The Role of Feminist Health Humanities Scholarship and Black Women’s Artistry in Re-Shaping the Origin Narrative of Modern, U.S. Gynecology

Rachel Dudley

doi:10.3390/h10010058

Abstract

Between 1845–1849, twelve enslaved women in Montgomery, Alabama lived through prolonged, gynecologic experimentation at the hands of Dr. James Marion Sims. What happened, in his 16-bed backyard hospital, often begins the origin narrative of modern U.S. gynecology and how it developed into a discrete and international, Western, scientific field of medicine. Sims autobiography references three of these women, by their first names only: Anarcha, Lucy and Betsey. The research questions here are: what more can be known about these women’s lives, their possible social networks and their cultural legacies? Further, what changes if the origin narrative of modern, U.S. gynecology begins with feminist health humanities scholarship and in the pages of black women’s artistry? I discuss original research findings, involving the following primary source: an 1841 property deed, mentioning the first names of 7 other enslaved people owned by Sims. I, then, examine cotemporary U.S. feminist scholarly writing and artistic cultural representations, centering the lives of the women as important historical figures. Last, I conceptualize the notion of poetic ancestral witnessing within the work of the following three, twenty-first century, African American, poets: Bettina Judd, Dominique Christina and Kwoya Fagin Maples. These women published poetry collections on this history, between 2014 and 2018.

Highlights

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations
In order to contextualize the poetry under review here within a larger genealogy of scholarly and artistic praxis, I first orient readers by providing both medical history and cultural memory background on this topic
I am defining poetic ancestral witnessing as a poetic approach created by African American women and addressing the lives of populations on the margins of history, society and culture

Summary

Introduction

—Natasha Tretheway, U.S Poet Laureate and Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Native Guard (Tretheway 2006). In relation to this history, numerous 20th and 21st century community performers, humanities scholars and U.S, black women artists have engaged—quite imaginatively—in the politics and poetics of counter-hegemonic storytelling They have worked to name and center the enslaved women patients in this history as “the mothers of modern gynecology” and to re-orient the telling of an important, international, socio-medical origin story (Daly 1978; Kuppers 2006; Wanzo 2009; Dudley 2016; Vedabtam 2017; Cooper Owens 2017). Community health activists and contemporary, African American poets have kept alive the cultural legacies of these supposedly “unknowable” and yet significant black historical figures They all help us negotiate “social memory” in relation to this complex story in medical history, which continues to reverberate medically and culturally in various ways—well into the 21st century

On Continuing Relevance

Results & Analysis

& Notes onthe

Poetic Ancestral Witnessing

Materials and Methods