Socio-demographic and health information, including history of hysterectomy/oophorectomy, was obtained in a telephone survey of 2137 women aged 40-52. Subjects were randomly selected from a list of all women with a driver's license in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Results showed that 27.3% of women surveyed reported having had a hysterectomy. Women who had undergone hysterectomy were more often black, less educated, older and heavier; and reported less frequent alcohol consumption, younger age at birth of first child and earlier menarche than women who did not report hysterectomy. Forty-seven percent of blacks reported hysterectomy compared with 24% of whites (P less than 0.01) and blacks were significantly younger at surgery than whites (mean age 38.5 vs. 39.6 yr, P less than 0.05). Results of multivariate analyses showed age, black race, less than a college education, menarche before age 12 and having no children to be associated with an increased risk of hysterectomy (P less than 0.01). Additional multivariate analyses conducted separately for blacks and whites showed that, for whites but not blacks, the higher a woman's educational attainment the less likely she was to report having had a hysterectomy (P less than 0.01). Black women with no children more often reported hysterectomy than those with children (P less than 0.01), but this relationship was not found among whites. These findings show the distribution of hysterectomy in the population to vary by race, education and parity.