Nawal El Saadawi
In 1959, the UN asked the WHO to investigate FGM, but the latter responded that it was not a medical matter. Feminists took up the issue throughout the 1970s. The Egyptian physician and feminist Nawal El Saadawi criticized FGM in her book "Women and Sex" (1972); the book was banned in Egypt and El Saadawi lost her job as director-general of public health. She followed up with a chapter, "The Circumcision of Girls", in her book "The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World" (1980), which described her own clitoridectomy when she was six years old: