In the beginning, cellularly speaking, you were an oocyte. This is long before you were born, even before your mother was born. She was in fact just seven weeks past her own conception when “primordial germ cells colonize[d her] newly formed ovary” (Szmelskyj). It sounds like the setup of a sci-fi/horror miniseries, but I promise I’m getting it out of a scientific paper.

You were not then the one-of a-kind wonder that you are today because you had company. Lots of company. At one point you had anywhere from 5.5 million to 7 million fellow oocytes hanging out with you (Szmelskyj and Hassett, 222). Just imagine it! Seven million hypothetical siblings rifling through your stuff and taking the last piece of dessert. But not to worry, you began to outpace your competition almost immediately. Your mother, still a fetus herself, not only stopped creating oocytes, she actually began misplacing them, quite carelessly, and on a massive scale so that by the time she was born, most of your potential siblings had already come to the end of their days, and you were down to only one or two million possible siblings.

Nor did the maternal neglect stop there. By the time she hit puberty, your mother had a mere 400,000 oocytes left, and roughly once a month she lost 1,000 more, along with one very special one which was released into the fallopian tube, at which point it became an egg or ovum, probably destined to pass into nothingness, but possibly, maybe, if the stars align, to meet up with a sperm cell, which your father had cooked up just 64 days earlier. A rushed and slipshod job compared to the years upon years in which your mother had been nurturing her oocytes.

Up until this point, there has been nothing to make you either male or female, since all eggs carry an X chromosome. It’s the sperm that carries either an X or Y chromosome. If you are female (and according to Spotify statistics 91% of you lovely listeners are) then it’s because an X-chromosomed sperm got the egg.

Of course for most of human history, people didn’t know all of this. Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn and all of the uncountable millions of women who “failed” because they gave birth to a girl, could have very scientifically snapped back that it was actually all their husband’s fault. But that probably wouldn’t have helped them.

There has never been a point when a pregnant woman didn’t wonder if they were expecting a girl or a boy. Nowadays we want to know partly out of curiosity and partly to know what color to paint the nursery.

Historical women had more disturbing reasons. Way back in episode 2.1, I discussed the origin of the patriarchy that exists in almost every historical civilization, and once that’s established then all human beings are really not created equal because boys inherit and bring their wives’ dowries into the family, while girls have to be provided with a dowry which they will take into someone else’s family.

In other words, girls are cute, but they are not as cute as they are expensive. Boys are cute too and a much, much better investment. And that is the root of a enormous amount of female misery throughout history.

But we’re not at misery or cuteness yet, your mother is just expecting you and your chromosome distribution is still unknown. Or is it?

The Chancy Business of Predicting Gender

In the days before ultrasounds there were still plenty of experts eager to dispel the mystery. One of the earliest experts was Aristotle, a man who managed to be the basis for a very large percentage of Western thought while simultaneously being spectacularly wrong about an amazing number of things. Aristotle says that mothers can tell whether the baby is a boy or a girl because boys move in the womb at 40 days, being big and strong and manly already, while girls, being weak and puny, don’t move until 90 days. Also boys move on the right because right is good. Girls move on the left because left is not good. He also says pregnancies are easier if it’s a boy, and it frequently takes girls a full 10 months to be ready for exit and that “fancies” (by which I think he means cravings) are strongest if the mother is having a girl.

Having told expectant mothers all of this, he rounds it off by hedging his bets. He says “We must not suppose, however, that an accurate judgment can be formed in this way” (Aristotle, 183-185), and that is a statement I can wholeheartedly agree with.

Aristotle wrote all of this in the 4th century BCE within a History of Animals. It wasn’t really a medical textbook. A later Greek physician named Soranus wrote a 4-volume treatise on gynecology in the 1st or 2nd century CE, and he is dubious on the subject of predicting gender. He quotes Hippocrates as saying that a mother with good color, easy movement, and a right breast that is bigger and firmer than her left is carrying a boy. But Soranus audaciously contradicts the great Hippocrates and says this is untrue. He also says that some say a boy fetus moves more, while a girl is slower and causes her mother to vomit more, but Soranus adds drily that “these things are more plausible than true” (Soranus, 44-45).

The question is who are these people who said so? The answer is unclear, but we can guess. Most births were not attended by doctors. What did they know about pregnancy or childbirth? The people who knew were women who had done this themselves and helped other women do it. Midwives, in other words, and in the ancient world, midwives didn’t write books. At least not ones that were copied and recopied and made their way down to us.

