19th century

The nineteenth century appears in the book as a period when girls’ capacity for sexual pleasure could be treated as a medical defect. Its significance lies in the stark gendered asymmetry the text draws: interventions meant to suppress girls’ masturbation included mutilating or surgically altering their bodies, while the cited medical literature offered no parallel practice for boys.

Medical Correction and Sexuality

The book states that girls who learned to develop orgasmic capacity through masturbation were regarded as medical problems. The language of treatment and correction casts their pleasure not as ordinary bodily experience but as a condition to be suppressed. The interventions described make that classification concrete: clitorises could be amputated or cauterized, vaginal lips sewn together to place the clitoris out of reach, and ovaries surgically removed through castration.

These methods differed in form but shared an aim: to restrict or eliminate the bodily capacity associated with girls’ sexual pleasure. Sewing the vaginal lips together, described as a kind of miniature chastity belt, made control literal and anatomical. The account thus links the medical management of masturbation to a broader history of regulating female bodies, rather than presenting the procedures as neutral care.

A Gendered Asymmetry

The text emphasizes that the medical literature contains no references to surgical removal of testicles or amputation of the penis to stop boys from masturbating. This absence sharpens the contrast: girls’ sexual behavior could provoke irreversible bodily intervention, while the same stated aim was not documented as a reason for comparable surgery on boys. The distinction is not merely between different treatments; it reveals whose pleasure was framed as a medical threat requiring physical correction.

The account also reaches beyond the nineteenth century. It reports that the last recorded clitoridectomy in the United States for the purpose of curing masturbation was performed in 1948 on a five-year-old girl. That later example shows why the nineteenth-century history is presented as more than a closed period: the practice described persisted into the twentieth century, and the age of the child makes the violence of the supposed correction especially plain.

The Larger Argument About Naming and Silence

Placed amid the book’s challenges to silence around female anatomy, this historical account gives that silence a material history. The author recalls growing up in a family that used the hushed euphemism “down there” for all female genitalia, despite knowing anatomical terms. In a different register, the nineteenth-century medical practices show what could happen when girls’ sexual knowledge and pleasure were not simply left unnamed but classified as problems to be corrected. Both passages expose how language and authority shape what can be said about women’s bodies, though one concerns family speech and the other medical intervention.

The book’s broader movement is toward speaking plainly where women had been taught to be reticent. It notes that women were often shy at first when invited to talk, yet became eager once someone asked; it then turns the word “vagina” itself into a subject of scrutiny, observing that the term can sound clinical or alien. Against that hesitant vocabulary, the historical account insists on naming the acts involved—amputation, cautery, surgical sewing, and removal of ovaries—rather than disguising them as benign correction. The contrast makes clear that naming is not only a matter of vocabulary: it can reveal the force concealed by the language of treatment.

That insistence also connects the historical note to the book’s later performance of bodily anger. In “My Angry Vagina,” a speaker objects to tampons, scented products, and gynecological examinations as practices imposed on a body expected to submit and be made more acceptable. The nineteenth-century procedures are far more extreme, and the book does not equate them with those contemporary complaints; their juxtaposition instead places different forms of regulation along a continuum of contested authority over female bodies. The historical passage supplies an especially stark instance of the stakes: medical power could convert disapproval of girls’ masturbation into invasive, lasting bodily harm.

Historical Reach and Limits

The account’s final historical marker is the last recorded clitoridectomy in the United States undertaken to cure masturbation: in 1948, the procedure was performed on a five-year-old girl. The date carries the history beyond the nineteenth century, while the child’s age makes the logic of correction especially stark. The passage does not describe this as a routine continuation of the earlier practices, but the recorded case shows that the impulse to treat female sexual capacity as a condition to be eradicated did not belong only to a distant past.

Historical Reach and Limits

The account’s final historical marker is the last recorded clitoridectomy in the United States undertaken to cure masturbation: in 1948, the procedure was performed on a five-year-old girl. The date carries the history beyond the nineteenth century, while the child’s age makes the logic of correction especially stark. The passage does not describe this as a routine continuation of the earlier practices, but the recorded case shows that the impulse to treat female sexual capacity as a condition to be eradicated did not belong only to a distant past.