In 1959 the UN asked the WHO to investigate FGM, but the latter responded that it was not a medical matter.[188] Feminists took up the issue throughout the 1970s.[189] 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.[190] She followed up with a chapter, "The Circumcision of Girls," in The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World (1980), which described her own clitoridectomy when she was six years old: I did not know what they had cut off from my body, and I did not try to find out.