One morning in June 2019, two city workers in Lyon, France, pulled a plastic bag out of the river that […]
Intertwined Histories and Embodied Lives: An Interview with Cassia Roth
In A Miscarriage of Justice: Women’s Reproductive Lives and the Law in Early Twentieth-Century Brazil, Cassia Roth offers an innovative […]
A Miscarriage of Justice
My book, A Miscarriage of Justice: Women’s Reproductive Lives and the Law in Early Twentieth-Century Brazil (Stanford University Press, 2020), […]
The (Historical) Body in Pain
For the last decade, I’ve been reading and writing about other women’s pain. Contractions lasting 72 hours. Feverish deliriums after […]
The Proof of Pregnancy
In February 1819, the Caswell County Superior Court in North Carolina tried three white women for infanticide. At issue was […]
On Infanticide and Reluctant Maternity: Between Personal Testimony and Historical Sensitivity
As a historian of gender and medicine, I sometimes have nightmares about the scenes of medical suffering that appear in […]
On Poverty, Morality, and Mothering
In 1930, nineteen-year-old black (preta) Jovelina Pereira dos Santos, a live-in domestic servant in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, hid her […]
Trump’s Part in Centuries-Long History of Punishing Women and Doctors
In a recent campaign interview with Chris Matthews, presidential candidate Donald Drumpf contended “there has to be some form of […]