Over in the far East, things were similar. No doubt midwives had a great deal of knowledge, but the earliest text on the subject is from 168 BCE, the Taichanshu or Book of Gestation and Birth. It was a veritable What to Expect When You’re Expecting of its day.

It gave a lot of dietary advice, like making sure you eat mud eel in the fourth month (Wilms, 102), and also that you should boil baimugou and eat it so that your “child will be beautiful and dazzling, and it will emerge easily” (Lee, “Gender and Medicine,” 22).

You may be wondering with, trepidation, what baimugou actually is, and your concern is warranted because it is either (depending on translation) mole crickets or it is the head of a white male dog (Lee, “Childbirth in Early China,” 224). Thus begins a long and glorious tradition of telling women that if your child happens to not be beautiful or dazzling, it is definitely your fault. You really should have eaten more crickets. Or dogs.

More to the point for our purposes is that the Taichanshu also tells a woman how to ensure a male fetus. You do it by eating male insects or animals. That may be easy enough in the case of a chicken dinner, but how you determine whether your mole crickets are male or female, I surely do not know. (Lee, “Gender and Medicine,” 9). Other early Chinese texts suggest shooting male pheasants, riding male horses, putting the feathers of a male duck under your bed, and (my personal favorite) urinating in places where roosters are washed (Lee, “Gender and Medicine,” 9). So now it’s not just that you ate wrong, but also that you urinated wrong.

The Chinese were also the first to visually depict the growing fetus in a series that tracks a woman through each stage of her pregnancy. Our oldest extant version is a Japanese copy made in 982 CE, but the Chinese original could have been much older (Wilms, 106). The pictures (which I have put on the website herhalfofhistory.com) do not show that fetus as having any particular sex organs as far as I can tell.

Back in Europe, books were getting more common again and occasionally women got a mention in them. One such text from the late 13th or early 14th century is tantalizingly called On the Secrets of Women, which is undoubtedly why male celibate monks liked copying it and once the printing press had been invented, this book had over 120 editions (Magnus. 1).

The author took all those ancient Greek and Roman ideas and let his imagination run wild with them. For example, if a pregnant woman’s face is red that’s good, it means she has enough heat and power to cook up a boy, instead of a disappointing girl. Also if any milk from the breasts is thick and doesn’t separate, then that’s good too because it means a boy. Or if you prick that mother on her right side, you can get a drop of blood and put it in water, or if you’re super dedicated, in the mother’s urine. If the blood floats, it’s a boy.

And if all that has still not given you the answer you want, you can put salt on the mother’s nipples. You’re hoping it will not liquefy because boys equal heat and power and heat hardens things, therefore it’s a boy. If the salt does liquefies, the mother’s having a girl for sure (Magnus, 123-124).

A more chancy method is to watch a pregnant woman closely as she moves. If she starts walking with her right foot, it’s a boy because one always places the heavier foot first. Or watch when she stands up: if she places her right hand on her knee first, it’s a boy. However, these are not the preferred methods of prediction because any expectant mother can sabotage the accuracy if she knows you are watching (Magnus, 124, 125).

A few hundred years later, some of these books were actually written by women, and midwives, no less! Someone with actual experience! What a thought! Unfortunately, that didn’t necessarily improve the advice.

In 1671, Jane Sharp recommended many of the same methods that had now been in vogue for a millennium and a half, some with slight variations, but my favorite thing she said was about cravings. One of the signs of pregnancy is cravings, Jane says, which I think we all knew, and remember that Aristotle thought strong cravings meant a girl. But what I did not know was a specific item that a pregnant women might crave. Jane says that “some women with child have longed to bite off their husband’s buttocks” (Sharp, 103). So there you go. Watch out for that.

So far, I’ve mentioned only the methods listed in semi-serious medical textbooks. You can imagine that the folk traditions proliferated too. One researcher in rural France found women who would drop a coin down their bodice: if it fell heads, it’s a boy, tails for a girl. This one was done right up until World War One.

Or if you had older children, they could give it away. A first word of mama meant the next child was a girl. Dada meant a boy. Except when the rules were reversed, with is a super helpful caveat (Cassidy, 89). What it meant if the first was banana, I don’t know. But then, they probably weren’t importing bananas yet.

The great thing about all of these methods, serious or no, is that whichever one you pick you will be right roughly 50% of the time, and every time you’re right, you’ve proved the method works, right?

