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Honoring the enslaved African American foremothers of modern women's health: Meditations on 40 years of Black feminist praxis

PMCID: PMC11742716

PMID: 38010275

Abstract

Abstract This article analyzes 40 years of Black feminist scholarship, art, and grassroots activism dedicated to the lives and legacies of the “foremothers of American gynecology.” Infamously, in Montgomery, Alabama, between 1845 and 1849, up to 16 enslaved women were exploited at a backyard hospital, some subjected to surgical experimentation by Dr James Marion Sims. He was a famous and world‐renowned surgeon who died in 1883, with a reputation as “the father of modern gynecology.” Sims achieved the medical knowledge that catapulted him into American and European fame, using skills gained from the exploitation of the enslaved women in his early career. Famously, three of these women are referenced by their first names: Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey. This research asks: how have these important figures been remembered in 20th and 21st‐century Black feminist scholarship, art, and grassroots community activism? Further, what are the broader impacts of this pathbreaking truth, reckoning, and reconciliation work?

Full Text

This article documents nearly 40 years of Black feminist scholarship, art, and grassroots activism dedicated to the nonconsensual “foremothers of American gynecology.” These foremothers (of “modern women's health” more broadly speaking) include up to sixteen 19th‐century African American women who were enslaved in the American South. What happened to them represents a well‐known and symbolically important story in the history of medicine and slavery, medical ethics, exploitative research with human subjects, and reproductive injustices. These enslaved teenagers, from areas in and around Montgomery, Alabama, were subjected to years of medical abuse at Dr James Marion Sims’ backyard slave hospital. Some of the young women underwent numerous rotations of experimental vaginal surgeries, between 1845 and 1849 (Sims, 1884, 222–46). Famously, only three of the women were mentioned in Sims’ life‐writing, by their first names, as Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey. Their exploitation allowed Sims to achieve international fame as a skilled surgeon and a revered pioneer in the field of modern American gynecology.
Referencing Katherine McKittrick, the backyard medical clinic served as a unique “cartography of struggle” for enslaved populations who feared Southern doctors and frequently underwent cruel procedures designed to advance scientific medical knowledge (Cooper Owens, 2017; Kenny, 2015; McKittrick, 2006, 8). Sims’ exploitation of the institution of slavery allowed him to develop a surgical cure for vesicovaginal fistulas, to publish the results in international medical journals, to create the Sims position, and to invent the Sims duckbill speculum, an instrument used in gynecology exams, as a medical technology (Figure 1).
In relation to my own positionality, I am a Black Women's Studies and Africana studies scholar of African American ancestry, specializing in medical history, feminist pedagogy, and interdisciplinary health humanities research. One of the great‐nieces of 19th‐century Southern suffragist and civil rights activist, Sara Dudley Pettey, I also have the benefit of a rich family legacy in grassroots advocacy, gender equity, and social justice work (see Gilmore, 1996). One of my great‐uncles, Edward R. Dudley, was a lawyer with the NAACP who worked alongside Thurgood Marshall as a civil rights activist. He also integrated US diplomatic embassies as the first African American ambassador in US history, appointed by President Harry S. Truman to serve as ambassador to Liberia. At the same time, together in 1949, my great grandparents—Alice B. Burton and Dr Dewitt T. Burton, MD—founded Burton Mercy Hospital in Detroit, Michigan. The hospital provided care for Black patients during the Black hospital movement in the era of racially segregated healthcare (see Northington Gamble, 1995).
Now a faculty member at The University of Toledo (a teaching‐centered, public research institution located in urban northwest Ohio), I research and teach about gender, race, and health equity issues. I began documenting Black feminist scholarly, grassroots and arts‐based interventions dedicated to the “foremothers of American gynecology,” beginning with graduate‐ level research at The Ohio State University, and later at Emory University (see Dudley, 2012, 2016, and 2021). I am also a proud member of the Black Feminist Health Science Studies Collective, whose mission is to “highlight the necessity of incorporating social justice into medical science” (www.blackfeministhealthstudies.com).
With my own positionality made clearer, the remainder of the article is grounded in Saidiya Hartman's Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Trade Route (2007) and in Deirdre Cooper Owens’ Medical Bondage: Gender, Race and Slavery in the Origins of American Gynecology (2017). I emphasize Cooper Owens’ framing of the enslaved women in this history as “medical superbodies,” juxtaposing this conceptualization with Hartman's concept of “the afterlife of slavery.” Significantly, Cooper Owens references the contradictions in the women's status as exploited and powerless “racial others” in 19th‐century, scientific racist‐patriarchal schemas, and their simultaneous status as highly trained healthcare workers in the first women's hospital in the country (2017, 108).
Third, I include excerpts from an interview with Ebony Golden, a community‐based performance artist and organizer in Harlem, New York, who founded the Betty's Daughter Arts Collaborative (BDAC). The collaborative staged an important “ring‐shout for reproductive justice” in front of a statue of Sims in 2011. In telling this story as a Black feminist intellectual and arts‐based social movement history, the inclusion of Ebony Golden is important in representing a grassroots profile. BDAC's street‐performance work preceded the 2018 removal of a statue of Sims from New York's Central Park. A BDAC performance ensemble known as Body Ecology created a symbolic watershed moment in street‐level, arts‐based activism memorializing the foremothers of American women's health. They did so to recast a narrative in front of the statue, to raise public consciousness, and to enact positive social change at a local level, linking the history to contemporary reproductive justice struggles for Black, Indigenous, and other people of color communities (BIPOC).
In the mid‐19th century, Alabamian slaveholders were eager to find a medical fix for the fistula condition because it threatened the profit economy of slavery (see Schwartz, 2010). Fistulas were an indicator of the violence Black women experienced under slavery—resulting directly from bodily trauma (McGregor, 1998, 68). This form of bodily trauma can be related to sexual violence, use of forceps and/or other medical instruments and/or numerous, particularly difficult labors. The women in this story were in their late teens and may have been mothers of other children before transport to Sims’ hospital in 1845 (Figure 2).
I ransacked the country for cases…[a]nd it ended in my finding six or seven cases of vesico‐vaginal fistula that had been hidden away for years in the country because they had been pronounced incurable (sic). I went to work to put another story on my hospital, and this gave me sixteen beds; four beds for servants, and twelve for the patients. (Sims, 1884, 236).
Eventually, the other medical men stopped coming, believing Sims would not be successful in his experimental exploits. Sims then started to train the women in their own nursing care. They were administered opium for pain, for bowel blockage and for compliance (hence the very real possibility of narcotic substance addiction, which has been emphasized in Black feminist conceptualizations of this history). However, they were not administered ether as anesthesia, which was slowly coming into broader use after its discovery by a Boston dentist named William Morton in 1846 (see Pernick, 1983).
