As a historian of gender and medicine, I sometimes have nightmares about the scenes of medical suffering that appear in archival sources. The setting is always the same: the historical medical-school-turned-archive where I conducted research. Because I study surgical technologies, my dreams tend to be chilling portraits of the instruments physicians used in obstetrical interventions…. Read more →
Category: Clio Gets Personal
Demanding to Be Heard: African American Women’s Voices from Slave Narratives to #MeToo
The #Metoo movement has made public what women have long known: that sexual assault and harassment are endemic in many workplaces. Using the power of social media, brave women have revealed the abuses men in positions of power have inflicted on the women who worked for them. Women have been revealing the abuses of powerful… Read more →
“Now I try to live my feminist politics in bed as well as elsewhere”
When Babe published a first-person account of a young woman’s awful sexual encounter with actor Aziz Ansari, one she later interpreted as sexual assault, many considered it to be crossing a line in the #MeToo movement. In this perspective, the transgression into the private sphere of dating led to a multitude of other women’s supposedly… Read more →
Why It’s Bad When It’s “Not That Bad”
When then-Senator Al Franken was accused of sexual harassment by multiple women this past November, I braced myself for the backlash. I grew up in Minnesota, so my social media threads were filled with Franken-loving Minnesotans begging him not to resign and castigating his accusers for blowing their experiences out of proportion. One friend of… Read more →
Hospital Confinement: From the 19th Century to the 21st
Last summer I had a very different experience of childbirth than most women. I was not entirely sure what to expect when my husband drove me to the emergency room on the night of July 4, leaking amniotic fluid 10 weeks early. Rather than the straightforward checking of vitals and intermittent monitoring as labor gradually… Read more →
The Stain of Slavery is Silencing Sexual Violence Against Black and Brown Women
I am an American woman who has never experienced sexual assault, rape, or coercion. Bully for me, right? This detail of my life is only notable because, among women in this county, I am in the minority. The Department of Justice reported in 2015 that there was an average of 321,500 reported cases of sexual… Read more →
It’s Not You, It’s Me: #MeToo in Academia
It was Friday, and I was indulging myself at the prepared foods bar at Whole Foods, thinking — hoping — that a meal would calm my anxiety enough to face the mountain of grading I had to finish at home. I had been too anxious to eat for about two days. Lost in thought, I… Read more →
Understanding My Past after #MeToo
For some, #MeToo and #TimesUp mark political correctness run amok. Some scoff that women don’t know the difference between a bad date and assault, drawing a sharp divide between critics of the movement and women who are demanding that we reclaim our voices in the face of a wide array of abuses. While not all… Read more →
Fight and Flight: “Butch Flight,” Trans Men, and the Elusive Question of Authenticity
My junior year of college, my roommate and dear friend had a butch girlfriend. She aligned more with what many would consider traditional masculinity than I did; there was always a can of Axe body spray in the back of her truck. She confessed to me one night that she felt pressure to transition to… Read more →
History at Home in the Tenement Museum
Several times a day, several days a week, I stand with a group of strangers in the parlor of a Lithuanian immigrant family who arrived in New York’s Lower East Side in 1901. I explain that when the Rogarshevsky family observed the Sabbath each week, their two teenage daughters were away at their jobs in… Read more →