I say roughly 50% for a couple of reasons. First, a baby is actually slightly more likely to be a boy. In most countries, there are about 105 boys born for every 100 girls. Girls make up the population imbalance overall by living longer. And second because there are a very small proportion of babies born with unclear sex organs. This was known and mentioned even in some of these historical sources. Our friend Magnus, who wrote On the Secrets of Women included them in the list, and he had the answer on what labels these people should adopt. “Nature always intends to produce a male,” he says with breathtaking confidence. And these people should be designated as men, “because when a determination is made about something, the worthier alternative should be chosen” (Magnus, 117). I recommend not using that argument in the modern world. It won’t go over well, I promise.

Ultrasound at Last

The high-tech method of determining the sex of a fetus was a long time coming. Ultrasound was invented to spot German submarines in World War One. It wasn’t until World War Two that a Scottish obstetrician realized that the difference between a submarine and a fetus was only a question of refinement: both are objects suspended in liquid (Epstein, 192).

Doctors were cautious about using ultrasound, primarily because they had routinely X-rayed pregnant women for fifty years before accepting that it was linked to childhood leukemia. As a result, ultrasound didn’t become a routine part of prenatal care until the 1980s, and of course by routine, I mean routine among mothers who actually have access to medical facilities in the developed world. That still leaves a lot of mothers out.

For those who do have it, a mother can find out the gender of her child starting at roughly sixteen weeks, with an accuracy that Aristotle never dreamed of. If she wants to find out, which not every mother does. Some people have superhuman patience and self-control. I was not one of those mothers.

Anyway, let’s imagine that you have actually been born, no matter when our historical mother found out your sex. Congratulations, you are now a separate entity. All in all, at this stage it may not matter that much to you if you happen to possess a Y chromosome or not. Either way you are likely to be displeased with the world. It’s too cold, too bright, too different from your former paradise, and no doubt you will tell the world of its shortcomings at the top of your voice.

To my surprise, the historical sources did not have much on how to treat girls versus boys at this age (though believe me they will make up for it later). There is a chance that the lying-in period might be different. Jewish women were unclean for seven days if they bore a boy, but a full two weeks if they had a girl. And after that period; it was 33 more days of purification for a boy and 66 for a girl. That’s Leviticus 12. Now you may bristle at the word unclean, and I get that, but if it meant mothers were excused from any of their daily work, I say bring on the uncleanness.

Since it’s in the Bible, some of that got carried over to European Christian manuals, though the exact number of days varied (Sharp, 211).

The mother who produced a son sometimes got better food in celebration (Cassidy, 193), but all in all I’d say that most of the manuals I read recognized that boy or girl, the life of an infant is going to be eat, sleep, excrete, repeat, for a good long while.

Female Infanticide

At least, you hope it’s going to be a good long while. Which brings me to a darker point which we cannot avoid. Infant mortality was high, and boy or girl you might not make it. Actually, girls are a little better than boys at surviving. Infant boy mortality rates are often higher than infant girl mortality rates, whether the overall rate be high or low (Sabu George, 154).

That’s true unless that rate is materially assisted by the surrounding adults. Our friend Soranus, the Greek gynecologist who wrote a 4-volume treatise on the subject, included a chapter with a chilling title: “How to Recognize a Newborn That Is Worth Rearing.”

His checklist includes things like immediate crying, all body parts present, all ducts clear, all joints bendable, etc. What you are supposed to do if any of the answers are no, Soranus leaves delicately unmentioned.

The implications for the disabled are gut wrenching, but what he does not say is anything about gender. Unless you want to interpret all body parts present to include the all-important male body part.

Nevertheless, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that girls were more at risk of infanticide than boys. Certain cultures were famous for it (Greece, China), but the fact is that it happened everywhere. Greece and China were just cultures that wrote things down enough for it to be documented. For example, we have a surviving papyrus from the 1st century BCE in which a Greek husband visiting Egypt wrote home to say that if he gets paid soon, he’ll send some money, and take care of the little one, and if you have the next little one child, then if it is male keep it; if it is female, throw it out (McKechnie, 158-159).

In China, the philosopher Han Feizi was the first to mention female infanticide, saying that “parents’ attitude to children is such that when they bear a son they congratulate each other, but when they bear a daughter they kill her” (Lee, “Female Infanticide,” 164). In colonial India there were families that proudly reported not having raised a girl for a hundred years (Vishwanath, 2315).

