In the Texas state legislature last month, several women dressed as handmaids sat in silent judgment over the lawmakers who were attempting (yet again) to outlaw an abortion procedure. Since last November’s election, sales of dystopian literature, including Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, have skyrocketed. A number of writers, perhaps most notably Rebecca Traister, have… Read more →
Tag: Race
Eyes of the Beholder: The Public Health Service Reports on Trachoma in White Appalachia and Indian Country
In 1912, the United States Public Health Service (PHS) set out to survey trachoma rates among two populations: Appalachian Whites in Kentucky and American Indians. I knew about the American Indian survey from my dissertation research on Native health in the early twentieth century. But when I read the report from that study, I was… Read more →
Inclusive Health Services for Women: More than Just Tote Bags
In Silver City, New Mexico, a small print company has raised over seventy thousand dollars for Planned Parenthood through a simple tote bag. PP services are printed on the tote, in a list so long, it barely fits on the bag. Power and Light Press sell these bags “in the name of Planned Parenthood [as]… Read more →
Love and Rage
On November 2, 1992, members of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) carried a dead body through the streets of Manhattan. The deceased was Mark Fisher, a gay man and AIDS activist who had died from complications of the disease he spent his last years fighting. His was the first political funeral staged… Read more →
Bans, Boycotts, and Brawls: The 1970s West Virginia Textbook Controversy
To find tensions in American society, look at K-12 textbooks. Not in them, but in the debates they bring to the fore. In the wake of the Donald Trump victory and right-wing populism, the protests in Kanawha County, West Virginia from 1974-5 are worth learning about. At the Kanawha County Board of Education meeting on… Read more →
Incarcerating Eve: Women’s Health “Care” in Prisons and Jails
In Season 4 of the hit Netflix original Orange is the New Black, we get a glimpse into the healthcare issues that plague incarcerated women in prisons. The fifth episode of the new season focuses on the crisis that the characters face when the prison has a tampon and maxi pad shortage. This shortage of… Read more →
“Witness the ‘Wall of Genitals’”: Anatomical Display at Brooklyn’s House of Wax
Located in the lobby of the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Brooklyn, the House of Wax is a dimly lit bar decorated with more than 100 anatomical, pathological, and ethnographic wax models. Once part of Castan’s Panopticum, a popular attraction in Berlin from 1869 to 1922, the models were purchased last year by collector Ryan Matthew… Read more →
Nursing Clio Stands with Equality
Some of our favorite photos from the NC Editors of the 1-22-2017 Women’s March on Washington and other cities.
We Can Do Better Than the Suffragists
How many references to suffragists have you seen in the news lately? In April, the US Treasury announced that five suffragists will appear on the back of the new ten-dollar bill. Three months later, Hillary Clinton wore a white pantsuit — a reference to the suffragists’ white dresses — to become the first female presidential… Read more →
Emotion and Fantasy: Marcus Garvey and a Blueprint for Modern Protest Movements
Here’s a trivia question: what was the largest African American organization in history? Hint: It wasn’t the NAACP, not SNCC or CORE or the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, not even the Nation of Islam with its 1995 Million Man March. Instead, it was the Universal Negro Improvement Association, a curious and short-lived movement that was… Read more →