Sex, rape, injustice, medicine, slavery. These words spark an interconnected web of issues relating to sexism and racism in the antebellum era. Owens’ begins with ways in which the perpetuation of slavery and the expansion of the field of gynecology were directly proportional. When Congress prohibited the importation of slaves from Africa, slave owners feared that there would no longer be enough slaves to sustain the growing economy, so slave owners turned their focus to the reproductive health of female slaves in order to maintain and improve slave procreation. Slave owners and white, male physicians alike continued to expand the field of gynecology; however, their motives were unethical. The motive for the development of the field of gynecology was to maintain a growing economy built upon slave labor by experimenting on marginalized populations like black women and Irish immigrants. These experiments planted the seeds for racism and sexism in medicine that still plague society today, illustrating the power of science and a persuasion. 

As one of only two Black women in the US leading a program rooted in the medical humanities at a university, Dierdre Cooper Owens is an award-winning public speaker and activist. Time magazine claimed Owens are one of the most successful and “acclaimed experts in U.S. history”. Owens graduated with a Ph.D. in history form the University of California-Los Angeles. Currently, Owens is the Director of the Humanities in Medicine program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. With a doctoral degree in history, Owens’ is versed in the history of gender and racial discrimination; furthermore, her position as Director of the Humanities in Medicine program indicates her knowledge for the intersectionality of race, sex, and medicine which allows her to speak with intelligence and poise on the topics discussed in Medical Bondage. Medical Bondage, Owens’ first book, won The Darlene Clark Hine Award for the best book in African American women’s and gender history in 2018. As a black woman, Owens can write with an accurate, first-hand point of view because she herself may have been victim to racism and sexism, either in medicine or the workplace. 

In the first chapter, Owens discusses the “Birth of American Gynecology” in the hands of Dr. James Marion Sims and other antebellum-era white physicians. Dr. Sims invented the silk suture method through countless experiments on female slaves. The sorrowful reality of this process is that once the experiments were complete, and the female slave was proved “infertile”, they were sold back to their slave owner because they were no longer useful for research. In other words, female slaves were pawns for white males, the economy, and for the development of modern-day science and medicine. White supremacy, male dominance, and the slave holder mentality prevailed in that no credit was given to the female slaves for the brutality that they endured; in other words, the white males were apathetic to the fact that a population was suffering at the expense of their ingenuity, success, and scientific fame. To be specific, by experimenting on innocent women, white males asserted their dominance and searched for biological ways to justify differences between white women and black women, further perpetuating the idea of black inferiority and oppression. The physicians used science as a means of justifying racism and oppression, stating that black women are biologically inferior to white women. 

In the second chapter, Owens further describes the cruelties that black women face in the hands of white slave owners and white physicians. Black women were seen as pawns and merely “breeders” for producing more and more slaves to benefit white men. White men viewed black women and Irish immigrants (another marginalized and discriminated population) as “impervious to physical pain and unafraid of surgeries” (Owens 20), illustrating the dehumanization and alienation of blacks and minorities. This mindset of using black women and immigrants as pawns for research is explained in Thomas Wright’s and other southern physicians’ experimentations in that “they needed their black patients, as a means to learn about curing disease, much more than their black patients needed them” (Owens 27). In other words, the blatant disrespect of dragging a black woman’s body across the floor, disrobing her in front of other servants, and performing an invasive surgery without consent illustrates the selfish and egocentric nature of white physicians in the Antebellum era, as well at outlining one of the motives for their gynecological research: perpetuating systemic racism and sexism. One specific example of the brutality that black women faced was the Supreme Court case State of Missouri vs. Celia, a slave, which was the trial for Celia who murdered the slave master who repeatedly beat, raped, and impregnated her on several occasions. The jury decided that Celia be sentenced to death, but at the time of the murder, she was pregnant, so the State of Missouri decided to wait until the child was born before executing her. This cruel and unjust criminal justice system illustrates the slave master’s desperation for the slave procreation and the perpetuation of forced labor. 