Given that there were 16 beds and only three names in Sims’ writing, this research holds space for not only Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey, but also the unnamed others. Including them in this research represents a nod to other marginalized stories that have been lost in the voids, gaps, silences, and absences in the historical record. In addition to Anarcha, Lucy, Betsey and the other unnamed women, Sims also experimented on enslaved men and children at other times in his early career, including in dentistry and for lockjaw (Sims, 1884, 19). Thus, the phrase “the unnamed others” is a powerful symbolic and representative placeholder.
Recent historical scholarship demonstrates that after the experimental series, Anarcha (also spelled Annacay) married a man named Laurenzi Jackson, and she died in 1869 at the age of 46, buried next to her husband (Hallman, 2023, xvi). Anarcha Jackson knew romantic love, and she lived through the abolition of slavery. Importantly, the story of what happened to her, and the others, loomed large in the medical legacy of Sims and needed to be addressed by the time of his death in 1883. Yet the enslaved women are ghost‐like (both there and not there) within 19th‐century newspaper memorialization. The question Sims’ contemporaries had to grapple with was what to say (or not say) about the enslaved people and the role of slavery in that infamous, backyard Montgomery hospital—following the Civil War and the Reconstruction Era.
Beginning with the publication of Diane Axelsen's “Women as Victims of Medical Experimentation” in 1985 and Durrenda Ojanuga's “The Medical Ethics of the “Father of Gynaecology,” Dr J Marion Sims” in 1993, Black feminist scholars have written to preserve the cultural memory of the enslaved women and to place their stories in larger bio‐ethical, political, and socio‐historical contexts (Axelsen, 1985; Ojanuga, 1993). In doing so, Black feminist scholars have also made broader points about power relations and the racialized and gendered dynamics of public memorialization.
In this case, “cultural memory” refers to a collective effort, dedicated to the women in this history, to document their legacies through cultural symbols and material culture artifacts in the written and public domains. We can see this, for example, in the work of five highly decorated African American US poets. These poets include Nikky Finney, with her poem “The Greatest Sideshow on Earth” in The World is Round (2013); scholar‐poet Bettina Judd, with her various publications in this area, including her book Patient. Poems. (2014); Kwoya Fagin Maples, with her book, Mend Poems (2018), and Dominique Christina, with her book Anarcha Speaks: A History in Poems (2018). These works emphasize the cultural memory aspects of the enslaved women's legacies through art. Notably, Judd begins her poem “After Memory” with a nod to the prolific African American poet Lucille Clifton (1934–2010). The epigraph of Judd's poem cites Clifton's “Why Some People Be Mad at Me Sometimes,” by excerpting the famous and apropos line: “i keep on remembering mine” (Clifton, 1987, 6).
These arguments portray Sims as simply a man of his times and claim that focusing on the enslaved women, forced opium addiction, the impossibility of consent, exploitation, and torturous abuse obscures Sims’ useful contributions to medical knowledge (Vernon, 2019; Wall, 2006; and 2018; Nature editorial with unidentified author, 2017).
Black feminist scholars have written against this vein of thinking, not to dismiss the gains of modern medical knowledge, but to properly contextualize them in relation to social power arrangements, structural violence, and 19th‐century patriarchal scientific racism. This vein of Black feminist scholarship also includes works about the ethics of statues dedicated to Sims and the politics of monument culture in a 21st century context (Green, 2017, Washington, 2006, and 2017). The groundbreaking work of historian and medical ethicist Harriet Washington highlights histories of medical abuse against African Americans, from colonial times to the present. Her 2006 book, Medical Apartheid, begins with the ethics of public monument dedications to Sims, and the cultural erasure of the enslaved women.
There has also been important cultural work by allies in feminist performance studies, including Terri Kapsalis’ “Mastering the Female Pelvis: Race and the Tools of Reproduction,” published in Black feminist scholar Kimberly Wallace‐Sanders’ edited anthology, Skin Deep Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture (2002, 263–300). The pathbreaking anthology in Black feminist studies also includes “The Body Politic: Black Female Sexuality and the Nineteenth‐Century Euro‐American Imagination,” by Beverly Guy‐Sheftall, Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Women's Studies and Director of the Women's Research and Resource Center at Spelman College (2002, 13–36). These chapters represent significant works in framings of Black female sexuality, medical history, and international cultural representations in the 19th century (also see Gilman, 1985).
Additionally, there has been Black feminist work in the form of public scholarship, including a 2015 National Public Radio interview on the show Hidden Brain called, “Remembering Anarcha, Lucy, & Betsey: The Mothers of Modern Gynecology” (2017). Hosted by Shankar Vedantam, the show featured Bettina Judd, PhD, and Vanessa Northington Gamble, MD, an internationally esteemed African American physician, who chaired the 1996 Tuskegee Syphilis Study Legacy Committee. Here, Judd and Northington Gamble claim cultural space for the enslaved women as important Black ancestors, by publicly naming them as the “mothers of modern gynecology,” acknowledging them as extremely influential (and nonconsensual) figures in modern women's health.
I have also published an article in a Humanities special issue on social memory about placing this history in the context of health humanities research (Dudley, 2021). The article explores the concept of poetic ancestral witnessing in this history, through readings of the African American women's poetry mentioned above. The Humanities article includes results from an interview with Dr Judd, a Black Feminist Health Science Studies Collective member, analyzing her work in relation to Black feminism, art, and cultural memory. In addition to cultural memory, the idea of honoring ancestral legacy also emerges as an important theme from 40 years of Black feminist scholarship on Anarcha, Lucy, Betsey, and the unnamed others.
Ancestral legacy, spirituality and the sacred represent important themes in Black feminist scholarship in general (see Alexander, 2005; Evans, 2021; Holland, 2000; Pauline Gumbs, 2016). In relation to this specific history, Black feminist scholars have been especially interested in reclaiming space for the enslaved women's possible interior lives, as important African American ancestors. This scholarship also emphasizes the impossibility of consent and the diminishment of the enslaved women's personhood and pain, highlighting how the false belief that Black people had a higher pain tolerance was used to justify conditions of slavery (see Davis, 1983).
In Black feminist scholarship, the enslaved women's legacies are often discussed in the context of contemporary US healthcare disparities regarding race, pain, cultural competency, and gendered/racial empathy gaps. In this sense, sharing the enslaved women's stories creates affective space for other stories of Black women's experiences of contemporary medical encounters and injustices to be documented. Reading some of these stories can be productive for health humanities, legal, and medical professions training (see Alford Washington, 2009). This vein of Black feminist scholarship negotiates ancestral legacy and plays with allegories of hauntings and specters, asking, what continues to resonate about this history for Black communities in relation to 21st century healthcare, and why?
