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 →
Category: History
Who Gets a Bathroom Pass? The History of School Bathrooms
Gavin Grimm is a 17-year-old boy, who like millions of other school children, simply wants to be able to attend to basic bodily functions while at school. Last year, Gavin stood in front of his school district’s board of education and said, “I am just a human. I am just a boy. Please consider my… Read more →
Sex and the Civil War
The image of Donald Trump signing an order reinstating the global gag rule this February was striking. Surrounded by a group of men — and one woman, all of them white — Trump approved an order that will affect millions of women and girls around the world who rely on programs supported by the United… Read more →
Gender-Bending in Thirteenth-Century Literature: The Roman de Silence
Do genetics or environmental factors determine one’s gender identity? The question may seem a distinctly modern one. Indeed, premodern people — and especially medieval ones — are often considered naively incapable of even pondering such concepts. We assume it was a simpler time, long before the theoretical legwork of social constructionism and so much feminist… Read more →
“Buried with Doctor’s Certificate”: Reading the Uses and Abuses of Bodies in a Medical School Thesis
In 1886, Marie K. Formad graduated from the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, entering the small but rapidly growing body of American women holding the degree of Doctor of Medicine. Along with Dr. Formad, the 31 other members of the class of 1886 demonstrated clearly the progress of women’s medical education in the thirty years… Read more →
Bradley Snyder and the Legacy of First World War Blind Veteran Rehabilitation
On April 30 People Magazine featured a story on Brad Snyder, a young swimmer seeking a gold medal at the summer Olympics in Rio this year. Snyder’s journey is extraordinary in and of itself, having served two tours of duty in the Middle East as a bomb disposal technician. The story is perhaps most intriguing,… Read more →
Disproving Self-Indulgence: Congenital Addiction in the Early Twentieth Century
On October 10, 1989, police arrived at the Medical University of South Carolina. They handcuffed Lori Griffin, a black girl not yet eighteen, and arrested her for distributing cocaine to a minor. That minor was her newborn child — distribution took place through the placenta. The police came because Lori’s urine had tested positive for… Read more →
Venus Revisited
“Creepy.” “Weird.” “Messed. Up.” Such are the visceral responses of my women’s history students to an admittedly bizarre and complex historical phenomenon: the Anatomical Venus. Designed to be realistic and anatomically correct wax models of the female body, Anatomical Venuses emerged in eighteenth-century Europe (primarily Spain, Italy, and Austria) to help train medical students who… Read more →
Sex, Secrecy, and Abuse in a 19th-Century Workhouse
“He asked him if he had seen the doctor having connection with a nurse.” Archives pose constant distractions. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve mentally stored away a snippet not directly relevant to the task at hand, but to be used somewhere, at some indefinable point in the future. It’s one of… Read more →
Poking Holes in Political Memes: History, the Welfare State, and the Trope of the Founding Fathers
An elderly man behind me in the checkout line at the grocery store asked me what I do. When I told him I’m a PhD candidate in history, he commented that understanding history better would really help this country to get “back on track.” I braced myself for a speech about the greatness of the… Read more →