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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