Conceptualising Gender and Pain in Modern History

Pain is a defining feature of the human experience. We have all, at some point in our lives, felt physical or emotional discomfort that fits under the broad umbrella of ‘pain’. Though the phenomenon of pain is universal, the ways it is experienced, perceived and conceptualised are shaped by the wider social, cultural and political milieu. The characterisation and articulation of pain is profoundly influenced by gender. In some historical and contemporary contexts, the female body has been associated with heightened sensitivity of various types. At other times, female bodies have been singled out for their ability to bear extreme pain, especially during childbirth. In a 1932 American survey published by the Journal of Social Psychology, 70 per cent of physicians and dentists believed that women were superior to men in withstanding pain.1 Even at the end of the 1980s, a British study commissioned by the drug company that made Nurofen found that 75 per cent of people agreed that women were ‘better able to tolerate pain than men’. Interestingly, the generalisation was held to be correct by 86 per cent of women compared with only 64 per cent of men.2 Representations of male stoicism – or the perceived lack thereof – in the face of physical and emotional discomfort have also been powerful images in a range of national and historical contexts. In particular, men’s experience of and responses to wartime suffering have tended to convey powerful messages about national as well as personal character, the ‘rightness’ of the cause, and the ‘valour’ of manliness itself. In brief: women and men have long been thought to experience bodily sensations, including pain, in a variety of culturally and historically specific ways. And in both past and present contexts, it matters whether a person has been categorised as male or female. In recent decades, medical researchers have attempted to delineate the multifaceted impacts of gender, in addition to sex, on individual pain experiences. In a 1993 editorial published in the American journal, Pain, National Institutes of Health (NIH) researcher M. A. Ruda posited that ‘with the emphasis on equality of the sexes that occurred in the 1980s, it has not been politically correct to suggest that men and women are different’. Ruda nonetheless asserted that ‘we all know that men and women are different!’ and went on to argue that the time had come for further study of the physiological and psychological ‘gender issues that relate to pain’.3 Though social scientists