather than as evidence of disease, pain, trauma, or social harm. Hysteria became one of the classic examples of this pattern: a broad diagnostic category through which women’s suffering, anger, sexuality, or nonconformity could be pathologised.
2. Early medicine: the male body as norm
For much of Western medical history, women were often understood as biologically derivative, weaker, colder, more passive, or more governed by reproductive function. The problem was not simply that medicine lacked knowledge; it was that medical knowledge was organised through gender hierarchy. The “normal” body was implicitly male, while the female body was often treated as a reproductive variation, a problem, or a risk.
This is the deep background to modern complaints that women are still told their pain is “normal,” hormonal, emotional, or psychological. The older language has changed, but the epistemic structure often remains: men’s symptoms are more readily read as clinical evidence, while women’s symptoms are more easily read as exaggeration, anxiety, or bodily instability.
3. Childbirth and the rise of male obstetric authority
Childbirth is central to the history of medical misogyny. Birth had long been managed largely by women, midwives, kin networks, and local forms of knowledge. From the eighteenth century, however, male physicians and surgeons increasingly entered childbirth as “man-midwives.” The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh describes the eighteenth century as the period in which surgeons and physicians attempted to medicalise pregnancy and childbirth, with men entering the field in growing numbers from around 1730. It also notes that women’s exclusion from medical schools gave men leverage to undermine female authority in the birthing chamber.
This did not mean that obstetrics was simply bad: instruments, anatomy, and surgical knowledge sometimes saved lives. But it did mean that childbirth increasingly became a site where women’s embodied knowledge could be displaced by professional male expertise. The birthing woman became more easily treated as a patient-object within a hierarchy rather than as an active subject.
This is very relevant to your point about Nohr: childbirth is difficult for rights-claiming because the biomedical hierarchy is already historically structured to privilege professional knowledge over women’s lived experience.
4. Nineteenth-century gynaecology: experimentation, race, and pain
The nineteenth century is one of the clearest periods in which medical misogyny and racism intersected. Modern gynaecology developed partly through the treatment and experimentation of poor, enslaved, and otherwise powerless women. Deirdre Cooper Owens’s Medical Bondage argues that nineteenth-century American gynaecologists advanced medicine while also creating racialised and gendered myths, including the idea that Black enslaved women could withstand more pain than white women.
This is crucial because medical misogyny was never experienced equally by all women. Black women, enslaved women, Indigenous women, poor women, disabled women, and immigrant women were often treated not merely as irrational or fragile, but as exploitable, hyper-reproductive, sexually suspect, or biologically different in ways that justified harsher treatment. Cooper Owens’s work shows how race, gender, class, and medical authority were built together in the origins of American gynaecology.
5. Women excluded from medical authority
Medical misogyny was also institutional: women were not only misrepresented as patients; they were excluded as producers of medical knowledge. Elizabeth Blackwell’s career illustrates this. She was rejected by numerous medical colleges before being admitted to Geneva Medical College in New York in 1847, and in 1849 she became the first woman to receive an M.D. from an American medical school. The University of Bristol notes that she later became the first woman entered on the British General Medical Council’s medical register in 1859.
This exclusion mattered because it shaped what counted as medical evidence. If women were largely absent from medical education, research leadership, professional bodies, and hospital authority, then women’s own accounts of menstruation, childbirth, menopause, pain, sexuality, and reproductive harm were easier to dismiss.
6. Early twentieth century: hospital birth and loss of autonomy
In the early twentieth century, childbirth became increasingly hospital-based in many settings. One striking example is twilight sleep, a method developed in Germany in 1906 using scopolamine and morphine. It aimed to relieve the pain of childbirth, but it also produced amnesia: women could wake with no memory of the birth. The Embryo Project notes that twilight sleep contributed to the shift from home birth to hospital birth and increased the use of obstetric anaesthesia.
The point is not that pain relief is misogynistic. The point is that pain relief was often embedded in a paternalistic model: doctors decided, women were sedated, and birth became something done to the woman rather than with her. This is part of the longer history behind contemporary concerns about consent, coercion, episiotomy, forceps, caesarean section, and obstetric violence.
7. Eugenics and reproductive control
Medical misogyny also took the form of controlling who was allowed to reproduce. In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, eugenics movements labelled many people “unfit,” including disabled people, poor people, ethnic and religious minorities, and others. The National Human Genome Research Institute explains that eugenics spread from England to the United States and other countries, and that the American movement focused heavily on sterilising those labelled “feebleminded.”
The 1927 U.S. Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell upheld the compulsory sterilisation of Carrie Buck, a young woman labelled “feebleminded” after she had been raped and institutionalised. This shows how misogyny, classism, ableism, and state power converged: reproductive capacity was treated as something the state and medical authorities could manage, restrict, or remove.
8. Research exclusion: women left out of evidence
A more modern form of medical misogyny is the exclusion of women from clinical research. In 1977, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration recommended excluding women of childbearing potential from early-phase drug trials, even where women used contraception or were unlikely to become pregnant. The NIH Office of Research on Women’s Health states that this policy contributed to a shortage of data on how drugs affect women.
This is a subtle but powerful form of misogyny: women were excluded “for protection,” but the result was that medicine knew less about women’s bodies, drug responses, symptoms, and risks. The male body again became the default evidence base.
9. Contemporary residues: pain, disbelief, and childbirth mistreatment
Medical misogyny is now often discussed through epistemic injustice: women are not believed as reliable knowers of their own bodies. This is visible in delayed diagnosis of endometriosis, adenomyosis, autoimmune disease, chronic pain, heart disease, and reproductive health conditions.
In the UK, the Women and Equalities Committee warned in 2024 that women with painful reproductive health conditions are often having symptoms normalised and pain dismissed, with “medical misogyny” contributing to poor awareness, lack of research, limited treatment options, and de-prioritised gynaecological care.
In childbirth, the World Health Organization has framed disrespect and abuse during facility-based childbirth as a violation of women’s rights to respectful care and a threat to rights including life, health, bodily integrity, and freedom from discrimination. The CDC similarly reported in 2023 that about one in five women surveyed in the United States reported mistreatment during maternity care, with higher reported rates among Black, Hispanic, and multiracial women.
The overall pattern
Across history, medical misogyny repeatedly appears in four forms:
- Pathologisation — women’s normal bodily processes, pain, sexuality, anger, or distress are treated as disease or instability.
- Disbelief — women’s testimony is treated as emotional, exaggerated, or unreliable.
- Control — women’s reproductive capacity is managed by doctors, states, courts, husbands, hospitals, or public policy.
- Exclusion — women are excluded from medical education, research, professional authority, and evidence-making.
So, historically, medical misogyny is not simply “medicine got women wrong.” It is more structural:
Medicine often produced women as objects of knowledge while denying them authority as subjects of knowledge.
Human rights approaches imagine women as rights-holders who can speak, claim, and challenge power. But the history of medical misogyny shows why that is difficult: the clinical setting has long been organised to make women’s embodied knowledge appear less authoritative than biomedical expertise.