The final three chapters parallel each other in that Owens explains reasons as to how physicians used scientific authority to justify their sexist and racist claims, as well as the various ways in which rape and mistreatment of black women went under the radar. The term “superbodies”, which is brought up in chapter five, suggests that rape does not even harm a black woman because they are physically dominant and capable of hard work which minimizes the pain and suffering of rape stories. For example, black women’s rapes were “private occurrences” and many of them went under the radar because it was considered normal and moral in the eyes of white supremacists. In short, gynecological medicine in the antebellum era was a field that allowed white physicians to stake inherently racist and sexist statements about women by using their title as doctors to bolster their claims. 

One of Owens’ strengths lies in her ability to synthesize information and find the intersections of medicine, race, and sex. The sexual discrimination and racial discrimination that arise in Medical Bondage relates to Audre Lorde’s “There is no Hierarchy of Oppression” In Audre Lorde’s “There is No Hierarchy of Oppressions”, the theme of oppression as a omnipresent challenge, not just individualistic, is revealed when Lorde states that “any attack against Black people is a lesbian and gay issue, because I and thousands of other Black women are part of the lesbian community” […] “I cannot afford the luxury of fighting one form of oppression only” (Lorde). In other words, oppression is bad in any of its forms: racism, sexism, heterosexism etc. One cannot classify one oppression to be less significant than another. In relation to Medical Bondage the brutality endured by women in bondage and the sexist claims created by male physicians is just as significant and oppressive as the racist classifications of white versus black female bodies. Black women were found to have “steatopygia (enlarged buttocks), elongated labia, low-hanging breasts, and lasciviousness” (19). These discriminatory and racist stereotypes perpetuated the racial binary of white versus black, which provided evidence for white supremacists to harass black women. These derogatory stereotypes relate to an article that I read in my writing class titled “Venus in Two Acts” written by Saidiya Hartman. Hartman brings up the term “Hottentot” which relates to Hottentot Venus, a stereotypical image of the black female physique, and further details the cruel language that is used to describe black women: “A sulky bitch. A dead negress. A syphilitic whore” (6, Venus in Two Acts). In short, Owens’ ability to create subtle connections with other texts, feminists, and activists illustrates the implicit strength of her argument. 

            A weak point in Owens’ book is when the term “superbodies” is brought up in Chapter 5 regarding black women seeming capable of harder work in the eyes of white men as a result of their “hypersexuality”, and their “physical strength” which was supposedly superior to that of white women. “Superbodies” is ironic in that it assumes black women are superior to white women because of their strength; however, women are supposed to be known for the weakness, fragility, tenderness, and submissiveness. Does the relationship drawn between “superbodies” and black women suggest that female slaves are not even human? “Superbodies” means “superhumans” or “superheros” which are all superior to humanity. Do female slaves not experience feelings, emotions, and physical suffering of normal humans? Black women were subject to racism and sexism and suffered the “ugly stereotypes that many American men, regardless of race, held about them as wanton seductresses,” (Owens 75) meaning that on top of racism coming from white men, black women experienced oppression from both white and black men who saw them solely for selfish sexual pleasure. However, I find the term “superbodies” to be hypocritical and illusionary by blurring the lines between white and black femininity. To strengthen the vagueness of this new term, Owens should have given an example for black women not showing emotion or pain or suffering and contrasting this with an example of white women’s fragility and emotion. 

In my opinion, the book Medical Bondage is an accurate representation of the intersectionality between sex, medicine, and race. While there are some weaknesses in the delivery of certain terms, Owens successfully describes the birth of American gynecology and draws connections between medicine and societal issues such as sexism and racism. Anyone seeking to learn more about the history of developing women’s health and the roots of prejudice in medicine that were planted during the antebellum era should read this book because the reading is accessible to the broader public and anyone who reads the book will benefit from its message about the ongoing quest for equity in medicine. 

Works Cited:

Owens, Deirdre Cooper. Medical Bondage Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology. University of Georgia Press, 2017. 

Lorde, Audre. “There is No Hierarchy of Oppressions”. Leaning into Lorde. Council on Interracial Books for Children, 1983.

Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe, vol. 12 no. 2, 2008, p. 1-14. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/241115.

Walsh-Little, Maya. “Bio”. Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens, https://www.deirdrecooperowens.com/bio

Dierdre Cooper Owens. “Charles and Linda Wilson Professor in the History of Medicine; Director, Humanities in Medicine”, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2019.