How do you tell a story about a real-life, embodied individual who inspired a stereotype, without reducing her life to fit into the same trope you are trying to upend? How do you uncover the exception that proved the rule without reifying the label you acknowledge is pernicious? I’m not sure, and Josh Levin sure… Read more →
Category: Features
“The Inflamed Egotism of Women:” Emma Simpson and the Limits of the Unwritten Law
Let me just admit it now—I’ve never listened to Serial.Or, rather, I never finished listening. Sure, I started it—after all, I did have an iPod, internet access, and a pretty NPR-happy social circle in fall of 2014—but I stopped after episode 1. Whatever it was that drew in historic millions of listeners, prompting critics to… Read more →
Pharmacological Innovation and the Desire to Simplify Postpartum Depression
At the end of March, Sage Therapeutics announced FDA approval for the intravenous and hospital-supervised use of their new postpartum depression (PPD) drug, Zulresso (brexanlone). The possibility of a new way to help women who are struggling with depression after childbirth is an exciting and important development, especially with claims that around 11% of new… Read more →
Bearing the Brunt of Their Father’s Service: Ex-Soldiers and Child Murder, 1914-1935
In May 2011, British Lance Corporal Liam Culverhouse assaulted his seven-week-old daughter, resulting in severe brain damage and fractures to her skull, limbs, and ribs.1 She never recovered and died 18 months later. Two years before the crime, Culverhouse had been medically discharged from the army with a diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder after he… Read more →
“Everything Seems Wrong:” The Postwar Struggles of One Female Veteran of the First World War
Around the world, ceremonies, public art installations, concerts, lectures, and educational events are commemorating the fallen of the First World War, to make beauty, peace, and sense out of a century of global grief. These ceremonies provide a critical sense of closure to a world still reeling from the political, economic, and personal ramifications of… Read more →
Truly Ambitious Women: Women Chiropractors and World War I
In the turn-of-the-century United States, women were among the first chiropractors. In a period when established medical schools barred women from entering because of their gender, chiropractic and other “irregular” medical practices provided a more welcoming home for women interested in health care and a professional career. Immediately before and during World War I, chiropractic… Read more →
“Battalion of Life”: American Women’s Hospitals and the First World War
Shortly after the United States entered the First World War in April 1917, Dr. Rosalie Slaughter Morton of Virginia published an article describing the work of Scottish Women’s Hospitals, a medical unit staffed entirely by female physicians who were caring for wounded servicemen among the Allied nations. Morton hoped this agency would serve as a… Read more →
“A Male Department of Warfare:” Female Ambulance Drivers in the First World War
While serving as an ambulance driver during the First World War, Pat Beauchamp witnessed the harrowing sight of four soldiers “blown to pieces.”1 It was an experience that, she wrote: By chance, shortly before the explosion, Beauchamp and her fellow drivers had stopped further up the road for lunch. Part of the shock and fear… Read more →
“The Joy of My Life”: Seeing-Eye Dogs, Disabled Veterans/Civilians and WWI
On December 13, 1933, Captain A. J. C. Sington, then Chairman of the British Guide Dogs for the Blind, read a letter from an unnamed veteran of the Great War to the Northern Counties Association for the Blind. In the letter, the veteran described his life before and after receiving his guide dog: The unnamed… Read more →
Searching for a Warm Home: Women and the Italian Refugee Crisis of World War I
In a 1918 article about aid programs for refugee women and children in Italy, Ernesta Fasciotti recalled an encounter with a family she could not forget, describing her impression of a refugee woman: “a true lady, fine and delicate, who was carrying at her breast a newborn of a few months, and had clinging to… Read more →