But when it comes down to actual data about how often this happened, there we hit a snag. There are plenty of sources eager to give me the figures, but without fail, the very next source says that all that is nonsense. Few historical societies took censuses with any regularity but when then did, then yes you get some pretty skewed gender ratios. Shanghai in 1572 was particularly bad. 460.4 males for every 100 females, therefore rampant female infanticide, right?

Except no. Because censuses always had a tendency to undercount women and children of any gender. Women weren’t necessarily citizens, they couldn’t be pressed into the army, they didn’t necessarily pay the head tax, so why bother counting them? (Lee, “Female Infanticide”, 164). Even more than that, a ratio of 4.6:1 has to be nonsense. Because if it were real, society would collapse, and I don’t just mean in the next generation, I mean immediately. You cannot have that many young men with no prospects for family life, ever, without a seriously destructive social upheaval. The numbers just have to be inaccurate.

Other researchers have fixed the number of female infanticides based on bones they dig up, and males predominate, therefore female infanticide. However, those numbers too are misleading. Unless a whole skeleton is found determining gender is super chancy, maybe as low as 20% (Engels, 113). Plus, bigger thicker bones have a better chance of surviving intact, so you would expect more men to be dug up on average.

Basically, there is just no good way to determine how prevalent this was, but we can determine how prevalent it wasn’t. One study looked at the statistical effect of killing one fifth of all girls in a stable population with high overall -mortality rates, which is a pretty good description of most pre-modern civilizations. The model predicted population decline of 50% in only 57 years and 88% decline in 173 years (Engels, 119).

And yet we know these civilizations survived for much longer than that. They just can’t have been killing more than a small percentage of girls. It’s  statistically impossible. No matter what the anecdotes say.

The answer to all the uncertainty may lie in interpreting what the writers meant when they talked about exposing a child. My mental image is an unhappy baby left out on the rough hillside for the elements to kill or possibly for wolves to take and raise and later to found the city of Rome. Dying of exposure certainly happened, but more commonly mentioned is drowning. it was quick, it was certain, it was clean.

And still others appear to have meant that they dropped the girl off at an orphanage or charity.

True, such institutions had a high mortality rate, and true, those infants who survived were likely to become slaves or prostitutes, so this is not exactly loving parental care, but it’s also not infanticide. It doesn’t have such an overall devastating effect on your gender ratios.

You may ask, wasn’t anyone protesting this? And yes, yes, they were. The Roman stoic philosopher Musonius Rufus wrote an essay called “Should Every Child That Is Born Be Raised?” and his answer was yes. A hundred years later St. Justin Martyr also said don’t expose the baby girls. Admittedly, he seemed less concerned with the daughter’s welfare and more concerned about the possibility that the father would years later visit a brothel and accidentally have sex with his own daughter. So, ew. But putting that aside, note the fundamental assumption there. Justin used the word “exposure,” but he didn’t think it meant the daughter would die. The Chinese poet Su Shi wrote of the horrible custom of drowning children and established a charity to take them in (Lee, “Female Infanticide”, 165).

Governments got into the act too. Romans finally made it a crime to kill a baby in 374 CE. In Yuan dynasty China, if you killed a baby girl your family property could be confiscated (Lee, “Female Infanticide”, 165). The British government tried hard to eradicate the practice in colonial India. It is unclear whether these measures had any effect because the numbers remained hard to prove.

There is very little doubt that Westerners exaggerated the prevalence of the practice in the East. But equally no doubt that it wasn’t entirely fictional, not even in the Christian West. And religion did play a role. Anyone who believed in reincarnation could tell themselves that killing a baby born in poverty freed her spirit to be reborn into a better situation. Christians didn’t have that loophole, which did not mean they didn’t have female infanticide, just that people were more horrified when they found out.

Don’t run away thinking this was only a problem in ancient civilizations or that it was all driven by the men. It was in the late nineteenth century that a Chinese woman said:

“A daughter is a troublesome and expensive thing anyway. Not only has she to be fed, but there is all the trouble of binding her feet, and of getting her betrothed, and of making up her wedding garments; and even after she is married off she must have presents made to her when she has children. Really, it is no wonder that so many baby girls are slain at their birth.”

Quoted in “Female Infanticide in China” by Bernice Lee, p. 176

And that was well before any Chinese had heard of the one-child policy, which did not help the situation.

