Fans pick 100 books like Medical Bondage

This book is part odyssey, part ghost story, and part passion play. Toni Morrison is one of the patron saints of American literature whom I was fortunate to discover at an early age. This is her masterpiece, an example of what is possible when a writer’s heart, mind, and spirit are aligned.

The fact that the unfathomable sacrifice around which Beloved is imagined is based upon an actual event speaks volumes about the innate horrors of slavery. In matters of race, America’s skeletons are buried in shallow graves.

I haven’t recovered yet from the way Hartman recovers the lives of young Black women through historical photographs. The images were made to rob these women of their individuality, make them fit “types,” letting them say Nothing about themselves.

But Hartman writes like she’s talking to them, and they’re wonderful. She messes with categories used by authorities who thought they “knew” these women by their transgressions. I was utterly transfixed by how she imagined these women’s lives and loves in the ordinary stairways and back alleys they called home.

The photos are gorgeous. You could talk about them for days and still have more to think about—like how when it comes to women being framed for doing something wrong, maybe Nothing has changed.

This isn’t a recent book, but it remains one of my favorite dives into the underworld! Who doesn’t like a salacious rag sheet or a grisly murder? It focuses on sexual danger in Victorian London and has everything: tabloid journalism, child prostitution, and narratives about Jack the Ripper and the “bad women” he killed!

All these stories uncover the ways that the general masses made sense of new sexual categories and illuminate how legislators and politicians used those categories to both challenge and push women out of public spaces and back into so-called traditional gender roles.

I remain fascinated by how the story of a serial killer could be subverted to instead denigrate white women (racialized as Other because of class) who were in public spaces where they didn’t belong. Or how often those same working-class white women used the ideas of sexual danger to show that it was, in… show more.

When I read this book as a young lawyer in reproductive rights in the 1990s, it resonated deeply with the daily bias that I witnessed against my clients. Decades later, a highlight of my book tour was being invited to do a talk with Professor Roberts at the Free Library of Philadelphia. Dorothy Roberts’ exploration of “race, reproduction and the meaning of liberty” is powerful.

Her writing clearly lays out how restrictions on abortion, parenting, and access to basic health care are shaped by and also perpetuate American racism. This book inspired me to work for equity and reproductive freedom for all, and hopefully, it will continue to do so for others, too. 

This book is a first. Theobald gives us a really interesting and comprehensive history of pregnancy, birthing, motherhood -- and activism -- on the Crow Reservation in Montana. She explains the interventions of the federal government, for example, via coercive sterilization and child removal, and provides rich accounts of family, tribal, and inter-tribal resistance -- and claims of self-determination -- in the face of these interventions.

This book has arrived with a bang, telling stories about how women and couples navigate questions of contraception. Littlejohn is a great writer, telling vivid story after vivid story about how decisions about contraception get made -- who has it easy, who doesn't, and why women rarely fall in the first category.

I loved this book when I initially read it, and return to it time and again. Adrienne Rich is, quite simply, the mother of motherhood studies. 

This book strongly resonates with me and my experiences as a mother, particularly how Rich defines mothering and motherhood as two distinct states of being: Motherhood–the patriarchal institution (this is where we get all the do’s and don’ts of what society expects of us as mothers)–and mothering–the actual affective labor of bringing up children. 

One section in particular–where Rich compares the freedom of the summer break with the return to restrictions of term time and the ‘rule of the father’–is as true now as it was then. This is a personal take on motherhood infused with passion and intelligence. I highly recommend it.

Jennifer Morgan’s history of childbearing in the Black Atlantic cracked open an entirely new field, exposing how American society has for centuries relied on Black women’s 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. Morgan’s analysis of European travel literature highlights how white men’s perceptions of Black women’s 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. 

It is a sign of our shocking historical amnesia regarding American women’s reproductive lives that this remarkable book is out of print. Leavitt discusses the long history of American women’s childbearing lives, moving from colonial times through the twentieth century and charting along the way women’s 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 ‘twilight sleep’ 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.

Once I settled in to read the life story of the scandalous 19th-century French femme fatale Marguerite (Meg) Steinheil, I didn’t get back up until I finished. What a ride! Then, I immediately went back to the beginning and read it again.

Meg became notorious in 1899 for literally being in the bed (and the clutches) of the French president when he suddenly died. But wait, there’s more! That’s not even the most incredible moment in her life story. At one point, I started yelling at the book: "Meg, what, no!"

This book has everything you want in a story: murder, sex, scandal, and an unlikely heroine’s pluck and poignancy. History that reads like a novel. What more could you want?