Abstract: In her prize-winning book, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology (2017), Cooper Owens explores how experimental surgeries on enslaved and working-poor women created the specialty of American gynecology. She shows how these experiments also shaped nineteenth-century Americans’ understanding of race. Merging women’s medical and social history, Cooper Owens pivots away from a near exclusive focus on white men to look instead at Black and Irish women's lives—as well as their bodies—to offer a new origins story for American medicine.
Sponsored by CMU's Department of History, Center for African-American Urban Studies and the Economy (CAUSE), Dietrich College Grand Challenge Seminar Initiative, and the University Lecture Series
Location and Address
(New) Tepper Quad
Simmons A Auditorium
Carnegie Mellon University
(Reception at 4:00)