LAUSR

and morality. In the young or the unmarried the problem was seen as sexuality inappropriate for their time of life or civil status, and even as manifesting degeneration. However, the clitoris was also operated upon in order to make penetrative marital intercourse more satisfactory for women, by freeing supposed ‘adhesions’ of the clitoral hood that prevented the necessary stimulation of the organ, or even removing part of the hood in order, it was claimed, that conjugal orgasm could be achieved through intercourse. Women’s sexuality was supposed to be awakened by their husbands, and to be responsive to their desires. The failure to attain mutual orgasm in the marriage bed was seen as threatening dangerous destabilisation to the institution of marriage, already imperilled by wider changes in the relations between the sexes and general social upheaval. Rodriguez performs a valuable service in demonstrating that these two apparently contradictory approaches to clitoral surgery—to prevent sexual pleasure or to facilitate it—were not different phases in the history of US medicine’s relationship with the clitoris but in fact overlapped over a period of half a century. She also reveals the various mutations in the ideology behind the practices of clitoral surgery for marriage enhancement. While the earlier operations to enhance marital sexual orgasms saw the clitoris as the central actor in the matter, the position became a good deal murkier and more conflicted with the rise of theories around the vaginal orgasm as the proper mature kind; in the most extreme versions of the theory, clitoral orgasm was not merely lesser but dysfunctional and pathological. This did not go uncontested, but there are signs that, beyond debates within the medical profession, the concept had become embedded in popular lore, leading distraught women to go their doctors about their failure to achieve the ‘right’ kind of orgasm. One of themost gruesome instances of the desire to remake the female genitalia toworkmore effectively in male-dominated models of intercourse occurred in the 1970s, after the rise of women’s liberation and the sexual revolution, with James Burt’s ‘Love Surgery’. While accepting the critique of the ‘vaginal orgasm’model and therefore seeing clitoral stimulation as important in a context of rising expectations of sexual pleasure for all, this surgery proceeded from an assumption that a design fault afflicted the vast majority of women’s bodies, which failed to facilitate adequate clitoral contact in straightforward penis in vagina intercourse. Burt’s surgery intended to amend this defect through extensive reconstruction of the vulval area. This is a rich and important study, even if one may feel a little thwarted that Rodriguez does not bring her analysis to bear, however briefly, on the recent rise of cosmetic surgery for the female genitalia.