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The expurgation of the clitoris in the diary of Anne Frank
While we’re on the topic of the modification of Huck Finn, here’s something interesting posted on the Give a Fig (Les Figues Press) blog:
The effacement of the clitoris extends even to Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl. When the unabridged edition of the diaries were released in 1995, the 50th anniversary of her death, they included the previously deleted passages that contained some of Anne’s negative remarks about her housemates and parents as well as a lengthy entry from March 24, 1944 in which she describes her vulva, clitoris, and vagina from the perspective of her own fifteen year old gaze:
“…Until I was eleven or twelve, I didn’t realize there was a second set of labia on the inside, since you couldn’t see them. What’s even funnier is that I thought urine came out of the clitoris…When you’re standing up, all you see from the front is hair. Between your legs there are two soft, cushiony things, also covered with hair, which press together when you’re standing, so you can’t see what’s inside. They separate when you sit down and they’re very red and quite fleshy on the inside. In the upper part, between the outer labia, there’s a fold of skin that, on second thought, looks like a kind of blister. That’s the clitoris…”
In November 2009, the unabridged version was pulled from the library shelves and classroom bookcases at Culpepper Middle School in Culpepper, Virginia after a parent complained that the diary contained explicit sexual content inappropriate for an eighth grade readership. “While these pages could be the basis of a relevant discussion,” remarked school superintendent Bobbi Johnson, “they do not reflect the purpose of studying the book at the middle-school level and could foster a discussion in a classroom that many would find inappropriate.”
When I learned of the censorship of Frank’s journals, I decided to resume the Feminaissance project I had started so many months ago. It seemed that now, as ever, we still need Feminaissance(s), the tiny revolts—to engage with and practice feminist (however one chooses to define it) ways of reading, thinking, seeing, and moving through the world. It was in this spirit that I asked writers Allison Carter, Evelyn Hampton, Claire Donato, Amy King, and Tisa Bryant to contribute their own response. I wanted the conversation to continue and to continue in the writing itself.
Follow the Feminaissance Blog Project.
Tags: anne frank, clits, Feminaissance Blog Project
anne frank’s dad was the first one to convert the handwritten pages to typescript. father knows best, apparently.
the clitoris? what’s not to love? crazy people.
they should change her name to Anne Demure; gee, don’t understand what the point is. i just can’t put my finger on it.
I imagine this won’t stir up the controversy of the Mark Twain debacle, but it should.
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i don’t remember the clitoris section at all…damn. “looks like a kind of blister.” and 8th grade? i read catcher in the rye and elie weisel in 8th grade and had “inappropriate discussions” with my clitoris almost every day.
I read that book at Culpeper County Middle School when I was in eighth grade, in 1996. It’s strange all the places that Culpeper randomly pops up on the Internet. I think we must have had the older version, though, ’cause I’m pretty sure I would have remembered that part…
You protected your tweets.
And yet Brighton Beach Memoirs, usually assigned in school around the same time as Anne Frank, contains much more frank & detailed discussion of the penis & masturbation. What a stupid double standard. This is like that tedious Blue Valentine discussion all over again.
[…] Merrigan recently forwarded this article to NC about the removal of unabridged copies of The Diary of Anne Frank’from libraries in Virginia. […]
Thank you so much for this post. I’ve been trying all day to find a copy of the unabridged version of the diaries here in Berlin. Seems like nobody has it and nobody even knows about this “censorship”. Thanks again.
Literary genital mutilation because they were marketing the book as a “diary of a young girl”. The editors effectively circumcised her. The shame is that all of her body died the same death. Every part of her body was killed, not just the parts that are cute and girlish. They killed her pussy, they killed her clit. If it’s censored it makes that crime not exist.
The recently published Everyman edition contains the entry, and it was edited by Otto Frank and Mirjam Pressler.
It is a shame how society finds it proper to believe teens and preteens so stupid and unable to think critically that this becomes a self fulfilled prophecy. and as much as I hate typing ‘self fulfilled prophecy’ – this is indeed a case for it.
Either that or eighth graders are stupidly unaware of their junk.
protected tweets are wack
yeah
lol
That’s not sexually explicit! It’s just something any kid would find in their biology textbook. I don’t really see why it would need censoring, I mean, by 8th grade, most kids have already heard all that stuff. Plus, when I was in 8th grade, I had already read ‘Justine’ and ‘Lolita’…
Just another example of how crazy people in America are.
The subject matter is too intense for kids the same age as Anne when she wrote it!!
The kids are mature enough to discuss WWII and the Holocaust, but oh no scary vagina!
The subject matter is too intense for kids the same age as Anne when she wrote it!!
The kids are mature enough to discuss WWII and the Holocaust, but oh no scary vagina!
