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“In the second half of the century, these fumbling experiments with the female interior gave way to the more decisive technique of surgery—aimed increasingly at the control of female personality disorders. There had been a brief fad of clitoridectomy (removal of the clitoris) in the eighteen sixties, following the introduction of the operation by the English physician Isaac Baker Brown. Although most doctors frowned on the practice of removing the clitoris, they tended to agree that it might be necessary in cases of nymphomania, intractable masturbation, or “unnatural growth” of that organ. (The last clitoridectomy we know of in the United States was performed in 1948 on a child of five, as a cure for masturbation.)The most common form of surgical intervention in the female personality was ovariotomy, removal of the ovaries—or “female castration.” In 1906 a leading gynecological surgeon estimated that there were 150,000 women in the United States who had lost their ovaries under the knife. Some doctors boasted that they had removed from fifteen hundred to two thousand ovaries apiece. According to historian G. J. Barker-Benfield: “Among the indications were troublesomeness, eating like a ploughman, masturbation, attempted suicide, erotic tendencies, persecution mania, simple ‘cussedness,’ and dysmenorrhea [painful menstruation]. Most apparent in the enormous variety of symptoms doctors took to indicate castration was a strong current of sexual appetitiveness on the part of women.” The rationale for the operation flowed directly from the theory of the “psychology of the ovary”: since the ovaries controlled the personality, they must be responsible for any psychological disorders: conversely, psychological disorders were a sure sign of ovarian disease. Ergo, the organs must be removed…

The overwhelming majority of women who had leeches or hot steel applied to their cervices, or who had their clitorises or ovaries removed, were women of the middle to upper classes, for after all, these procedures cost money. But it should not be imagined that poor women were spared the gynecologist’s exotic catalog of tortures simply because they couldn’t pay. The pioneering work in gynecological surgery had been performed by Marion Sims on black female slaves he kept for the sole purpose of surgical experimentation. He operated on one of them thirty times in four years, being foiled over and over by post-operative infections. After moving to New York, Sims continued his experimentation on indigent Irish women in the wards of the New York Women’s Hospital. So, though middle-class women suffered most from the doctors’ actual practice, it was poor and black women who had suffered through the brutal period of experimentation.

— Barbara Ehrenreich & Deirdre English

Found on ‘a reading blog‘.