Challenging the “Great Man” Narrative: Imagining the Voices of Women in the History of Sex and Reproduction
Historians of marginalized groups face a common problem: the people about whom they want to write often did not leave written records of their lives and experiences. Or, if they did, their voices are filtered through the structures of more powerful individuals and systems: courtroom testimonies, narratives of formerly enslaved persons edited by well-connected White elites, White autobiographies and memoirs, or medical records. Despite the limitations of these sources, historians must interpret them directly, indicating clearly when they speculate about how someone may have thought or felt in a situation.
Another technique for recovering these lost voices, however, is informed imagination, in which novelists and playwrights use historical texts and events as a springboard for fictional recreations thereof. Two playwrights in the past five years have focused on using theater as a medium to reimagine the experiences of U.S. women of color subject to medical experimentation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their plays —Behind the Sheet by Charly Evon Simpson (Ensemble Studio Theatre, 2019) and Las Borinqueñas (The Puerto Rican Women) by Nelson Diaz-Marcano (Ensemble Studio Theatre, 2024)—provide insight into the lives and worlds of women who did not record their own life stories but whose bodies became the sites of nonconsensual experiments at the hands of medical professionals. These plays not only show that historically marginalized women had textured lives, emotions, and agency, they also challenge “great men of science” narratives and add nuance and complexity to the history of medicine.
Behind the Sheet is inspired by the experiences of Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy, three enslaved women named in the autobiography of J. Marion Sims. Sims was an Alabama obstetrician/gynecologist who performed experiments on the three women in the 1840s to develop a standard surgical procedure for repairing fistula, a tear between the vaginal and bladder or rectum walls that leads to incontinence and infection. The historian Deirdre Cooper Owens brought renewed attention to the enslaved women and Sims in Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology (2017), and in April 2019, a statue of Sims that had stood in Central Park in New York City since October 1894 was removed following public protests. Any records of Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy’s own words—if any ever existed—do not survive, so Cooper Owens intuited their experiences. Simpson, using theater as a medium and Owens’s book as one source of inspiration, heavily researched and then imagined their stories and experiences into being onstage.
The central character in Behind the Sheet is nineteen-year-old Philomena, a fictionalized representation of Anarcha, upon whom Dr. George Barry (the fictionalized Sims) operated upwards of thirty times without consent, let alone anesthesia. Philomena is pregnant—by Barry himself—and serves as his medical assistant during the procedures on other enslaved women. The plot is set into motion when another enslaver, Edward, brings an enslaved woman named Dinah to Barry as a candidate for fistula surgery. Barry fancies himself a medical inventor and innovator with technique and instruments, indifferent to the pain that his work causes. Dinah and another enslaved woman called Mary endure his multiple attempts at repairing their fistulas, and they care for each other with home remedies after he is finished. When Philomena gives birth to a stillborn child after three days of labor, she too becomes Barry’s fistula surgery patient. In the next two-and-a-half years, Barry operates on Philomena thirty times, and finally closes the fistula. The play concludes with the enslaved women wondering if their bodily sacrifices will be forgotten in the shadow of Barry’s success. Simpson’s words provide insight into what these women’s thoughts and feelings might have been.
Nelson Diaz-Marcano, the playwright of Las Borinqueñas, aims to accomplish the same goal for Puerto Rican women in the 1950s. Five Puerto Rican women are the main characters in Las Borinqueñas, which centers on the birth control pill trials that took place on the island in 1956. The island had recently become a Commonwealth of the U.S., shifting its relationship to the mainland U.S. and spurring migration there. The “great man of science” in this play is Gregory Pincus, one of the developers of the first oral birth control and menstrual regulation pill, later known as Enovid. The stories of the Puerto Rican women and Pincus (along with his wife Elizabeth and the local physician, Edris Rice-Wray, all given their real-life names) intersect with each other when two of the women volunteer for the trials and one of them serves as a nurse assistant to Rice-Wray. All of the female characters engage with the possibilities of the pill and reproductive control in their own ways, even if only as a thought experiment. Rosa has one child with her husband and wants more, but not yet; Chavela wants to use the pill for birth spacing as she enjoys sex a lot; Fernanda has children with an unlikeable man and is pregnant again; Maria, her lover, is married to an absentee husband; and Yolanda has children with her married lover who is unable to get a divorce. Women like them are often absent from histories of the pill like Jonathan Eig’s The Birth of the Pill (2014). Diaz-Marcano was determined that audiences see and reckon with them.