In the end I can’t give numbers, but I can say that female infanticide definitely happened in the past, and unfortunately still does. But nowadays, most people find it easier to get an ultrasound and abort the girls before they are born, instead of the really really late term option of aborting them afterwards. According to the Pew Research Center, about 142.6 million girls went missing between 1970 and 2020 due to sex-selective abortion or neglect. Together China and India account for 83% of that total, due to a strong cultural preference for sons. The only good news I can find in there is the fact that that preference is shrinking over time. Just not fast enough.

For our purposes in this series, let us assume that you got two X chromosomes, you made it through the birth canal at a viable time, and no one has murdered you in the first couple weeks of your life. It has been a long journey since the time that you were one of seven million oocytes, and now here you are, a bundle of joy, a one-of-a-kind wonder, ready to begin the adventure of being a girl.

Selected Sources

Aristotle. Aristotle’s History of Animals. Translated by Richard Cresswell, George Bell & Sons, 1862, http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/59058/pg59058-images.html#Pg179. Accessed 12 Aug. 2023.

Cassidy, Tina. Birth : The Surprising History of How We Are Born. New York, Grove, 2006.

Engels, Donald. “The Problem of Female Infanticide in the Greco-Roman World.” Classical Philology 75, no. 2 (1980): 112–20. http://www.jstor.org/stable/268918.

Epstein, Randi Hutter. Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank. W. W. Norton & Company, 11 Apr. 2011.

Eucharius Rösslin. When Midwifery Became the Male Physician’s Province. Translated by Wendy Arons, McFarland & Company Incorporated Pub, 1994.

Furth, Charlotte. “Concepts of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Infancy in Ch’ing Dynasty China.” The Journal of Asian Studies 46, no. 1 (1987): 7–35. https://doi.org/10.2307/2056664.

Gélis, Jacques. History of Childbirth : Fertility, Pregnancy, and Birth in Early Modern Europe /. Translated by Rosemary Morris, Cambridge, Uk, Polity Press, 1996.

Hassett, Brenna. Growing up Human. Bloomsbury Publishing, 30 June 2022.

Lee, Bernice J. “Female Infanticide in China.” Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques 8, no. 3 (1981): 163–77. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41298766.

Lee, Jen-Der. “Childbirth in Early Imperial China.” NAN NÜ, vol. 7, no. 2, 2005, pp. 216–286, www2.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/file/2202dixRkWT.pdf, https://doi.org/10.1163/156852605775248658.

LEE, JEN-DER. “Gender and Medicine in Tang China.” Asia Major 16, no. 2 (2003): 1–32. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41649876.

Magnus, Albert. Women’s Secrets : A Translation of Pseudo-Albertus Magnus’s de Secretis Mulierum with Commentaries. Translated by Helen Rodnite Lemay, New York, State University Of New York Press, Cop, 1992.

McKechnie, Paul. “An Errant Husband and a Rare Idiom (P.Oxy. 744).” Zeitschrift Für Papyrologie Und Epigraphik 127 (1999): 157–61. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20190482.

Sabu George, Rajaratnam Abel, and B. D. Miller. “Female Infanticide in Rural South India.” Economic and Political Weekly 27, no. 22 (1992): 1153–56. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4398446.

Sharp, Mrs. Jane. The Midwives Book, or the Whole Art of Midwifry Discovered. Directing Childbearing Women How to Behave Themselves in Their Conception, Breeding … And Nursing of Children, Etc. [with Plates.]. London, Simon Miller, 1671, name.umdl.umich.edu/A93039.0001.001. Accessed 29 July 2023.

Soranus, Of Ephesus, and Owsei Temkin. Soranus’ Gynecology. Baltimore Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1994, archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.547535/page/233/mode/2up. Accessed 1 Aug. 2023.

Szmelskyj, Irina. “Oocyte Development – an Overview | ScienceDirect Topics.” Www.sciencedirect.com, 2015, http://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/oocyte-development#:~:text=At%20around%2020%20weeks. Accessed 6 Aug. 2023.

Vishwanath, L.S. “Female Infanticide: The Colonial Experience.” Economic and Political Weekly 39, no. 22 (2004): 2313–18. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4415098.

Wilms, Sabine. “Nurturing the Foetus in Medieval China: Illustrating the 10 Months of Pregnancy in the Ishimpō 醫心方.” In Imagining Chinese Medicine, edited by Vivienne Lo, 羅維前, Penelope Barrett, David Dear, Lu Di, 蘆笛, Lois Reynolds, Dolly Yang, and 楊德秀, 18:101–10. Brill, 2018. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1163/j.ctvbqs6ph.11.