This includes publications derived from experiences in the Anarcha Project, spearheaded by disability studies scholar and ally Petra Kuppers (Kuppers, 2008; Steichmann, 2008). The project included numerous community‐centered readings and performances throughout the country from 2006 through 2007. The point was to examine disability histories alongside African American histories through the stories of Anarcha, Lucy, Betsey, and the unnamed others. At least two notable Black feminist scholarly works were derived from participation in the Anarcha Project, including “With Anarcha: A Meditative Diary on Personal Healing and Touching History Through Performance Practice,” by Aimee Meredith Cox, and “In the Shadows of Anarcha: Race, Pain, & Medical Storytelling,” in This Suffering Will Not Be Televised: Black Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling, by Rebecca Wanzo (Meredith Cox, 2008; Wanzo, 2009). These important works (plus dissertation interviews with both scholars and grad school mentorship by Dr Wanzo), played significant roles in my early interest in this research area.
The concept of healing justice comes from the work of Black feminist scholar and grassroots leader Cara Page, and the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective (Page and Raffo, 2016). They have articulated healing justice as: “a political strategy…[t]o intervene and respond on generational trauma and systemic oppression and build community/survivor led responses rooted in southern traditions of resiliency to sustain our emotional/physical/spiritual/psychic and environmental wellbeing” (http://kindredsouthernhjcollective.org). Through this framework, we can understand how Black feminist scholars have imaginatively engaged in prolonged truth, reconciliation, and healing justice work in relation to the history of slavery and the foremothers of American gynecology/modern women's health.
Of course, Columbia Professor of English and Comparative Literature Saidiya Hartman is one of the most preeminent Black feminist scholars to publish on gender, race, and US slavery in the 21st century. In her works, including Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, & Self‐Making in Nineteenth Century America and Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, she famously discusses how the “racial calculus” established under the logics of slavery continues to devalue Black life, well into the 21st century (see Hartman, 1997, 2006, 2007, and 2021). This devaluation exists affectively and materially, and it can be measured in many ways, including (for the purposes of this context) appalling inequalities in healthcare statistics, and in the structural violence of the medical industrial complex on Black bodies. The legacies of slavery also exist in relation to reproductive justice concerns for Black women, particularly disparities in Black maternal and infant health outcomes (Cooper Owens & Fett, 2019; Hammonds & Reverby, 2019).
In conceptualizing the term “medical superbodies,” history of medicine and medical humanities scholar Deirdre Cooper Owens helps us understand how Sims (and his 19th‐century colleagues) exploited enslaved women's reproductive laboring bodies—both on the medical exam table and in the medical clinic as trained nurses (Cooper Owens, 2017, 7). Black feminist framings of modern gynecology's development help us to see not only the continuing legacies of the enslaved women in this history but also the challenging ways in which the remnants of slavery and colonial medicine are still evident in our neo‐colonial healthcare systems (Cronin, 2020).
In this vein of historical reclamation and healing justice work, the newly established Black Feminist Health Science Studies Collective (BFHSS, http://www.blackfeministhealth.com) published an open letter to the editors of Journal of the National Medical Association in 2019 (Bailey, et al 2019). The letter was a response to a review published by the journal defending monuments to Sims, titled, “J. Marion Sims MD: Why He and His Accomplishments Need to Continue to be Recognized, a Commentary and Historical Review.” In the open letter, the BFHSS collective included a list of works that could have been cited by the author, imploring the editors to publish the letter in full and to engage a more diverse group of reviewers before publishing similar works again. In this instance, the collective drew attention to the ways in which certain repetitive claims extend the women's original exploitation and willfully dismiss the history of Black feminist praxis in this area.
These efforts have helped shape the intellectual and cultural milieu, which influenced The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists to publish their article Joint Statement: Collective Action Addressing Racism (2020). The statement was written in the wake of the national reckoning with systemic racism, following the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of law enforcement in the United States. It includes 24 of the leading professional associations in gynecology and obstetrics, all acknowledging the contributions of Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey and vowing to address current, systemic inequities in medicine. The joint statement affirms a commitment by the profession to eliminate disparities in women's healthcare through the following actions: collaboration, education, recognition, scholarship, research, publication, guidance, inclusive excellence, caring for patients and communities, as well as policy & advocacy work (The American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists, 2020, 2).
BDAC wanted to shed light on long histories of laws, campaigns, institutions, and policies, attempting to control Black women's bodies and reproduction (see Ross & Solinger, 2017). They engaged in a methodical and organized effort, devising a Facebook campaign meant to express outrage and offer talking points for people doing social justice work who were interested in speaking out against the billboard campaign. In direct response to these attacks, which targeted African American women, organizations such as the Trust Black Women Campaign began mobilization efforts. In solidarity with these efforts, BDAC began planning ringshouts for reproductive justice in strategic public locations across the city, including the “Swing Low” Harriet Tubman memorial statue created by Alison Saar in Manhattan and the James Marion Sims statue in Harlem. A ringshout is a circle gathering rooted in Black diasporic ancestral traditions, which involves ritual, song, mourning, healing, togetherness, movement, poetry, rhythm, and music, as well as testimony and ancestral connection. In Ebony Golden's words: “[a] ringshout is a method for praise and worship. In the ringshout, people sing, dance, testify. Usually, the songs are led but there is time for each person to speak or sing.[..] The idea is that the circle is sacred and when those join in the circle, they harness an energy and power to manifest what they choose” (Golden & Dudley, 2013).
Here, we can think of Black feminism and ancestral legacy in the sense of gathering in the memory of ancestors and reclaiming cultural spaces to remember them, to heal and to make more poignant points about current social justice struggles. This works affectively, geographically, and visually in stunning ways, in relation to street performance. Several times, Golden articulated the womanist approach of the group. So, I asked her to define the relationship of their work to Alice Walker's foundational articulation of woman of color feminism, in her famous essay, “Womanism.” The field‐defining essay appeared within Walker's larger book, In Search of Our Mothers Gardens: Womanist Prose (Walker, 1983). In the following interview excerpt, Golden discusses her take on womanist performance practice:






Here, Golden mentions key issues of nutrition and food insecurity, reproductive justice, police and state violence, and the meanings of freedom and bodily autonomy and controlling media images of Black women (see Hill Collins, 1990). For Golden, to say that things have not really changed is not to say that Black women are still enslaved or facing the specific kinds of medical trauma endured under Sims. The point, instead, is that the afterlife of slavery still haunts the American imaginary and can be traced by concrete, material disparities in wealth, housing, nutrition access, education, employment, incarceration, policing, and in health outcomes.