Diaz-Marcano’s research for the play led him to create characters who represent different aspects of Puerto Rican women’s reproductive experiences. While crafting it, Diaz-Marcano read innovation-centered histories like The Birth of the Pill, drew from the 1982 Ana María García documentary on sterilization in Puerto Rico, La Operaciòn, and collected the memories of his own grandmother and other Puerto Rican women who were adults in the 1950s and 1960s. The pill trials as presented in Las Borinqueñas reflect and expand upon his research: they frame the wider challenge of managing reproduction in a society where women had little control over their sexuality and childbearing, with the pill offering the promise of control but also the perils of blood clots, cramps, dizziness, and stroke. Each character has a different health outcome—Rosa is sterilized without her consent after her only child is born; Chavela starts to take the pill and then stops after experiencing nausea and dizziness; Yolanda champions the pill but judges women who need it; Fernanda dies after a botched abortion for an unwanted pregnancy; and Maria challenges Rice-Wray (the medical director of Puerto Rico Planned Parenthood and local collaborator on the pill trials) directly on the pill’s harms. Pincus, valuing efficacy over safety, decides to put the pill forward for approval by the US Food & Drug Administration despite Rice-Wray’s ongoing concerns about safety, and it is approved in 1960.
The two playwrights take similar approaches to foregrounding the female patients’ experiences, degrees of agency, and conclusions about their role in contributing to developments in medicine. In Behind the Sheet, one of the enslaved women, Sally, notices that Barry has trouble with stitching closures tightly and recognizes that women’s sewing skills could solve his problem: “We always fixin’ something. I just wonder if one of us was the doctor.” And after Barry gives his triumphant presentation to an audience of doctors, Philomena reflects on her and the other women’s invisibility: “They look right through you. Like I’m not even there….Just something that needed fixing and got fixed and now can go back to being fully invisible yet again.”[1] Diaz-Marcano gives his characters room to work through pill debates with each other. For example, the politically active Maria thinks the pill is part of a U.S. sterilization campaign: “Propaganda is believing they’re helping us when they’re trying to exterminate us,” while Yolanda reminds her that Puerto Ricans voted to become part of the American commonwealth.[2] Simpson and Diaz-Marcano give their characters a range of perspectives on their involvement in these medical experiments and show how their identities (age, sexual identity, marital status, and fertility among them) affect those perspectives. There is always a risk that playwrights may flatten historical characters into caricatures, but that is not the case in either of the plays under discussion here.
Additionally, Simpson and Diaz-Marcano highlight the self-interest of the scientists in their professional success, illustrating the disregard they had for their patients. In Behind the Sheet, Barry cares less about relieving the suffering of future women through his painful experiments and more about becoming famous: “I must be able to show someone and have them see what I know to be true about myself….That I am capable of changing the direction of medicine,” he tells his wife.[3] Pincus pushes forward the pill trial for personal reasons: “It’s what I have been trying to decipher my whole life…. My whole life, so if I don’t finish this, what was the point?” After the pill trials reveal serious side effects, Pincus dismisses them by arguing, “If we stay the course, keep quiet, and do our jobs, these women will trade a few months of discomfort for a life with less burdens.”[4] [4] Simpson and Diaz-Marcano are thus critical of both the historical “great men of science” themselves and the historical narratives that erase the pain and suffering of the subjects who paid high prices for their success.
Plays based on historical events like Behind the Sheet and Las Borinqueñas give non-elite individuals a voice in the events that they affected and were affected by. These plays not only challenge “great man” histories of medicine, but also give viewers insight into the individuality and humanity of historical persons whom those men declined to see as equals worthy of dignity and respect. These plays bring life to persons identified in medical experiments only as numbered patients or anonymous case studies. We see their faces, hear their voices, wince at their pain, rejoice at their happiness. We viewers may not know exactly how they thought or felt, but we can enter into thoughtful recreations of their experiences through theater and our own imaginations.
Disclosure: The author received compensation from Ensemble Studio Theatre/ The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Science and Technology Festival (EST / Sloan Project — Ensemble Studio Theatre) for participating in a question-and-answer session after a performance of “Las Borinqueñas” in April 2024 (Historians Donna J. Drucker and Kathryn Lankford join Bioethicist Inmaculada de Melo-Martín and Activist Alia Tejeda to discuss contraceptives, clinical trials, consent, and LAS BORINQUEÑAS — Ensemble Studio Theatre).
Notes
Featured image caption: “Woman Behind a Sheet” by Toni Tan.
Donna J. Drucker, MLS, PhD, is Assistant Director of the Office of Scholarship and Research Development at the Columbia University School of Nursing. Her books include Contraception: A Concise History (MIT Press, 2020) and Fertility Technology (MIT Press, 2023).
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