Early embryology cast the female as passive vessel for a preformed male seed

Evidence

In the middle of the seventeenth century, Harvey, slaughtering female deer shortly after they had mated, found vesicles in the uterine horns that he thought were eggs but that were really embryos. The Danish scientist Steno coined the term “ovaries” for the female genital glands that had until then been called “feminine testicles,” and he noted the existence of vesicles on their surface that Graaf, in 1672, had erroneously identified as eggs and to which he gave his name. The ovary was still regarded as a homologue of the male gland. That same year, though, “spermatic animalcules” were discovered penetrating the feminine womb. But it was thought that they went there for nourishment only, and that the individual was already prefigured in them; in 1694, the Dutchman Hartsoeker drew an image of the homunculus hidden in the sperm, and in 1699 another scientist declared he had seen the sperm cast off a kind of slough under which there was a little man, which he also drew. In these hypotheses woman merely fattened a living and active, and perfectly constituted, principle. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 81

Categorization

• QUESTION: The homunculus drawings by Hartsoeker are striking — worth chasing the original image and its cultural afterlife.
• SEED: Angle: how the homunculus theory of the 1690s prefigures modern tropes of male seed as the sole ‘active’ genetic contribution.
• XREF: connects to: Biology refutes both the female-passivity bias and the male-effervescence bias at the gamete level — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 85; Virginity destruction makes the female body an irrevocably passive object — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 343

Broader Connections

• Biology refutes both the female-passivity bias and the male-effervescence bias at the gamete level #contradicts (0.90) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 85
• Virginity destruction makes the female body an irrevocably passive object #qualifies (0.75) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 343