The East Harlem Preservation Inc., led by community member and ally Marina Ortiz, sustained a 12‐year grassroots effort in Harlem, New York for the removal and replacement of Sims’ statue in Central Park. Through a multi‐racial and multi‐coalitional sub‐committee to empower voices for healing and equity, they coordinated with other community‐based organizations, cultural institutions, city agencies, and elected officials. During the recorded virtual event “Victory Beyond Sims: A Community Report Back,” James C. Horton, the vice president of education and engagement at the Museum of the City of New York, interviewed medical ethicist Harriet Washington (Victory Beyond Sims: A Community Report Back, 2021). To start the interview, Horton asked Washington, “what motivated you or inspired you to include J. Marion Sims statue in your book, Medical Apartheid?”
Juxtaposing the women's pain with their grit and their powerful enduring legacies, Browder adorns each woman with distinctive Afrocentric jewelry—incorporating Ghanaian adinkra symbols and cowry shells. Browder also affords the women dignity and beauty through welded metal in the shape of Black women's hairstyles, including bantu knots, braids, and a small kinky afro. The public monument in Montgomery brings this history (and this article) full circle—powerfully shifting iconographic representation and signifying decades of Black feminist praxis (Figure 3).
Further, the research on which this article is based can be placed in productive conversation with anthropological scholarship on obstetrics, gynecology, and birthing justice. For example, recent important anthropological work has been done on the politics of vesicovaginal fistulas in Niger and Ethiopia (Hannig, 2017; Heller, 2018, on the afterlife of colonial medical violence and women's labor in the Congo (Hunt, 2016), and in ethnographic approaches to intersectional reproductive justice research across various geographic contexts (Bridges, 2011; Davis, 2019; Falu, 2023; Ross & Roberts et al., 2017).
Circling back now to where the article began, I conclude by nodding toward the work of Saidiya Hartman and Deirdre Cooper Owens. Hartman, echoing Nikole Hannah Jones’ 1619 Project, reminds us: “I too live in the time of slavery, by which I mean I am living in the future created by it” (2007, 133). Cooper Owens reminds us further that “[T]he historical arc of American gynecology resembles other American histories in that it is triumphant. It is a polyphonic narrative that contains the voices of the elite and the downtrodden, and if studied closely, this history evidences how race, class, and gender influenced seemingly value‐neutral fields like medicine” (2017, 3). Through the prism of Black feminism, readers of this Medical Anthropology Quarterly special issue can more fully appreciate the transformational truth and reconciliation work done in this area. I have documented Black feminist praxis over the span of four decades now, for Anarcha, Lucy, Betsey, and the unnamed others—and for us all.

Sections

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Some of the young women underwent numerous rotations of experimental vaginal surgeries, between 1845 and 1849 (Sims, 1884, 222\\u201346). Famously, only three of the women were mentioned in Sims\\u2019 life\\u2010writing, by their first names, as Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey. Their exploitation allowed Sims to achieve international fame as a skilled surgeon and a revered pioneer in the field of modern American gynecology.\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC11742716\", \"pmid\": \"38010275\", \"reference_ids\": [\"maq12836-bib-0009\", \"maq12836-bib-0038\", \"maq12836-bib-0043\", \"maq12836-fig-0001\"], \"section\": \"INTRODUCTION\", \"text\": \"Referencing Katherine McKittrick, the backyard medical clinic served as a unique \\u201ccartography of struggle\\u201d for enslaved populations who feared Southern doctors and frequently underwent cruel procedures designed to advance scientific medical knowledge (Cooper Owens, 2017; Kenny, 2015; McKittrick, 2006, 8). Sims\\u2019 exploitation of the institution of slavery allowed him to develop a surgical cure for vesicovaginal fistulas, to publish the results in international medical journals, to create the Sims position, and to invent the Sims duckbill speculum, an instrument used in gynecology exams, as a medical technology (Figure\\u00a01).\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC11742716\", \"pmid\": \"38010275\", \"reference_ids\": [\"maq12836-bib-0022\", \"maq12836-bib-0044\"], \"section\": \"INTRODUCTION\", \"text\": \"In relation to my own positionality, I am a Black Women's Studies and Africana studies scholar of African American ancestry, specializing in medical history, feminist pedagogy, and interdisciplinary health humanities research. One of the great\\u2010nieces of 19th\\u2010century Southern suffragist and civil rights activist, Sara Dudley Pettey, I also have the benefit of a rich family legacy in grassroots advocacy, gender equity, and social justice work (see Gilmore, 1996). One of my great\\u2010uncles, Edward R. Dudley, was a lawyer with the NAACP who worked alongside Thurgood Marshall as a civil rights activist. He also integrated US diplomatic embassies as the first African American ambassador in US history, appointed by President Harry S. Truman to serve as ambassador to Liberia. At the same time, together in 1949, my great grandparents\\u2014Alice B. Burton and Dr Dewitt T. Burton, MD\\u2014founded Burton Mercy Hospital in Detroit, Michigan. The hospital provided care for Black patients during the Black hospital movement in the era of racially segregated healthcare (see Northington Gamble, 1995).\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC11742716\", \"pmid\": \"38010275\", \"reference_ids\": [\"maq12836-bib-0014\", \"maq12836-bib-0015\", \"maq12836-bib-0016\"], \"section\": \"INTRODUCTION\", \"text\": \"Now a faculty member at The University of Toledo (a teaching\\u2010centered, public research institution located in urban northwest Ohio), I research and teach about gender, race, and health equity issues. I began documenting Black feminist scholarly, grassroots and arts\\u2010based interventions dedicated to the \\u201cforemothers of American gynecology,\\u201d beginning with graduate\\u2010 level research at The Ohio State University, and later at Emory University (see Dudley, 2012, 2016, and 2021). I am also a proud member of the Black Feminist Health Science Studies Collective, whose mission is to \\u201chighlight the necessity of incorporating social justice into medical science\\u201d (www.blackfeministhealthstudies.com).\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC11742716\", \"pmid\": \"38010275\", \"reference_ids\": [\"maq12836-bib-0031\", \"maq12836-bib-0009\", \"maq12836-bib-0009\"], \"section\": \"INTRODUCTION\", \"text\": \"With my own positionality made clearer, the remainder of the article is grounded in Saidiya Hartman's Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Trade Route (2007) and in Deirdre Cooper Owens\\u2019 Medical Bondage: Gender, Race and Slavery in the Origins of American Gynecology (2017). I emphasize Cooper Owens\\u2019 framing of the enslaved women in this history as \\u201cmedical superbodies,\\u201d juxtaposing this conceptualization with Hartman's concept of \\u201cthe afterlife of slavery.