The Medical Practice of Female Circumcision in the United States

Some historians as well as feminist scholars have noted that physicians in the United States removed all (clitoridectomy) or part (female circumcision) of the clitoris in the late nineteenth century as a means of stopping a woman or child from masturbating; these scholars tended to see this removal as based in medical ignorance, if not outright hostility, of the female sexual body. But also during the late nineteenth century, and continuing throughout the twentieth century, physicians removed the clitoral foreskin (female circumcision) as a means of liberating the organ to enhance female heterosexual behavior - specifically, to surgically better enable women to reach orgasm during penetrative, vaginal sex. Physicians who performed female circumcision did so based on a medically accepted physiological understanding of the clitoris as the principal organ of sexual pleasure for women. The practice of female circumcision in the United States, then, illustrates a seeming paradox: the acceptance of the clitoris as the principal sexual organ for females while medically maintaining the primacy of the vaginal model of sex as culturally important. In my paper, I will explore how this use of female circumcision reflects not a medical ignorance regarding the female sexual body, or ignoral of the role of the clitoris to female sexuality, but, rather, a consistent medical understanding of the clitoris as a sexual organ, albeit one that was consistently shaped by changing social and cultural attitudes about sex and gender.