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The links between women, motherhood, the family, and natural morality may help to explain the emphasis on the breast in much medical literature. . . . While the uterus and ovaries interested nineteenth-century gynaecologists, the breast caught the attention of eighteenth-century medical practitioners who were concerned with moral philosophy and ethics. The breast symbolized women's role in the family through its association with the suckling of babies. It appeared to define the occupational status of females in private work in the family, not in public Ufe. The breast was visible - it was the sign of femininity that men recognized. It could thus be said to be a social law that sexual attraction was founded on the breast, and a natural law that women should breast feed their own children. . . . The breasts of women not only symbolized the most fundamental social bond, that between mother and child, but they were also the means by which families were made since their beauty elicited the desires of the male for the female.
- Ludmilla Jordanova1
The locus - both symbolic and real - of this new appropriation of women's bodies for motherhood and for the state was the maternal breast It was as if this organ became the site of the struggle over the maternal definition of women, staged in opposition to the sexual definition of women.
-Ruth Perry2
The first edition of Captain Charles Johnson's A General History of the Robberies and Murders Of the Most Notorious Pyrates appeared in 1724.3 It included the stories of two female pirates, Anne Bonny and Mary Read, attached as an appendix to the story of Captain "Calico Jack" Rackam, whose crew they had been part of. This edition includes illustrations of Bonny and Read, dressed in men's clothes with cutlasses and hatchets: it is a representation that emphasizes their ferocity and their masculine aspect (see Fig. 1). They stand with legs apart, firmly planted, brandishing their weapons, dressed in jackets and wide-legged pants, and ready to fight. Their hair is loose and flows around their shoulders, but this is an ambiguous sign of gender. Behind them lie three ships at anchor, near a promontory with palm trees, contextualizing them in the West Indies. The picture's caption...