\\u201d Significantly, Cooper Owens references the contradictions in the women's status as exploited and powerless \\u201cracial others\\u201d in 19th\\u2010century, scientific racist\\u2010patriarchal schemas, and their simultaneous status as highly trained healthcare workers in the first women's hospital in the country (2017, 108).\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC11742716\", \"pmid\": \"38010275\", \"reference_ids\": [\"maq12836-bib-0004\"], \"section\": \"METHODS AND METHODOLOGY\", \"text\": \"Third, I include excerpts from an interview with Ebony Golden, a community\\u2010based performance artist and organizer in Harlem, New York, who founded the Betty's Daughter Arts Collaborative (BDAC). The collaborative staged an important \\u201cring\\u2010shout for reproductive justice\\u201d in front of a statue of Sims in 2011. In telling this story as a Black feminist intellectual and arts\\u2010based social movement history, the inclusion of Ebony Golden is important in representing a grassroots profile. BDAC's street\\u2010performance work preceded the 2018 removal of a statue of Sims from New York's Central Park. A BDAC performance ensemble known as Body Ecology created a symbolic watershed moment in street\\u2010level, arts\\u2010based activism memorializing the foremothers of American women's health. They did so to recast a narrative in front of the statue, to raise public consciousness, and to enact positive social change at a local level, linking the history to contemporary reproductive justice struggles for Black, Indigenous, and other people of color communities (BIPOC).\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC11742716\", \"pmid\": \"38010275\", \"reference_ids\": [\"maq12836-bib-0052\", \"maq12836-bib-0042\", \"maq12836-fig-0002\"], \"section\": \"FRAGMENTED LIFE SKETCHES OF ANARCHA, LUCY, BETSEY, AND THE UNNAMED OTHERS\", \"text\": \"In the mid\\u201019th century, Alabamian slaveholders were eager to find a medical fix for the fistula condition because it threatened the profit economy of slavery (see Schwartz, 2010). Fistulas were an indicator of the violence Black women experienced under slavery\\u2014resulting directly from bodily trauma (McGregor, 1998, 68). This form of bodily trauma can be related to sexual violence, use of forceps and/or other medical instruments and/or numerous, particularly difficult labors. The women in this story were in their late teens and may have been mothers of other children before transport to Sims\\u2019 hospital in 1845 (Figure\\u00a02).\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC11742716\", \"pmid\": \"38010275\", \"reference_ids\": [\"maq12836-bib-0053\"], \"section\": \"\", \"text\": \"I ransacked the country for cases\\u2026[a]nd it ended in my finding six or seven cases of vesico\\u2010vaginal fistula that had been hidden away for years in the country because they had been pronounced incurable (sic). I went to work to put another story on my hospital, and this gave me sixteen beds; four beds for servants, and twelve for the patients. (Sims, 1884, 236).\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC11742716\", \"pmid\": \"38010275\", \"reference_ids\": [\"maq12836-bib-0068\"], \"section\": \"FRAGMENTED LIFE SKETCHES OF ANARCHA, LUCY, BETSEY, AND THE UNNAMED OTHERS\", \"text\": \"Eventually, the other medical men stopped coming, believing Sims would not be successful in his experimental exploits. Sims then started to train the women in their own nursing care. They were administered opium for pain, for bowel blockage and for compliance (hence the very real possibility of narcotic substance addiction, which has been emphasized in Black feminist conceptualizations of this history). However, they were not administered ether as anesthesia, which was slowly coming into broader use after its discovery by a Boston dentist named William Morton in 1846 (see Pernick, 1983).\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC11742716\", \"pmid\": \"38010275\", \"reference_ids\": [\"maq12836-bib-0053\"], \"section\": \"FRAGMENTED LIFE SKETCHES OF ANARCHA, LUCY, BETSEY, AND THE UNNAMED OTHERS\", \"text\": \"Given that there were 16 beds and only three names in Sims\\u2019 writing, this research holds space for not only Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey, but also the unnamed others. Including them in this research represents a nod to other marginalized stories that have been lost in the voids, gaps, silences, and absences in the historical record. In addition to Anarcha, Lucy, Betsey and the other unnamed women, Sims also experimented on enslaved men and children at other times in his early career, including in dentistry and for lockjaw (Sims, 1884, 19). Thus, the phrase \\u201cthe unnamed others\\u201d is a powerful symbolic and representative placeholder.\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC11742716\", \"pmid\": \"38010275\", \"reference_ids\": [\"maq12836-bib-0027\"], \"section\": \"FRAGMENTED LIFE SKETCHES OF ANARCHA, LUCY, BETSEY, AND THE UNNAMED OTHERS\", \"text\": \"Recent historical scholarship demonstrates that after the experimental series, Anarcha (also spelled Annacay) married a man named Laurenzi Jackson, and she died in 1869 at the age of 46, buried next to her husband (Hallman, 2023, xvi). Anarcha Jackson knew romantic love, and she lived through the abolition of slavery. Importantly, the story of what happened to her, and the others, loomed large in the medical legacy of Sims and needed to be addressed by the time of his death in 1883. Yet the enslaved women are ghost\\u2010like (both there and not there) within 19th\\u2010century newspaper memorialization. The question Sims\\u2019 contemporaries had to grapple with was what to say (or not say) about the enslaved people and the role of slavery in that infamous, backyard Montgomery hospital\\u2014following the Civil War and the Reconstruction Era.\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC11742716\", \"pmid\": \"38010275\", \"reference_ids\": [\"maq12836-bib-0002\", \"maq12836-bib-0045\"], \"section\": \"Cultural Memory\", \"text\": \"Beginning with the publication of Diane Axelsen's \\u201cWomen as Victims of Medical Experimentation\\u201d in 1985 and Durrenda Ojanuga's \\u201cThe Medical Ethics of the \\u201cFather of Gynaecology,\\u201d Dr J Marion Sims\\u201d in 1993, Black feminist scholars have written to preserve the cultural memory of the enslaved women and to place their stories in larger bio\\u2010ethical, political, and socio\\u2010historical contexts (Axelsen, 1985; Ojanuga, 1993). In doing so, Black feminist scholars have also made broader points about power relations and the racialized and gendered dynamics of public memorialization.\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC11742716\", \"pmid\": \"38010275\", \"reference_ids\": [\"maq12836-bib-0020\", \"maq12836-bib-0036\", \"maq12836-bib-0019\", \"maq12836-bib-0007\", \"maq12836-bib-0066\"], \"section\": \"Cultural Memory\", \"text\": \"In this case, \\u201ccultural memory\\u201d refers to a collective effort, dedicated to the women in this history, to document their legacies through cultural symbols and material culture artifacts in the written and public domains. We can see this, for example, in the work of five highly decorated African American US poets. These poets include Nikky Finney, with her poem \\u201cThe Greatest Sideshow on Earth\\u201d in The World is Round (2013); scholar\\u2010poet Bettina Judd, with her various publications in this area, including her book Patient. Poems. (2014); Kwoya Fagin Maples, with her book, Mend Poems (2018), and Dominique Christina, with her book Anarcha Speaks: A History in Poems (2018). These works emphasize the cultural memory aspects of the enslaved women's legacies through art. Notably, Judd begins her poem \\u201cAfter Memory\\u201d with a nod to the prolific African American poet Lucille Clifton (1934\\u20132010). The epigraph of Judd's poem cites Clifton's \\u201cWhy Some People Be Mad at Me Sometimes,\\u201d by excerpting the famous and apropos line: \\u201ci keep on remembering mine\\u201d (Clifton, 1987, 6).