4 Transformative Black Women and Their Contributions to Gynecology and Reproductive Health
By Brittany Villegas
To honor Black History Month, I want to expand on the lives of four different Black women and their contributions - voluntary or not - to gynecology and reproductive health.
Some of these women were innovative, yet suppressed because of the color of their skin and the "radicalness" of their ideas. Some of these women were subjected to cruel surgical experiments that controversially benefit us now. Some of these women will never know the difference they continue to make. Some of these women are alive and continuing to spread awareness about gynecology's brutal past while advocating for its better, more inclusive future.
These women and their stories have helped me further understand the prejudices and downright dangers of how Black women continue to experience reproductive healthcare. To ensure that Black women receive the care they deserve, we must be aware of and learn from history's inhumanities shaping the current healthcare gap that is twice as likely to kill them.
Knowledge is power, no matter how hard it is to accept. As we continue to acknowledge the harsh past that built our current discriminatory gynecological healthcare system, we can continue to shape a better system for all uterus carriers.
Anarcha Westcott (1828 - unknown)
Painting of Anarcha Westcott laying on a gynecological examination board and surrounded by depictions of white doctors, including J. Marion Sims. Sourced from www.AL.com
There are three separate statues in the U.S. honoring Dr. James Marion Sims, considered the "father of modern gynecology." Little recognition is given to the three known (out of 11 total) black slave women he exploited through nonconsensual and anesthetic-free surgical experimentation.
One of these women was Anarcha Westcott. When she was 17-years-old, she went into labor at the plantation she lived on in Alabama. Due to a severe case of rickets caused by a Vitamin-D deficiency and malnutrition, she had a disfigured pelvis, making it near-impossible for her to give birth.
After three days of laboring, her plantation owner called Sims to assist in the birth. The birth caused her severe tearing in her vagina and rectum (vesicovaginal fistula and rectovaginal fistula). These tears caused her to have uncontrollable bowel movements that flowed through her vaginal and rectal wounds, plaguing her with infection and excruciating pain.
Sourced from WashingtonPost.com. Women from The Black Youth Project paint their clothes with red as they take part in protest against the J. Marion Sims statue in New York in 2017
Her infected wounds piqued Sims' interest in using her for experimental surgery, as fistulas were common among slave women since they typically suffered from malnutrition and gave birth three years earlier than white women. It took Sims 30 anesthetic-free operations before he successfully closed Anarcha's fistula and tears.
What Anarcha underwent is hard to imagine, let alone read; because I know without the sacrifices of hers and other slave women’s bodies and personal autonomy, my post-birth second degree vaginal tears couldn’t have been routinely mended.
The view that Black women’s bodies are, as author Dr. Deidre Cooper Owens describes them, “medical superbodies” that can withstand pain and are considered “lesser-than” to their white counterparts, inflicts prejudices within modern gynecological care.
Read more about Anarcha as well as the two other known slave women Betsy and Lucy in Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens's book Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology.
Mary Beatrice Davidson Kenner (17 May 1912 - 13 January 2006)
A sephia toned headshot of Mary Beatrice Davidson Kenner. Sourced from blackinhistory.tumblr.com
Hailing from a family of inventors - including her father, who invented a traveling clothing press - Mary Beatrice Davidson Kenner revolutionised menstrual hygiene products through the development of the sanitary belt.
Born in Monroe, North Carolina, at the age of six, she proposed a self-oiling door hinge to her mother after continuously being awoken early in the morning by their back door as her mother went to work.
"I [hurt] my hands trying to make something that, in my mind, would be good for the door,” Kenner's quoted as saying in Zing Tseng's book Forgotten Women: The Scientists. “After that, I dropped it, but never forgot it."
In 1931, Kenner graduated high school and started college at the prestigious Historically Black College and University (HBCU) Howard University. However, she was unable to finish due to financial pressures.
After working as a federal employee, she saved enough money to file her first patent ever for an adjustable sanitary belt with an inbuilt, moisture-proof napkin pocket in 1957. At this time, women still predominantly relied on scrap cloth and rags to absorb their menstrual blood.
A vintage green and pink Kotex Featherweight sanitary belt package. Sourced from www.diversityhouse.org.uk
"One day, I was contacted by a company that expressed an interest in marketing my idea," she said. "I was so jubilant...Sorry to say, when they found out I was black, their interest dropped."
Undeterred, she continued to invent and filed four more patents while running a flower shop with her husband in Washington D.C. These patents one filed in the late 1970s for a toilet paper holder attachment that gave people easy access to the loose end of the roll.
