A Rollicking Satire

When Gerber’s narrator selects Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain as reading material for the doctor’s office, she is deriding the excessive waiting time she expects. But also Mann’s novel is a monumental exploration of religion, illness, and sexuality in a medical institution, and as such it highlights Gerber’s mock-heroic intent. She gives these same subjects a feminist inflection and uses a range of satirical devices—caricature, literary parody, pastiche, and farce—to produce a romp through Everywoman’s gynecological experiences.

In Mann’s novel Hans Castorp enters the Sanatorium Berghof as a visitor and then falls prey to the full battery of medical treatments. Gerber’s heroine starts with a benign tumor but then loses her uterus, appendix, one ovary, and barely escapes a double mastectomy. Unlike Castorp she is a feisty combatant who resists every “intervention.”

The targets of Gerber’s satire are many and their targeting is politically incorrect, but hers is an equal-opportunity incorrectness. She ridicules Roman Catholic and Jewish dogmas, rigid Talmudic scholars, materialistic doctors, support groups, philoprogenitive immigrants, and the doctrine of intelligent design (“any foresighted deity could have predicted repairs would be necessary and installed a skin-colored Teflon coated zipper”). Her chief target is the male desire to control the reproductive powers of women, evidenced in the policing of sexual and childbearing activity. Gerber focuses on the medical treatment of women after childbearing years. Her protagonist asks the counselor who declares her ovaries dispensable, “What about the doctor? Are his childbearing days over? Do you think he’s had an orchiectomy? Has he had his testicles removed so he doesn’t have to drag them around with him any more? So he won’t ever get cancer?” But the counselor is simply stating the official policy. Off the record she says, “you fight like hell to keep your good ovary . . . if they both come out, the next morning you’ll have cold sweats, hot flashes, a mustache . . . If you go through female castration, terrible things happen. Dowager’s hump appears, the breasts flatten, the vagina dries out, you get whiskers on your chin.”

Gerber’s style veers from racy colloquialism to the literary: “Three babies were born to me in five years”; “the man who let me keep my pubic hair when all about me were losing theirs”; “I awoke a sterile woman.” Occasionally the prose approaches the sublime: “My heart ached for the distress each ovum would feel when, monthly released from my still-connected ovary, it would find itself lost in space, propelled down a lone Fallopian tube toward an impossible rendezvous with an army of earnest but uninformed sperm butting against a barrier of hem stitches! . . . The desperate little egg, drifting lost and unsecured in the vast black realm of pulse-beats, peristaltic convulsions, muscular contractions, and diaphragmatic rhythms, would eventually give up the ghost and expire like a dying star.”

The focus of the novel shifts post-operatively to a support group, Wombless Women, modelled on the twelve-step aa program. Where aa’s eighth step has members list those they’ve harmed, ww has its members list the doctors who have harmed them, and vow to take revenge. This last item produces the climax of the plot into which Gerber deftly weaves her material. She recaps her heroine’s life story, through childhood, marriage, and motherhood, until she takes revenge on her gynecologist, and on the internist, who satisfies his prurient desires by making obscene phone calls.

Gerber wrote this book thirty-three years ago. It is easy to understand its genesis in 1980, when feminist critics were bringing women’s medical issues to the forefront. Barker-Benfield’s The Horrors of the Half-Known Life: Male Attitudes Toward Women and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America was published in 1976, and Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady five years later. Gerber says that the world of doctors has changed since then, noting the increasing number of women doctors (thank heaven!) and citing her recent positive...