\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC11742716\", \"pmid\": \"38010275\", \"reference_ids\": [\"maq12836-bib-0058\", \"maq12836-bib-0061\", \"maq12836-bib-0062\", \"maq12836-bib-0017\"], \"section\": \"Cultural Memory\", \"text\": \"These arguments portray Sims as simply a man of his times and claim that focusing on the enslaved women, forced opium addiction, the impossibility of consent, exploitation, and torturous abuse obscures Sims\\u2019 useful contributions to medical knowledge (Vernon, 2019; Wall, 2006; and 2018; Nature editorial with unidentified author, 2017).\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC11742716\", \"pmid\": \"38010275\", \"reference_ids\": [\"maq12836-bib-0025\", \"maq12836-bib-0065\", \"maq12836-bib-0066\"], \"section\": \"Cultural Memory\", \"text\": \"Black feminist scholars have written against this vein of thinking, not to dismiss the gains of modern medical knowledge, but to properly contextualize them in relation to social power arrangements, structural violence, and 19th\\u2010century patriarchal scientific racism. This vein of Black feminist scholarship also includes works about the ethics of statues dedicated to Sims and the politics of monument culture in a 21st century context (Green, 2017, Washington, 2006, and 2017). The groundbreaking work of historian and medical ethicist Harriet Washington highlights histories of medical abuse against African Americans, from colonial times to the present. Her 2006 book, Medical Apartheid, begins with the ethics of public monument dedications to Sims, and the cultural erasure of the enslaved women.\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC11742716\", \"pmid\": \"38010275\", \"reference_ids\": [\"maq12836-bib-0037\", \"maq12836-bib-0026\", \"maq12836-bib-0021\"], \"section\": \"Cultural Memory\", \"text\": \"There has also been important cultural work by allies in feminist performance studies, including Terri Kapsalis\\u2019 \\u201cMastering the Female Pelvis: Race and the Tools of Reproduction,\\u201d published in Black feminist scholar Kimberly Wallace\\u2010Sanders\\u2019 edited anthology, Skin Deep Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture (2002, 263\\u2013300). The pathbreaking anthology in Black feminist studies also includes \\u201cThe Body Politic: Black Female Sexuality and the Nineteenth\\u2010Century Euro\\u2010American Imagination,\\u201d by Beverly Guy\\u2010Sheftall, Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Women's Studies and Director of the Women's Research and Resource Center at Spelman College (2002, 13\\u201336). These chapters represent significant works in framings of Black female sexuality, medical history, and international cultural representations in the 19th century (also see Gilman, 1985).\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC11742716\", \"pmid\": \"38010275\", \"reference_ids\": [\"maq12836-bib-0035\"], \"section\": \"Cultural Memory\", \"text\": \"Additionally, there has been Black feminist work in the form of public scholarship, including a 2015 National Public Radio interview on the show Hidden Brain called, \\u201cRemembering Anarcha, Lucy, & Betsey: The Mothers of Modern Gynecology\\u201d (2017). Hosted by Shankar Vedantam, the show featured Bettina Judd, PhD, and Vanessa Northington Gamble, MD, an internationally esteemed African American physician, who chaired the 1996 Tuskegee Syphilis Study Legacy Committee. Here, Judd and Northington Gamble claim cultural space for the enslaved women as important Black ancestors, by publicly naming them as the \\u201cmothers of modern gynecology,\\u201d acknowledging them as extremely influential (and nonconsensual) figures in modern women's health.\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC11742716\", \"pmid\": \"38010275\", \"reference_ids\": [\"maq12836-bib-0016\"], \"section\": \"Cultural Memory\", \"text\": \"I have also published an article in a Humanities special issue on social memory about placing this history in the context of health humanities research (Dudley, 2021). The article explores the concept of poetic ancestral witnessing in this history, through readings of the African American women's poetry mentioned above. The Humanities article includes results from an interview with Dr Judd, a Black Feminist Health Science Studies Collective member, analyzing her work in relation to Black feminism, art, and cultural memory. In addition to cultural memory, the idea of honoring ancestral legacy also emerges as an important theme from 40 years of Black feminist scholarship on Anarcha, Lucy, Betsey, and the unnamed others.\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC11742716\", \"pmid\": \"38010275\", \"reference_ids\": [\"maq12836-bib-0001\", \"maq12836-bib-0018\", \"maq12836-bib-0034\", \"maq12836-bib-0047\", \"maq12836-bib-0013\"], \"section\": \"Ancestral Legacy\", \"text\": \"Ancestral legacy, spirituality and the sacred represent important themes in Black feminist scholarship in general (see Alexander, 2005; Evans, 2021; Holland, 2000; Pauline Gumbs, 2016). In relation to this specific history, Black feminist scholars have been especially interested in reclaiming space for the enslaved women's possible interior lives, as important African American ancestors. This scholarship also emphasizes the impossibility of consent and the diminishment of the enslaved women's personhood and pain, highlighting how the false belief that Black people had a higher pain tolerance was used to justify conditions of slavery (see Davis, 1983).\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC11742716\", \"pmid\": \"38010275\", \"reference_ids\": [\"maq12836-bib-0064\"], \"section\": \"Ancestral Legacy\", \"text\": \"In Black feminist scholarship, the enslaved women's legacies are often discussed in the context of contemporary US healthcare disparities regarding race, pain, cultural competency, and gendered/racial empathy gaps. In this sense, sharing the enslaved women's stories creates affective space for other stories of Black women's experiences of contemporary medical encounters and injustices to be documented. Reading some of these stories can be productive for health humanities, legal, and medical professions training (see Alford Washington, 2009). This vein of Black feminist scholarship negotiates ancestral legacy and plays with allegories of hauntings and specters, asking, what continues to resonate about this history for Black communities in relation to 21st century healthcare, and why?