Read more about Mary Beatrice Davidson Kenner in an excerpt from Forgotten Women: The Scientists here.
Joycelyn Elders (13 August 1933 - present)
Joycelyn Elders in her official portrait / public domain
Did you know that May is National Masturbation Month in the U.S.? It was established in honor of former and first Black U.S. Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders for promoting the then-radical idea that teens should embrace masturbation to avoid the risks of unwanted pregnancy and STDs.
“I think that is something that is a part of human sexuality, and it's a part of something that perhaps should be taught,” she said about masturbating at a 1994 United Nations conference on AIDS. “But we've not even taught our children the very basics.”
Elders was born as Minnie Lee Jones in Schaal, Arkansas (then-population: 98) to a “desperately poor,” sharecropping family who had zero access to any hospitals that cared for Black people in their surrounding area. As the eldest of eight children, Elders and all her siblings were adamantly taught to read by their mother at an early age.
Elders eventually graduated as valedictorian of her class and received a full-tuition scholarship to Philander Smith College in Little Rock. After college, she joined the U.S. Army's Women's Medical Specialist Corps, then entered the University of Arkansas Medical School in 1956 where she earned her M.D. (Doctor of Medicine degree).
After years of conducting research on childhood diseases, the then-governor of Arkansas Bill Clinton appointed Elders as Director of the Arkansas Department of Health. To become well-acquainted with her job, she traveled around the state for a month and visited more than 100 health clinics located throughout its 75 different counties. She established school-based health programs to meet the needs of both poor white and black people, which set off a storm of protest throughout the state.
She’s stated that the opposition she stirred in Arkansas followed her into the White House once she was appointed as Surgeon General by President Bill Clinton in 1993.
Besides promoting and eventually being forced to resign over her views on masturbation, she advocated for other then-controversial ideas like drug legalisation, safe and open access to abortions, and school-sponsored contraceptives. She was even labeled as the “Condom Queen” by conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh for favoring handing out condoms to public-school students.
Today, she works as professor emerita at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences where she focuses on pediatrics. She is also a big proponent for the federal legalisation of marijuana in the U.S.
I highly recommend reading her autobiography, Joycelyn Elders: From Sharecroppers’ Daughter to Surgeon General of the United States of America, to learn more about her awe-inspiring and truly badass life and views.
Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens
As a renowned public speaker, author, historian, and professor, Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens is also one of the only two Black women in the U.S. running a medical humanities program. She is primarily focused on the African American experience, especially within obstetrics and gynecology.
Her book, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology, combines medical case narratives, patient histories, judicial cases, physician’s daybooks, and formerly enslaved women’s narratives to describe in detail the experiences of Black and Irish women with professional medical care and racism in the mid-1800s.
The book, as described by The African American Intellectual Society’s blog, Black Perspectives:
“…sets out to specifically expand the historiography of slavery and medicine and to also humanize the experiences of enslaved Black women who were, as [Owens] writes, both “subjects and objects” (9). To narrate her thesis she relies on the term “medical superbody,” a concept she employs throughout to characterize the multiple, often contradictory meanings of enslaved women’s medical experiences that produced invaluable, foundational knowledge for white doctors, yet continually relegated Black women to the realm of subhuman and naturalized servitude. The great contradiction of the history of American gynecology, Owens argues, is how deeply the groundbreaking knowledge of early gynecology depended on enslaved women’s bodies—bodies deemed inferior, inherently flawed, and culpable—and how this history has eclipsed the essential knowledge produced through Black women’s bodies and the expertise of Black midwives…Medical Bondage not only details Black women’s essential role in the history of gynecology, but also serves as a foundational text for understanding the realities of gendered violence against Black women in the present.”
The cover of Dr. Deidre Cooper Owens’ book, “Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology.” .Sourced from www.aaihs.org
Dr. Owens is a proud graduate of two HBCUs, the all-women's Bennett College and Clark Atlanta University, and she received her Ph.D. in history from UCLA. She is currently the Charles and Linda Wilson Professor in the History of Medicine and Director of the Humanities in Medicine Program at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln.
She firmly believes that “the job of the historian is to break the chains of ignorance one lecture, one book, and one lesson plan at a time.”
Follow her on Twitter @dbcthesis to learn more about her work, future events, and news on her upcoming book that examines mental illness during the era of slavery. You can also read more about her and her mission to make “history more accessible and inspiring for all” on her website.