"In the second half of the nineteenth century, and over a period of ten years, the British surgeon Isaac Baker Brown performed clitoridectomies - removal of the clitoris - at his clinic, the London Surgical Home for the Reception of Gentlewomen and Female of Respectability Suffering from Curable Surgical Disorders. Science sanctioned these excisions using the convenient 'theory' that removing the clitoris could cure conditions as varied as incontinence, uterine haemorrhaging, hysteria, and mania brought on by masturbation.
While cutting out the clitoris was seen as one way of preventing women from masturbating, in the US, cornflakes king J.H. Kellogg had another remedy. He advocated pouring 'pure carbolic acid to the clitoris,' if girls would not stop pleasuring themselves. It is hard to imagine how anyone could have envisaged that such a cruel and damaging act could be in any way good or healthy for a person.
These attitudes toward the clitoris and female sexual pleasure were found elsewhere in the west. Swiss anti-masturbation doctor Tissot pushed propaganda claiming that female masturbation was responsible for clitoral scabbing, and other female 'problems'. According to him, these included vapours, hysteria, incurable jaundice and a uterine fury that, 'depriving them of their modesty and reason, reduced them to the level of the most lascivious of brutes'."
- Catherine Blackledge, The Story of V: Opening Pandora's Box. London: Wiedenfeld & Nicolson, 2003. [italics mine]
1 comment:
The word 'hysterectomy' is capable of turning me into a ranting raging person all by itself. Right. Removing our sexual organs, that which technically make us female, is going to remove our hysteria. Because you know. We're inferior, and weak, at least men have to keep themselves (and us, if possible) convinced of that, because really we're strange and scary to them with these internal sexual organs and the ability to give birth, so we've got to be controlled and, failing that, destroyed.
*rant rant rant rant rant*
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