In 1831, Anne Lister wrote that she ‘found distinctly for the first time’ her own clitoris. This culminated a search of at least eleven years, involving much exploration of her own and her female lovers’ anatomy. Of course, her explicit diaries made clear that she touched her own and her lovers’ clitorises, but she was not able to link her own sensations with the anatomical terms she found in textbooks. By looking at Lister’s quest to find the clitoris, we can understand in more detail how difficult it was for women to conceptualise this important part of their bodies. If Anne Lister, a brilliant, erudite woman very knowledgeable about science and anatomy, and very sexually experienced with women, took so long to figure it out, it must have been much more difficult for ordinary women. The most startling aspect of how discourses could affect perception was that Lister spent ten years confusing the clitoris with the cervix, leading to fruitless explorations of her own body and those of her lovers. This chapter will thus contribute to the larger historiography about the history of the clitoris - when it appeared in anatomical books, and when some medical texts started to downplay or omit it.

This concluding chapter revisits the four main themes of the book and ties them into important theories and ideas that emerged after 1750.