Deirdre Cooper Owens
Deirdre Cooper Owens is an American historian of medicine and slavery whose 2017 book Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology recast the founding of American gynecology as a racialised history rooted in the medical labour of enslaved Black women.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017)(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017) In the encyclopaedia she serves as the lead specialist for the gender, race, and slavery cluster of the antebellum-American historiography tier.
Life and Position
Biographical particulars (degree-granting institutions, current academic appointment, awards) are not present in the evidence cards drawn from her own monograph and have been left for later editorial fill. [TODO: insert academic affiliation, training, and current title from external source.]
Argument of Medical Bondage
Cooper Owens locates the institutional origin of American gynecology on a small slave farm at Mount Meigs, Alabama, where between 1844 and 1849 J. Marion Sims operated on Anarcha, Betsy, Lucy, and roughly nine other unidentified enslaved women and girls leased from their owners.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017)(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017) Her argument turns the standard founding-father narrative inside out. Sims’s enslaved patients did not simply lie on the table; after his white medical apprentices abandoned him, they trained as his surgical nurses, learning the fundamentals of gynecological surgery while continuing their domestic and agricultural labour.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017)(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017) By the time Sims closed Anarcha’s vesico-vaginal fistula on the thirtieth attempt, the women on his farm knew more about the repair of obstetrical fistulae than most American doctors of the late 1840s.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017)(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017) Cooper Owens proposes that they be regarded as the rightful “mothers” of American gynecology, the counter to Sims’s designation as “father.”(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017)
The book reframes American gynecology as inseparable from the political economy of slavery. After Congress banned the importation of African-born slaves in 1808, the domestic slave trade and the financial pressure to increase slave births in the United States expanded reproductive medicine alongside slavery itself.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017) Reproductive medicine was essential to the maintenance of southern slavery: each enslaved woman was medically examined so she could be priced for sale, and gynecological assessments shaped antebellum slave markets.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017) At the same moment, midwifery, which had been a women’s domain for centuries, was being absorbed by male doctors, who built institutions and pedagogical pathways for men whose only patients would be women.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017) Most pioneering nineteenth-century American gynecological surgeries, ovariotomies, cesarean sections, fistula repairs, happened during interactions between elite white southern doctors and their enslaved Black patients.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017) Cooper Owens shows that this was not the work of exceptionally cruel men. The early gynecologists were elite white men working within a culture of scientific racism that gave them ready access to enslaved women’s bodies and rationalised what they did there.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017) In northern cities such as New York, the same surgical methods were tested on poor Irish immigrant women, who occupied an analogous position as an accessible vulnerable population.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017) The doubling was supported by a wider Anglo-American discourse that explicitly racialised the Irish: a famous mid-century article in London’s Punch, “The Missing Link,” cautioned readers to protect themselves against an Irish “creature manifestly between the Gorilla and the Negro.”(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017) Antebellum scientists projected the same simian imagery onto people of African descent and the Irish alike. James W. Redfield’s 1852 Comparative Physiognomy; or, Resemblances between Men and Animals likened “Negroes to elephants and fish” and the noisy Irish immigrant in America to “a scavenger-dog of the city,” part of a wider visual and verbal lexicon that flattened both populations into the experimentally available category.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017)
Antebellum medicine treated blackness simultaneously as a skin hue and as a biological racial category, allowing a Black woman to be the same species as a white woman yet biologically distinct from and inferior to her.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017) Benjamin Rush, called the Father of American Medicine, taught medical students that blackness was a genetic pathology and a form of leprosy.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017) Cooper Owens reads physicians’ own writings against the grain: when doctors describe restraining enslaved women during childbirth and surgery, the practical need for restraint contradicts the same physicians’ claims that Black women were impervious to pain.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017) These cracks in the medical literature are her preferred entry into the archive.
After Sims left the South for New York, he sold the Mount Meigs hospital to his former assistant Nathan Bozeman, a fellow slave owner, who continued operating it as a gynecological hospital experimenting on a primarily enslaved population.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017) The institution did not depend on any one man.
Methodology
Cooper Owens coins the term medical superbody to capture the contradictions in how white doctors viewed enslaved women: simultaneously healthy and sick, strong yet weakened by the surgeries they endured.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017) She names the term “intentionally messy, ambiguous, and contentious” because the antebellum vocabulary contains no honest label for what enslaved women were inside the gynecological clinic. She borrows Stephanie Camp’s framework of “geographies of containment” to read the slave hospital as a site where slaveholders enacted bodily restraint over enslaved patients, and she draws on Dorothy Roberts’s concept of “maternal-fetal conflict” elsewhere in the book.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017) Roberts’s term names the way laws, medical practices, and social policies separated a pregnant woman’s interests from her fetus’s, and she traces its genealogy to slavery itself, where slaveholders whipped enslaved women but shielded their bellies from the lash to preserve the unborn child as property.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017) Cooper Owens uses the same legal-medical lineage to read antebellum gynecology, where the value of an enslaved woman’s reproductive capacity made her body simultaneously an object of medical care and an object of property assessment. These borrowings tie Medical Bondage into a wider historiography of Black women’s reproductive lives.
The methodology is also empirical at points where the standard archive seems silent. Drawing on Roberts’s earlier statistical work, Cooper Owens cites evidence that enslaved women may have exercised limited control over conception: across a sample of more than one hundred Federal Writers’ Project slave interviews, about a quarter of respondents whose birth months are recorded show conceptions clustered in November, December, and January, the months when fieldwork demands were lowest after harvest, and births clustered in the early agricultural seasons that follow.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017) The clustering does not prove agency, but it complicates a frame in which enslaved women’s reproduction is read entirely as planter-imposed.
The methodological challenge she acknowledges is structural: patients do not leave archives; doctors do.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017) The recovery of Anarcha, Betsy, and Lucy as historical actors must therefore be done through the slave-owners’ and surgeons’ own writings, read carefully for the moments when the enslaved women’s actions push through the surface of the source.
Place in the Encyclopaedia
The encyclopaedia uses Medical Bondage as the lead source for American gynecology’s racialised origin and for the medical-experimentation cluster on Sims, Mettauer, McDowell, Bozeman, and the Charleston Medical College. Her work sits alongside sharla-fett‘s Working Cures and pablo-f-gomez‘s The Experiential Caribbean as the third leg of the gender/race/colonial historiography tier, focused on the antebellum United States.
See Also
- medical-bondage-2017
- american-gynecology
- j-marion-sims
- scientific-racism
- medical-experimentation
- sharla-fett
- pablo-f-gomez
- non-elite-healing