\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC11742716\", \"pmid\": \"38010275\", \"reference_ids\": [\"maq12836-bib-0041\", \"maq12836-bib-0055\", \"maq12836-bib-0011\", \"maq12836-bib-0063\"], \"section\": \"Ancestral Legacy\", \"text\": \"This includes publications derived from experiences in the Anarcha Project, spearheaded by disability studies scholar and ally Petra Kuppers (Kuppers, 2008; Steichmann, 2008). The project included numerous community\\u2010centered readings and performances throughout the country from 2006 through 2007. The point was to examine disability histories alongside African American histories through the stories of Anarcha, Lucy, Betsey, and the unnamed others. At least two notable Black feminist scholarly works were derived from participation in the Anarcha Project, including \\u201cWith Anarcha: A Meditative Diary on Personal Healing and Touching History Through Performance Practice,\\u201d by Aimee Meredith Cox, and \\u201cIn the Shadows of Anarcha: Race, Pain, & Medical Storytelling,\\u201d in This Suffering Will Not Be Televised: Black Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling, by Rebecca Wanzo (Meredith Cox, 2008; Wanzo, 2009). These important works (plus dissertation interviews with both scholars and grad school mentorship by Dr Wanzo), played significant roles in my early interest in this research area.\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC11742716\", \"pmid\": \"38010275\", \"reference_ids\": [\"maq12836-bib-0046\"], \"section\": \"Healing Justice\", \"text\": \"The concept of healing justice comes from the work of Black feminist scholar and grassroots leader Cara Page, and the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective (Page and Raffo, 2016). They have articulated healing justice as: \\u201ca political strategy\\u2026[t]o intervene and respond on generational trauma and systemic oppression and build community/survivor led responses rooted in southern traditions of resiliency to sustain our emotional/physical/spiritual/psychic and environmental wellbeing\\u201d (http://kindredsouthernhjcollective.org). Through this framework, we can understand how Black feminist scholars have imaginatively engaged in prolonged truth, reconciliation, and healing justice work in relation to the history of slavery and the foremothers of American gynecology/modern women's health.\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC11742716\", \"pmid\": \"38010275\", \"reference_ids\": [\"maq12836-bib-0030\", \"maq12836-bib-0031\", \"maq12836-bib-0032\", \"maq12836-bib-0010\", \"maq12836-bib-0029\"], \"section\": \"Healing Justice\", \"text\": \"Of course, Columbia Professor of English and Comparative Literature Saidiya Hartman is one of the most preeminent Black feminist scholars to publish on gender, race, and US slavery in the 21st century. In her works, including Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, & Self\\u2010Making in Nineteenth Century America and Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, she famously discusses how the \\u201cracial calculus\\u201d established under the logics of slavery continues to devalue Black life, well into the 21st century (see Hartman, 1997, 2006, 2007, and 2021). This devaluation exists affectively and materially, and it can be measured in many ways, including (for the purposes of this context) appalling inequalities in healthcare statistics, and in the structural violence of the medical industrial complex on Black bodies. The legacies of slavery also exist in relation to reproductive justice concerns for Black women, particularly disparities in Black maternal and infant health outcomes (Cooper Owens & Fett, 2019; Hammonds & Reverby, 2019).\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC11742716\", \"pmid\": \"38010275\", \"reference_ids\": [\"maq12836-bib-0009\", \"maq12836-bib-0012\"], \"section\": \"Healing Justice\", \"text\": \"In conceptualizing the term \\u201cmedical superbodies,\\u201d history of medicine and medical humanities scholar Deirdre Cooper Owens helps us understand how Sims (and his 19th\\u2010century colleagues) exploited enslaved women's reproductive laboring bodies\\u2014both on the medical exam table and in the medical clinic as trained nurses (Cooper Owens, 2017, 7). Black feminist framings of modern gynecology's development help us to see not only the continuing legacies of the enslaved women in this history but also the challenging ways in which the remnants of slavery and colonial medicine are still evident in our neo\\u2010colonial healthcare systems (Cronin, 2020).\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC11742716\", \"pmid\": \"38010275\", \"reference_ids\": [\"maq12836-bib-0003\"], \"section\": \"Healing Justice\", \"text\": \"In this vein of historical reclamation and healing justice work, the newly established Black Feminist Health Science Studies Collective (BFHSS, http://www.blackfeministhealth.com) published an open letter to the editors of Journal of the National Medical Association in 2019 (Bailey, et al 2019). The letter was a response to a review published by the journal defending monuments to Sims, titled, \\u201cJ. Marion Sims MD: Why He and His Accomplishments Need to Continue to be Recognized, a Commentary and Historical Review.\\u201d In the open letter, the BFHSS collective included a list of works that could have been cited by the author, imploring the editors to publish the letter in full and to engage a more diverse group of reviewers before publishing similar works again. In this instance, the collective drew attention to the ways in which certain repetitive claims extend the women's original exploitation and willfully dismiss the history of Black feminist praxis in this area.\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC11742716\", \"pmid\": \"38010275\", \"reference_ids\": [\"maq12836-bib-0056\", \"maq12836-bib-0056\"], \"section\": \"Healing Justice\", \"text\": \"These efforts have helped shape the intellectual and cultural milieu, which influenced The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists to publish their article Joint Statement: Collective Action Addressing Racism (2020). The statement was written in the wake of the national reckoning with systemic racism, following the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of law enforcement in the United States. It includes 24 of the leading professional associations in gynecology and obstetrics, all acknowledging the contributions of Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey and vowing to address current, systemic inequities in medicine. The joint statement affirms a commitment by the profession to eliminate disparities in women's healthcare through the following actions: collaboration, education, recognition, scholarship, research, publication, guidance, inclusive excellence, caring for patients and communities, as well as policy & advocacy work (The American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists, 2020, 2).