4 - Female Circumcision to Promote Clitoral Orgasm, 1890–1945

Summary

In 1896, Eugene P. Bernardy, a physician in Philadelphia, wrote about a young blonde woman who came to him complaining of an “absence of sexual feeling.” Married for two years, with three pregnancies and two living children, it was during her most recent lying-in that the eighteen-year-old woman complained she had “never experienced” the “pleasure I hear so much about.” Indeed, she told Bernardy, “the approaches of my husband I abhor.” Shortly after, her husband came to Bernardy with a case of gonorrhea. Bernardy lectured him on how he had come to acquire the disease, but in explaining his dalliances the straying husband told the physician he had “no pleasure with [his] wife,” comparing her to a “piece of marble.” Convinced the wife's lack of sexual desire lay in the condition of her clitoris, Bernardy decided to examine it; her lying-in state made “an easy excuse” to do so. Bernardy found the prepuce adherent to the glans, and, by “catching the margin of the prepuce with a pair of dressing forceps,” he separated the adhesions. He then bathed the glans in carbolized cosmoline until the raw edges “were completely healed.” A year later, Bernardy saw the husband again, who “informed [him] that everything was satisfactory.” Bernardy, I think it safe to say, believed the removal of the clitoral adhesions responsible for the couple's now satisfactory sexual relationship.

Bernardy published his account of breaking up clitoral adhesions in 1896—the same year Polak published his report on removing a woman's clitoris to treat her masturbation. As seen in the first chapter, doctors based their decisions on when to use—or not to use—one of the clitoral surgical procedures on what they deemed to be the origins of masturbation. But masturbation was not the only sexual disorder to be treated through clitoral surgery because it was not the only imbalance in women's sexual instinct seen as having its origins in the condition of the clitoris. For, just as the clitoris was seen as responsible for a woman's inappropriate sexual instinct when it manifested as masturbation, hypersexuality, or homosexuality, the organ was also blamed when a woman failed to respond in the marital bed. As Bernardy stated, though “aneroticism” may arise from “numerous causes,” he believed the “condition of the clitoris and its cover” was the reason for “many, if not the majority, of the cases.”