The Natural Superiority of Women by Ashley Montagu

Author:Ashley Montagu [Montagu, Ashley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural, Women's Studies, test
ISBN: 9780761989820
Google: WiRrwzdafGEC
Amazon: B000FAGLEO
Publisher: Rowman Altamira
Published: 1970-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

Page 168

males was denied . Apart from its being a disorder limited to women, the condition gave quite a number of nineteenth-century medical men an opportunity to excise women's ovaries and to remove, by knife or cauterization, the clitoris in an attempt to cure the "disease."

16

It seems difficult to believe that such drastic operations, in spite of all rationalizations by way of explanation, were altogether motivated by a desire to benefit the patient. Hysterical symptoms in women were described by Freud, and others, as conversions of repressed sexual wishes into psychophysical symptoms. Since the sexual involvement could hardly escape the attention of a perceptive nineteenth-century physician, it is not too difficult to surmise why it really was that the surgical attack upon the sexual organs was made, for nineteenth-century ladies were not supposed to be sexual at all. Men, it would seem, were avenging themselves upon women for having a womb and for having been ejected from it. But what is more to the point is that, while the statistics are unreliable, there is fair evidence that men were at least as often victims of "hysteria" as women, and possibly more often. Today psychiatrists and psychologists see the constellation of symptomsthose previously described as "hysteria"in patients of both sexes.

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