I am Associate Professor of Atlantic World Womenâs History at the University of Oxford. The history of race, gender, and childbearing is my passion and my profession. The Dobbs decision pissed me TF off and inspired me to write this list. I hope you enjoy these books, and never stop questioning why womenâs reproductive lives are controlled so minutely and why their reproductive labour is unpaid and unacknowledged.
I wrote
The Politics of Reproduction: Race, Medicine, and Fertility in the Age of Abolition
Adrienne Richâs book was a clarion call for second-wave feminists to rethink the history of motherhood in the Western world. It inspired and reflected a wave of scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s that rethought the traditional depiction of childbirth before the advent of male-doctor-dominated hospitals as crude and dangerous. Adrienne Rich examined the idealization of mother love as the purest kind of love and exposed the psychic tensions this had created for generations of mothers who could not live up to this ideal. In her chapter "Hands of Iron, Hands of Flesh" she offered a poetic and stinging rebuttal of the notion that childbearing women were safest in the hands of the male medical establishment.
In Of Woman Born, originally published in 1976, influential poet and feminist Adrienne Rich examines the patriarchic systems and political institutions that define motherhood. Exploring her own experience-as a woman, a poet, a feminist and a mother-she finds the act of mothering to be both determined by and distinct from the institution of motherhood as it is imposed on all women everywhere. A "powerful blend of research, theory, and self-reflection" (Sandra M. Gilbert, Paris Review), Of Woman Born revolutionised how women thought about motherhood and their own liberation. With a stirring new foreword from National Book Critics Circle Award-winning writerâŚ
Jennifer Morganâs history of childbearing in the Black Atlantic cracked open an entirely new field, exposing how American society has for centuries relied on Black womenâs work as mothers. Her attention to the role of reproduction in the perpetuation of racial slavery in the Americas during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries exposed how European imperialism had, from its inception, relied upon pushing Black women into dual roles as labourers in the fields of new world plantations and also as labouring mothers. Morganâs analysis of European travel literature highlights how white menâs perceptions of Black womenâs bodies was shaped by these dual roles, as for example in the recurring trope that depicted African women as able to suckle infants over their shoulder whilst attending to other sorts of labour.
When black women were brought from Africa to the New World as slave laborers, their value was determined by their ability to work as well as their potential to bear children, who by law would become the enslaved property of the mother's master. In Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery, Jennifer L. Morgan examines for the first time how African women's labor in both senses became intertwined in the English colonies. Beginning with the ideological foundations of racial slavery in early modern Europe, Laboring Women traverses the Atlantic, exploring the social and cultural lives of women inâŚ
Acquaintance is a work of LGBT historical fiction, a gay love story set in 1923 when the Ku Klux Klan was growing in influence, the eugenics movement was passing human sterilization laws, illegal liquor was fueling corruption, and Freud was all the rage.
It is a sign of our shocking historical amnesia regarding American womenâs reproductive lives that this remarkable book is out of print. Leavitt discusses the long history of American womenâs childbearing lives, moving from colonial times through the twentieth century and charting along the way womenâs loss of control over their reproductive lives as they moved away from births at home, attended by friends and neighbors, and toward birth in hospitals where their freedom of choice was increasingly restricted. To understand the dark side of the âtwilight sleepâ procedures depicted in The Crown or Mad Men, read Chapter 5 on the growing use, by the early twentieth century, of drugs that rendered women so passive that their babies could be pulled roughly from their bodies with metal instruments.
This is a comprehensive history of women and childbirth in America. Many of the basic changes that have occurred since 1750 resulted from two factors: the replacement of midwives and other female support systems by male doctors in the actual delivery process, and the movement of childbirth from the home to hospitals.
Did you know that the supposed âfather of gynecologyâ built his practice on horrific medical experiments conducted on African-American and Irish women? Owensâ book exposes how J. Marion Simsâ practice amongst relatively elite white women was built upon procedures that he developed through experimentation on Black and Irish womenâs bodies, and particularly a series of experimental surgeries to repair African-American womenâs fistulas, which were painful and debilitating tears between the vagina and the bladder or anus that developed during childbirth. Cooper makes a crucial and revealing methodological move by recovering and reframing the lives of the women who were objectified by these experiments.
The accomplishments of pioneering doctors such as John Peter Mettauer, James Marion Sims, and Nathan Bozeman are well documented. It is also no secret that these nineteenth-century gynecologists performed experimental caesarean sections, ovariotomies, and obstetric fistulae repairs primarily on poor and powerless women. Medical Bondage breaks new ground by exploring how and why physicians denied these women their full humanity yet valued them as ""medical superbodies"" highly suited for medical experimentation.
In Medical Bondage, Cooper Owens examines a wide range of scientific literature and less formal communications in which gynecologists created and disseminated medical fictions about their patients, such asâŚ
Saving Raine is a captivating tale of resilience, redemption, and the enduring power of love, penned by the acclaimed author Marian L. Thomas.
This contemporary fiction novel chronicles the compelling journey of Raine Reynolds as she confronts heartache, betrayal, and loss. Against the vibrant backdrops of Atlanta and Paris, Raine'sâŚ
For a fictional and gut-wrenching take on how the American reliance on oppressed womenâs reproductive labor has long put these women in impossible binds (based on a true story!), you have to read Toni Morrisonâs Pulitzer prize-winning novel, Beloved. I wonât say any more lest I give away the plot. Just read it.
'Toni Morrison was a giant of her times and ours... Beloved is a heart-breaking testimony to the ongoing ravages of slavery, and should be read by all' Margaret Atwood, New York Times
Discover this beautiful gift edition of Toni Morrison's prize-winning contemporary classic Beloved
It is the mid-1800s and as slavery looks to be coming to an end, Sethe is haunted by the violent trauma it wrought on her former enslaved life at Sweet Home, Kentucky. Her dead baby daughter, whose tombstone bears the single word, Beloved, returns as a spectre to punish her mother, but also to elicit herâŚ
The Politics of Reproduction charts how the management of black womenâs reproductive under slavery in the British empire laid the foundation for modern methods for managing womenâs fertility. Politicians, slave owners, missionaries, and doctors all attempted to exploit the fertility of Black women's bodies in order to ensure the economic success of Britainâs Caribbean and North American colonies despite the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. This led to new strategies for managing sex and childbearing, such as centralized nurseries, discouragement of extended breastfeeding, and financial incentives for childbearing, that have become commonplace in our modern world. The story of a Barbadian midwife and her family dramatically illustrates the consequences of this obsession with maximizing Black womenâs fertility.
The Extraordinary Journey of David Ingram
by
Dean Snow,
An ordinary sailor named David Ingram walked 3600 miles from Mexico to Canada over the course of eleven months in 1568-9. There, he and two companions were rescued by a French ship on the Bay of Fundy. They were the first Englishmen to explore the interior of North America.
What would you do if a meteorite landed in your own front yard? And not just any meteorite, but one that turns out to be some kind of mysterious force that will drain the life out of you and your surroundings?
Illustrator Sara Barkat lends her vision to H.P. LovecraftâsâŚ