Sunday, February 22, 2015

Female Circumcision and Clitoridectomy in the United States by Sarah B. Rodriguez


Contrary to popular belief, female circumcision was never isolated to the African continent. It was widely practiced in the USA, but unlike the African origin, female circumcision in the USA had nothing to do with keeping wives from straying or making them submissive. It had more to do with paranoid prudishness and fear of criminality. Rodrigues paints a picture of this divisive issue (even then) as being motivated by several unjust philosophies; sexism, prudish mores, racism, and eugenics.

In the chapter Female Sexual Degeneracy and the Enlarged Clitoris, the author refers to prison doctors and their skewed research on female sexual habits. She describes hoe a NY prison doctor described black women as having oversized clitorises, making them hypersexual lesbians. Sarah Baartman, an enslaved African woman, was used by physicians as a highly inaccurate example of the African woman’s body, and these racist physicians made claims that women in hot climates had larger genitalia. As with most medical research as the time, a lot of it was falsified, and physicians were rarely questions or criticized for their theories. This was the same generation of physicians that researched the infamous Kalikak and Jute families in New Jersey.

Fast forward to the 1940’s. Attitudes towards women, though still unequal, had changed. Doctors were now promoting the idea of orgasms as being perfectly healthy for women (perhaps thanks in part to Dr. Kinsey’s research) and doctors were no longer fanatically against the idea of masturbation. It was at this time that doctors looked into removing the clitoral hood as a way for women to achieve greater sexual pleasure. By the 1970’s more and more women were having the clitoral hood removed to increase sexual pleasure, and it worked.

To see the progress in attitudes towards sex, look at the way the USA changed. WWI left loads of men dead, so women flooded into clerical jobs, and the attitude towards women changed. Then the Great Depression hit, and the once powerful church, an institution that had been the biggest welfare provider, was hit hard. Religion was no longer as dominant as it had been before, and thanks to widespread poverty, birth control, in whatever form existed, became widely accepted. In fact, birth control was so widely practiced in the Depression, that the era is referred to as the “baby bust.” Then came WWII, women entered the workforce, and the role of women changed further.

Sarah Rodriguez’ book is well-researched, fair, balanced, and highly detailed. It uses the idea of female circumcision as an example of the changes going on in US history.

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