Gynecology was not always the well known field of medicine that is present in the United States today. In fact, gynecology is a relatively new development in medicine that came to fruition in the United States in the 19th century. START HERE Before modern gynecology arose in the 19th century, women’s health was the job of women. Midwives were the heads of women’s health and pregnancies. These midwives were almost always women. It was not until the practice of gynecology took root that men became involved in women’s health. In her monograph, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology, Deirdre Cooper Owens explores the impact that enslaved and working class women had on the development of gynecology and in return, the impact that gynecology had on them.

Cooper Owens brings to light the “mothers of gynecology” who have gone under noticed and under-recognized throughout history. Through many quotations from both enslaved Black women, poor Irish women, and doctors that developed gynecology, Cooper Owens argues not only about the horrors and inhuman conditions that these women were subjected to, but also about the contradictory of white views of black women having “medical superbodies.” Cooper Owens summarizes her monograph in her introduction, saying “Medical Bondage is ultimately a historical telling of the impact of this medical scrutiny on the lives of enslaved women and poor immigrant women; it is also the story of the white medical men who fixated their gaze on these two groups.”¹

Dr. Cooper Owens is a professor in the Humanities in Medicine program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she is one of two black women in the US who runs a medical humanities program. Cooper Owens grew up in Washington, DC, but often visited her grandfather in South Carolina who told her stories of the enslaved. She earned her Ph.D. in  history from UCLA and has had many fellowships at different colleges, including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Time Magazine had called her one of the country’s most “acclaimed experts in U.S. history.”² Additionally, Dr. Cooper Owens won the 2018 Darlene Clark Hine Book Award for the best book written in African American women’s and gender history for Medical Bondage.³ Clearly, Cooper Owens is very qualified for writing a monograph about the history of black women and gynecology. Using not only her skills as a researcher, but also her own experiences, Cooper Owens is able to give this topic the justice it deserves through her writing. 

Cooper Owens splits her monograph into five parts plus an introduction and an afterword. In these sections Cooper Owens discusses how American Gynecology effected black lives, the birth of American gynecology, how black women experienced slavery and medicine, how slavery, sex, and medicine relate to each other, how Irish immigrant women experienced gynecology, and how black bodies were historically viewed from a medical perspective. For her roughly 130 page monograph, Cooper Owens has a bibliography of over 13 pages including manuscripts, newspapers and magazines, medical journals, government records, and pages of primary and secondary sources. Cooper Owens conducted research in numerous libraries across the country and in Ireland.

The monograph excelled in bringing alive the stories of the past, especially considering how few sources are available today that directly quote women who were enslaved, particularly on the topic of gynecology. Dr. Cooper Owens goes above and beyond to humanize the women that she references, making sure that they are not just seen as slaves or Irish prostitutes, but as real and complex women with families, feelings, opinions, skills, and flaws. In contrast, Cooper Owens also does a remarkable job of detailing the inhuman view of slaves from the perspective of white people, especially those in medicine. She often uses the term “medical superbody” to discuss how doctors viewed their black patients. Cooper Owens spends much time outlining the contradictory views of doctors who practiced on black people because they “projected a simianized image on people of African descent and the Irish,”⁴ but at the same time believed black people to be impervious to pain and also used the same processes on white women that they developed after experimenting with black women because white and black people have not only the same reproductive organs, but all of the same body parts.

Additionally, Cooper Owens made the brilliant decision to include an afterword that brings readers back into the 21st century by discussing her own struggles as a black woman dealing with medical professionals in gynecology. This inclusion allows readers to make the connection between the past and the present and to get a glimpse into how the racist history of gynecology still affects gynecology today.

Cooper Owens struggles, though with being overly repetitive in her ideas about the contradictory views of the doctors she discusses. The entire last chapter of her book is dedicated to talking about black bodies from the medical gaze, which would be fine but she seems to spend the whole chapter repeating ideas that she had touched on in previous chapters. While what Cooper Owens is claiming is very complex, her continued repetition sometimes made her point less clear because one feels as if they are reading the same thing over and over again. 

In addition to her needless repetition, the placement of the discussion of Irish immigrant women feels out of place. Cooper Owens spends most of her book talking about enslaved black women in the south and her flip into talking about poor Irish women in the northern US is abrupt. If Cooper Owens had spent a more equal amount of the book discussing both groups, perhaps the inclusion of the Irish immigrants would have made more sense. Another option would have been for Cooper Owens to have turned the chapter on Irish women into a chapter that touched on multiple different groups of women’s experiences with early gynecology and focused on how these women collectively differed from enslaved black women. With the way the monograph is structured now, though, it would be better to omit the chapter about Irish women and to focus exclusively on black women’s historical relationship with gynecology. 

These flaws though do not take away from a powerful, insightful, and intriguing first book by Dr. Dierdre Cooper Owens. In a topic of history that often goes undiscussed, the history of gynecology, Cooper Owens brings an important, albeit hard to swallow, truth forward into public view. I plan to be an Obstetrician Gynecologist in the future and I know that reading this monograph will forever inform how I view the occupation. This book will help me to remember my privilege in medicine and help me to work towards making the medical field a more inclusive and morally sound place. I hope to be a doctor that my patients can trust, and Cooper Owens has inspired me to not only be a doctor, but to be an advocate for groups of people who have historically been wronged by medicine.

1. 1. Deirdre Cooper Owens, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2017), 7.
2. 2. “Bio,” Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens, accessed November 9, 2022, https://hyperboloid-megalodon-lj62.squarespace.com/bio.
3. 3. “Deirdre Cooper Owens,” Deirdre Cooper Owens | Department of History (University of Nebraska-Lincoln), accessed November 9, 2022, https://history.unl.edu/deirdre-cooper-owens.
4. 4. Deirdre Cooper Owens, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2017), 114.

Bibliography:

“Bio.” Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens. Accessed November 9, 2022. https://hyperboloid-megalodon-lj62.squarespace.com/bio. 

“Deirdre Cooper Owens.” Deirdre Cooper Owens | Department of History. University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Accessed November 9, 2022. https://history.unl.edu/deirdre-cooper-owens.  

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