On the morning that my daughter-in-law went into labor, a small bird crashed into our apartment window and lay dead […]
From Hospital to Home: Wendy Kline’s Coming Home: How Midwives Changed Birth
Wendy Kline has delivered a new addition to the history of childbirth in America. In her engaging and well-researched book, […]
For Keeps: Teenage Girls and Anxiety around Sex during the 1990s
In 1995, I was sixteen and experiencing the excitement of my first real love. As if out of a 1990s […]
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 […]
Meanings and Materials of Miscarriage: How Babies in Jars Shaped Modern Pregnancy
In 1866, a young man in Crestline, Ohio, visited Dr. J. Stolz to ask the physician for help. Mr. B’s […]
The Proof of Pregnancy
In February 1819, the Caswell County Superior Court in North Carolina tried three white women for infanticide. At issue was […]
The Gendered Dynamics of Miscarriage
“I don’t like the use of ‘our.’ It’s ‘her’ body.” I was sitting in a small meeting room in the […]
Mothers of Monsters
I am looking at an infant boy suspended in a jar of liquid. The preservative fluid has kept the boy’s […]
Scheduling My Miscarriage
Scattered across my journals, you’ll find various iterations of multi-year plans, listing off months, allowing me to plan my way […]
Anatomy of Generation
Before the advent of modern technologies like the ultrasound, miscarried and aborted fetuses provided some of the very few glimpses […]