Well they were locked in a tiny attic all together. People still have sexual needs… whose to say a family orgy or two never took place?
This is way out of mien kampfort zone. Anne frankly, I don’t like it.
At least they were Goering to do something about it…
At least they were Goering to do something about it…
fuck off.
wow, you’re fucking sick. Justine?
I like clitorae..(sp?)
Since it was her own father who edited it, it’s hardly just Americans, or even the fault of Americans at all.
Its simply a description of her anatomy; there is no sex involved. Maybe if we as a culture were not so repressive of our sexuality/sex parts, we would not have such a large degree of unhealthy sex…strange porn and such. People really need to lighten up and be okay with the human body.
[…] though, Anne was a little too frank for some of her hagiographers. “…Until I was eleven or twelve, I didn’t realize there was a […]
http://traffic.libsyn.com/smodcast/SModcast-156.mp3 talks about this site (4th qtr)
I will never grasp this concept that someone can be “sick” simply for having absorbed a specific piece of information. I’ve read Justine. I’ve read Lolita. I’ve read Mein Kampf. I’ve read the UNABOMBER manifesto. Hell, I’ve even read the Old Testament. I didn’t agree with the nasty things done and said in them, obviously. I didn’t ever claim I approved. Is merely exposing yourself to knowledge really that offensive? Really?!
[…] href=”http://htmlgiant.com/random/clit-talk-removed-from-diary-of-anne-frank/“>The expurgation of the clitoris in the diary of Anne […]
Your reaction implies you’re only familiar with the graphic half of the book. You may wanna read it again, tho, because there’s a whole other side to that book you seem to have lost between all the sexual fantasies.
Poor girl… Jesus. The Nazis killed her. We owe her the courtesy of printing her last words in their entirety… And we owe her the courtesy of not robbing her of her humanity/femininity now that she is gone… Talk about kick em while they’re down.
Anne Frank was my first crush and my first heartbreak, once I had finished the book and realized what had happened to her. Such a loss…
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[…] body talk in Anne Frank’s diary is an older story (the content discussed was first published in 1995), but resurfaced two years ago when parents in a […]
[…] beschreibt es das Blog Give A Fig (via); Textstelle des Anstoßes war wohl ein Eintrag zum 24. März 1944, in dem sich Anne Frank mit Form […]
did you then examine your “blister”? If so how many times?
@twitter-14455528:disqus, sounds like you need to expose yourself to the knowledge of the meaning of sarcasm. In Australia we call it ‘having a lark’.
You don’t get if fellows.
It is not just ordinary “clitoris”.That’s nothing special.
But here we have a case of holy-holo-clitoris!
On your knees!!!
Jerzy Ulicki-Rek
seeing the poor kid wrote it in her diary it was meant to be secret so the father did the right thing and deleted that part…what father wouldnt seeing she didnt make its called respect for the dead!
Why lol? (To the person below). I thought this comment was excellent! Really well written.
[…] Strange Tales of the Holocaust The expurgation of the clitoris in the diary of Anne Frank | HTMLGIANT anne would have been 82 june 12 […]
Wow, that impresses me a lot. I didn´t know about this part of the book. The description of the vagina is so perfect
[…] and then write it down – and that 50 years later, this might be considered to be “inappropriate for an eighth grader” – is entirely the point (thanks to @theducks for the link). In fact, so ahead of her […]
Ow, poor Ana, now everybody is writtinh her private diary
[…] The expurgation of the clitoris in the diary of Anne Frank | HTMLGIANT […]
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[…] Merrigan recently forwarded this article to NC about the removal of unabridged copies of The Diary of Anne Frank’from libraries in Virginia. […]
[…] Anne Frank’s Diary for over 50 Years. The unabridged version of her diary has been subject to censorship since its publication. Why the fear of such beauty? …Until I was eleven or twelve, […]
However what she wanted was to be a famous writer.
They probably know more than many adults.
Cynthis Ozick wrote an essay blaming Otto Frank for the disaster. That he had the means and the time to get out of Europe. that he wanted to keep a bourgeois lifestyle while in the attic. That he let in the man who would doom them. Bad judgement.
[…] plenty more examples – including a significant sample of sexualized feminists who harp on Anne’s clitoris – but that’ll do […]
[…] plenty more examples – including a significant sample of sexualized feminists who harp on Anne’s clitoris – but that’ll do […]
[…] J Wang: The expurgation of the clitoris in the diary of Anne Frank […]
actually the people who bankrolled the Nazis killed her, as well (and 60 million other people). We killed one another is more correct. All you have to do is to go to Wall St. You can do business with these same companies the Nazis did..many of them are still around. Hitler was Time Magazine’s Man of the Year for 1935.
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