Female Circumcision and Clitoridectomy in the United States: A History of a Medical Treatment

Abstract

For Americans who think that female genital cutting is a barbarity confined to darkest Africa and parts of the Islamic world, Sarah Rodriguez's detailed history of female circumcision in the United States will come as a revelation and perhaps a shock. In her impressively researched study the author considers the social rationale of such practices and their relationship with changing theories of anatomy, physiology, sexual behaviour and gender relations. In pursuit of these themes four types of circumcision are examined in detail: clitoridectomy; excision of all or part of the clitoral hood (female prepuce); removal of accumulated smegma beneath the hood; and breaking down the adhesions between the hood and the clitoris. These procedures were performed for three basic reasons: to discourage masturbation; to correct homosexuality or “hypersexuality”; or to enhance the capacity for orgasm during intercourse. Introduced in the late nineteenth century at the height of the childhood masturbation scare, clitoridectomy had a brief and limited respectability, usually performed on girls at the behest of worried parents, though occasionally at the request of adult women. There is not much evidence that clitoridectomy was widely employed to treat lesbianism or hypersexuality, though there are certainly cases of parents wanting the “large” clitorises of their daughters trimmed down to a “normal” size. Among professionals, there was much indecisive debate about whether lesbians and African women had abnormally large genitals (i.e. larger than those of white middle class Americans), but the conclusion of the gynaecologist whom Rodriguez regards as the most reliable authority on such questions (Robert Dickinson) seems to have been that there was wide variation among women of all races and that no firm standards could be set.