Vaginismus

We saw in Chapter 1 that female impotence was a well-established concept in medical and legal thought from the seventeenth century onwards, without usually being considered an enduring obstacle to copulation or marriage. In only a few cases, most doctors declared, was the woman prevented from yielding to the man’s desires. Those cases were generically defined in canon law as arctitudo, or narrowness of the genital parts, and some version of that view continued to be influential for centuries: there was thought to be a small, exceptional class of women who were physically incapable of intercourse. But some equivocation was produced in the nineteenth century by the increasing preoccupation with ‘moral’ causes in addition to physical ones.