Medical Bondage and the Birth of American Gynecology

The 13th Annual Margaret Morrison Distinguished Lecture in Women’s History

Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens
Associate Professor of History at Queens College, CUNY

Thursday, March 28, 2019

Simmons A, Tepper Quad
Carnegie Mellon University

In her prize-winning book, Medical Bondage, Cooper Owens explores how experimental surgeries on enslaved and working-poor women created the specialty of American gynecology.  She shows how these experiments also shaped nineteenth-century Americans' understanding of race.  Merging women’s medical and social history, Cooper Owens pivots away from a near exclusive focus on white men to look instead at Black and Irish women's lives—as well as their bodies—to offer a new origins story for American medicine.

Co-sponsored by: The Center for Africanamerican Urban Studies and the Economy and the University Lecture Series

Image credit: University of Michigan Museum of Art