The Sterilized Heiress
     
Like "Aimee McPherson" this satirical song seems not to have long survived public memory of the event that inspired it.  

Oh, I am the sterilized heriess,
The butt of all laughter of rubes.
I'm comely, I'm rich, I'm a bit of a bitch,
And my mother ran off with my tubes.

Chorus:
Fie on you, mater, you scoundrel,
For stealing my feminine joys.
Restore my abdomen and make me a woman.
I want to go out with the boys.

The butler and second man scorn me.
No more do they use my door key.
The cook from Samoa has spermatozoa
For others, but never for me.

Imagine my stark consternation
On feeling the rude surgeon's hands.
Exploring my person was surgeon McPherson
And fiddling around with my glands.

No action in court can repay me
For stealing the peas in my pod.
Oh, where are the yeggs who took all my eggs?
I'll cut off their bollocks, by God!

Last chorus:
Fie on you, mater, you scoundrel,
For stealing my feminine joys.
I've nothing but anger for Margaret Sanger.
I want to go out with the boys.

A fragment of this song was forwarded to the editor after a broadcast appeal for bawdy songs.  Appended was this note:

This bawdy song was chanted to me by my college classmate _________ ____________ in Connecticut in 1941.  The subject is the case in which the heiress sued her mother (or guardian) for a large sum of money because she had been left an inheritance provided she produced an heir -- and the mother      apparently undertook to prevent the girl from producing this heir.  (I won't even sing this one to my husband -- so I guess it's either very bawdy or crude.)

     A fuller text, credited to the collection of Gershon Legman, is in Songs of Roving and Raking, p. 82; the same is in Legman's own The Limerick, pp. 241-42, where he identifies the heiress as Anne Cooper Hewitt and ascribes the song to the late Gene Fowler, p. 441.  Babab, p. 93, reprints it again.
     There are two variants of this in the editor's collection, both from Southern California.  Abrahams has forwarded a virtually identical copy from Texas in a manuscript collection dated April 17, 1959.  Another, collected in 1956, is in the Indiana University Folklore Archives from East Lansing, Michigan.
     The melody here is borrowed from the English music-hall song "Botany Bay."  The editor has been informed that it is also sung to the tune of "Rosin the Beau" in some New York state schools of higher education.  The version in the Western Kentucky Folklore Archives housed at UCLA is to be sung to "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean."  Babab uses an unidentified popular song.
     The multiplicity of tunes suggests this song has traveled as much by written copy as it has aurally. ®PG¯