\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC11742716\", \"pmid\": \"38010275\", \"reference_ids\": [\"maq12836-bib-0049\", \"maq12836-bib-0024\"], \"section\": \"BLACK FEMINIST RESPONSES IN ART AND GRASSROOTS COMMUNITY ACTIVISM\", \"text\": \"BDAC wanted to shed light on long histories of laws, campaigns, institutions, and policies, attempting to control Black women's bodies and reproduction (see Ross & Solinger, 2017). They engaged in a methodical and organized effort, devising a Facebook campaign meant to express outrage and offer talking points for people doing social justice work who were interested in speaking out against the billboard campaign. In direct response to these attacks, which targeted African American women, organizations such as the Trust Black Women Campaign began mobilization efforts. In solidarity with these efforts, BDAC began planning ringshouts for reproductive justice in strategic public locations across the city, including the \\u201cSwing Low\\u201d Harriet Tubman memorial statue created by Alison Saar in Manhattan and the James Marion Sims statue in Harlem. A ringshout is a circle gathering rooted in Black diasporic ancestral traditions, which involves ritual, song, mourning, healing, togetherness, movement, poetry, rhythm, and music, as well as testimony and ancestral connection. In Ebony Golden's words: \\u201c[a] ringshout is a method for praise and worship. In the ringshout, people sing, dance, testify. Usually, the songs are led but there is time for each person to speak or sing.[..] The idea is that the circle is sacred and when those join in the circle, they harness an energy and power to manifest what they choose\\u201d (Golden & Dudley, 2013).\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC11742716\", \"pmid\": \"38010275\", \"reference_ids\": [\"maq12836-bib-0060\"], \"section\": \"BLACK FEMINIST RESPONSES IN ART AND GRASSROOTS COMMUNITY ACTIVISM\", \"text\": \"Here, we can think of Black feminism and ancestral legacy in the sense of gathering in the memory of ancestors and reclaiming cultural spaces to remember them, to heal and to make more poignant points about current social justice struggles. This works affectively, geographically, and visually in stunning ways, in relation to street performance. Several times, Golden articulated the womanist approach of the group. So, I asked her to define the relationship of their work to Alice Walker's foundational articulation of woman of color feminism, in her famous essay, \\u201cWomanism.\\u201d The field\\u2010defining essay appeared within Walker's larger book, In Search of Our Mothers Gardens: Womanist Prose (Walker, 1983). In the following interview excerpt, Golden discusses her take on womanist performance practice:\\n\\n\\n\\n\\n\\n\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC11742716\", \"pmid\": \"38010275\", \"reference_ids\": [\"maq12836-bib-0033\"], \"section\": \"BLACK FEMINIST RESPONSES IN ART AND GRASSROOTS COMMUNITY ACTIVISM\", \"text\": \"Here, Golden mentions key issues of nutrition and food insecurity, reproductive justice, police and state violence, and the meanings of freedom and bodily autonomy and controlling media images of Black women (see Hill Collins, 1990). For Golden, to say that things have not really changed is not to say that Black women are still enslaved or facing the specific kinds of medical trauma endured under Sims. The point, instead, is that the afterlife of slavery still haunts the American imaginary and can be traced by concrete, material disparities in wealth, housing, nutrition access, education, employment, incarceration, policing, and in health outcomes.\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC11742716\", \"pmid\": \"38010275\", \"reference_ids\": [\"maq12836-bib-0059\"], \"section\": \"East Harlem, New York Preservation Inc. Virtual Community Report Back and Michelle Browder's More Up Campus in Montgomery, Alabama\", \"text\": \"The East Harlem Preservation Inc., led by community member and ally Marina Ortiz, sustained a 12\\u2010year grassroots effort in Harlem, New York for the removal and replacement of Sims\\u2019 statue in Central Park. Through a multi\\u2010racial and multi\\u2010coalitional sub\\u2010committee to empower voices for healing and equity, they coordinated with other community\\u2010based organizations, cultural institutions, city agencies, and elected officials. During the recorded virtual event \\u201cVictory Beyond Sims: A Community Report Back,\\u201d James C. Horton, the vice president of education and engagement at the Museum of the City of New York, interviewed medical ethicist Harriet Washington (Victory Beyond Sims: A Community Report Back, 2021). To start the interview, Horton asked Washington, \\u201cwhat motivated you or inspired you to include J. Marion Sims statue in your book, Medical Apartheid?\\u201d\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC11742716\", \"pmid\": \"38010275\", \"reference_ids\": [\"maq12836-fig-0003\"], \"section\": \"East Harlem, New York Preservation Inc. Virtual Community Report Back and Michelle Browder's More Up Campus in Montgomery, Alabama\", \"text\": \"Juxtaposing the women's pain with their grit and their powerful enduring legacies, Browder adorns each woman with distinctive Afrocentric jewelry\\u2014incorporating Ghanaian adinkra symbols and cowry shells. Browder also affords the women dignity and beauty through welded metal in the shape of Black women's hairstyles, including bantu knots, braids, and a small kinky afro. The public monument in Montgomery brings this history (and this article) full circle\\u2014powerfully shifting iconographic representation and signifying decades of Black feminist praxis (Figure\\u00a03).\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC11742716\", \"pmid\": \"38010275\", \"reference_ids\": [\"maq12836-bib-0069\", \"maq12836-bib-0070\", \"maq12836-bib-0071\", \"maq12836-bib-0073\", \"maq12836-bib-0072\", \"maq12836-bib-0074\", \"maq12836-bib-0050\"], \"section\": \"CONCLUSION: LESSONS FOR MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY\", \"text\": \"Further, the research on which this article is based can be placed in productive conversation with anthropological scholarship on obstetrics, gynecology, and birthing justice. For example, recent important anthropological work has been done on the politics of vesicovaginal fistulas in Niger and Ethiopia (Hannig, 2017; Heller, 2018, on the afterlife of colonial medical violence and women's labor in the Congo (Hunt, 2016), and in ethnographic approaches to intersectional reproductive justice research across various geographic contexts (Bridges, 2011; Davis, 2019; Falu, 2023; Ross & Roberts et\\u00a0al., 2017).\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC11742716\", \"pmid\": \"38010275\", \"reference_ids\": [\"maq12836-bib-0031\"], \"section\": \"CONCLUSION: LESSONS FOR MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY\", \"text\": \"Circling back now to where the article began, I conclude by nodding toward the work of Saidiya Hartman and Deirdre Cooper Owens. Hartman, echoing Nikole Hannah Jones\\u2019 1619 Project, reminds us: \\u201cI too live in the time of slavery, by which I mean I am living in the future created by it\\u201d (2007, 133). Cooper Owens reminds us further that \\u201c[T]he historical arc of American gynecology resembles other American histories in that it is triumphant. It is a polyphonic narrative that contains the voices of the elite and the downtrodden, and if studied closely, this history evidences how race, class, and gender influenced seemingly value\\u2010neutral fields like medicine\\u201d (2017, 3). Through the prism of Black feminism, readers of this Medical Anthropology Quarterly special issue can more fully appreciate the transformational truth and reconciliation work done in this area. I have documented Black feminist praxis over the span of four decades now, for Anarcha, Lucy, Betsey, and the unnamed others\\u2014and for us all.\"}]"

Metadata

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