Victorian medicine was not reponsible for repressing the clitoris : rethinking homology in the long history of women's genital anatomy

Narratives about female sexual pleasure frequently make recourse to teleological views of historical development that posit the present as relatively more enlightened than past repressive attitudes. The teleology usually takes the form of recognizing early modern accounts of the clitoris but denying the vast array of nineteenth-century sources that had significantly more holistic views about female pleasure than is often imagined. Any scholar who has studied many nineteenth-century texts about sexuality across French, British, US, German, and Italian cultures cannot help notice that female sexual pleasure in fact was heavily represented in medical thought throughout this time. This article suggests an alternative account of how the clitoris became maligned in the twentieth century. Several factors were involved, some of them occurring over a long historical process and some particular to interwar gender culture. Anatomical ideas about female genitalia were divided from the very beginning of their history, in what might be characterized as the Galenic versus Hippocratic models. Divergent views about the importance of the clitoris have been a constant feature of the long history of medical attempts to account for women's sexual pleasure. This article discusses how the clitoral-vaginal dichotomy was generated in Europe and the United States only in the early twentieth century and how it was contested in the period between 1950 and 1973. The final section considers what is now understood scientifically about female genitalia and how these new understandings might inform feminist thinking about women's pleasure in ways that do not rely on historical myths about Victorian repression.