10 books like Medical Bondage

Set at a time of slavery in the U.S., Sethe, a former slave, makes a terrible – and to her the only - choice to save her girl child from the horrors faced by women in slavery.

Beloved is the daughter who haunts her, and their tale has haunted me ever since.

Behind the scenes, historians recognize that our writing involves conjecture—interpretation of evidence whose meaning is subject to debate—but rarely do we let readers in on that aspect of our work.

Not so Saidiya Hartman, whose books always make clear how she has transformed fragments of evidence into coherent stories. In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, the stories center on the brave and creative ways that young Black working women who migrated to northern cities in the early twentieth century defied limitations imposed on them by families, partners, employers, social workers, and the criminal justice system.

The book inspires me not only for what it reveals about the humanity’s capacity for resistance in the face of overwhelming odds but also for Hartman’s forthrightness about the challenges of interpretation.  

It’s not an exaggeration to say this book by Dorothy Roberts is one of the most important books I’ve ever read.

Here, Roberts lays bare how race is central to understanding the long fight for reproductive freedom in America. She maps out the different terrains of that particular battleground as it morphed from forced reproduction to eugenics and involuntary sterilization to various “bad mother” panics that advanced the notion that the key to solving societal ills lie in controlling the reproductive capability of black women. 

A sociologist and legal scholar, Robert’s analysis is meticulous and damning, without being dry or difficult to parse. In fact, her voice is so keen and so clear that over the years I’ve internalized so much of her thinking that I forget that those ideas are not mine!

I would even argue the discourse has subsumed so much of her analysis that this book is… show more.

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.

Adrienne Rich’s 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.

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.

Caldwell opened my eyes not only to aspects of American history I wasn’t familiar with, but current politics with this heavy saga. Captains and the Kings highlighted the plight of Irish immigrants in the mid-1800s and then widened the scope to show the follies of the social classes, political corruption, and greed into the new century. True events and historical figures are woven into this fictional tapestry with such skill that everything seems plausible. I ended the read fearful for our future, like I’d typically get from reading a dystopian novel. It’s an intense read needing tissues, a search engine for looking up historical tidbits you might not be familiar with, and possibly a dictionary. The book haunts me to this day—in a good, though horrific, way.

I fell in love with this series and its intrepid heroine Molly Murphy on page one. A young, penniless woman who has to rely on her own wits to make her way to America at the end of the 19th century, and a sea voyage that ends well enough until she becomes a murder suspect as soon as she arrives in Ellis Island - this impeccably researched historical mystery has all the ingredients I could want. It’s a satisfying mystery and a scathing social commentary, the tone of voice is clever and funny, and I didn’t just want to follow Molly on every step of her journey, I wanted to be her.