Deirdre Cooper Owens is an American historian and reproductive rights activist known for her 2017 book Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology . She is an associate professor at the University of Connecticut.
Deirdre Cooper Owens was born to a National Archives and Records Administration employee father and a genealogist mother and raised in Anacostia, a neighborhood in southeastern Washington D.C. [1] [2] Descending from South Carolina Lowcountry Gullahs on both her parents' sides, [1] she learned Gullah-language stories from her grandfather as a young child. [2]
Cooper Owens graduated from Bennett College, Clark Atlanta University, and University of California, Los Angeles, the latter where she obtained her PhD in history. [2] She later joined the faculty of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where she was Charles and Linda Wilson Professor in the History of Medicine and directed the Humanities In Medicine program. [3] She also directed the Library Company of Philadelphia's program in African-American history. [4] In 2023, she moved to the University of Connecticut's Department of History and the Africana Studies Institute and became an associate professor there. [4]
As an academic, Cooper Owens specializes in African-American history, particularly history of medicine. [1] In 2017, she published Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology , a book on the exploitation of Black women in 19th-century gynecology; [3] she won the 2018 Darlene Clark Hine Award for said book. [5]
Cooper Owens is an advocate for reproductive justice, having worked with organizations in combating Black maternal mortality in the United States. [1]
Gynaecology or gynecology is the area of medicine that involves the treatment of women's diseases, especially those of the reproductive organs. It is often paired with the field of obstetrics, forming the combined area of obstetrics and gynaecology (OB-GYN).
Halle Tanner Dillon Johnson was an American physician and the first woman to be licensed as a physician in the U.S. state of Alabama.
Dorothy E. Roberts is an American sociologist, law professor, and social justice advocate. She is the Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, George A. Weiss University Professor, and inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at the University of Pennsylvania. She writes and lectures on gender, race, and class in legal issues. Her focuses include reproductive health, child welfare, and bioethics. In 2023, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society. She has published over 80 articles and essays in books and scholarly journals, including Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, and Stanford Law Review.
Pamela Irene Erickson is a medical anthropologist. The holder of both a Dr.P.H and a PhD, she is Professor of Anthropology and Community Medicine at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. A former editor of the scholarly journal Medical Anthropology Quarterly, much of her own research has focused on reproductive health among Hispanic girls and young women. Prominent among the publications resulting from these investigations is her 1998 book, Latina Adolescent Childbearing in East Los Angeles. Erickson has also done fieldwork in Nepal, the Philippines, India, and Ecuador and this work is reflected in her 2008 textbook, Ethnomedicine. A Fellow of the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Applied Anthropology, Erickson has also served on the Governing Council of the Family and Reproductive Health Section of the American Public Health Association. Additionally, she is co-editor, with Merrill Singer of the book series Advances in Critical Medical Anthropology with Routledge.
Darlene Clark Hine is an American author and professor in the field of African-American history. She is a recipient of the 2014 National Humanities Medal.
Florence Pat Haseltine is a U.S. physician, biophysicist, reproductive endocrinologist, journal editor, novelist, inventor, and advocate for women's health. She has been diagnosed with dyslexia. She built a diverse career in medicine. An associate professor at Yale University, her work specializes in obstetrics and gynecology as well as women's rights and gender bias in medicine. While at Yale, Haseltine established the embryology laboratory, which was one of the early labs to have a successful IVF baby. The Microscope used in the laboratory is now in Historical Collections of the National Museum of Health and Medicine.
The UCSF School of Medicine is the medical school of the University of California, San Francisco and is located at the base of Mount Sutro on the Parnassus Heights campus in San Francisco, California. Founded in 1864 by Hugh Toland, it is the oldest medical school in California and in the western United States. U.S. News & World Report ranked the school fifth in research training and fifth in primary care training. Six members of the UCSF faculty have received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and five have received the National Medal of Science.
Brenda Elaine Stevenson is an American historian specializing in the history of the Southern United States and African American history, particularly slavery, gender, race and race riots. She is Professor and Nickoll Family Endowed Chair in History and Professor in African-American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). As of Autumn 2021, she was appointed inaugural Hillary Rodham Clinton Chair of Women's History at St John's College, University of Oxford.
Marek Glezerman is an Israeli obstetrician and gynecologist, Professor Emeritus of Obstetrics and Gynecology, head of Gender and Sex Conscious Medicine and immediate past chair of the Ethics Committee at the Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University. He is the founding president of The Israel Society for Gender and Sex Conscious Medicine and past president of the International Society of Gender Medicine. Glezerman is also a member of the Ministry of Health's National Council for Obstetrics and Gynecology, Genetics and Perinatology. Prof. Glezerman is internationally considered one of the pioneers of Gender and Sex Conscious Medicine.
Thavolia Glymph is an American historian and professor. She is Professor of History and African-American Studies at Duke University. She specializes in nineteenth-century US history, African-American history and women’s history, authoring Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (2008) and The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation (2020). Elected the 140th president of the American Historical Association, she is the first Black woman to serve in that office.
Carolyn Beth Sufrin is an American medical anthropologist and obstetrician-gynecologist. She is an assistant professor of gynecology and obstetrics at Johns Hopkins University.
Julia R. Hall was an American physician. Graduating from medical school in 1892, Hall was the first woman to work as a resident in the Howard University gynecology clinic. Her career as a physician lasted around fifty years.
Black maternal mortality in the United States refers to the death of women, specifically those who identify as Black or African American, during or after child delivery. In general, maternal death can be due to a myriad of factors, such as the nature of the pregnancy or the delivery itself, but is not associated with unintentional or secondary causes. In the United States, around 700 women die from pregnancy-related illnesses or complications per year. This number does not include the approximately 50,000 women who experience life-threatening complications during childbirth, resulting in lifelong disabilities and complications. However, there are stark differences in maternal mortality rates for Black American women versus Indigenous American, Alaska Native, and White American women.
The Darlene Clark Hine Award is awarded annually by the Organization of American Historians for best book in African American women's and gender history. Darlene Clark Hine is an expert of African-American history and was President of the OAH in 2001–2002.
Lyman Maynard Stowe was an American physician and academic administrator. He served as the first dean of the University of Connecticut School of Medicine. The Lyman Maynard Stowe Library at the UConn Health Center was named in his honor.
Deborah Anne Driscoll is an American reproductive geneticist. She is the Luigi Mastroianni Jr. Professor and chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
Leslee L. Subak is an American urogynecologist and reproductive surgeon. She is the Katharine Dexter McCormick and Stanley McCormick Memorial Professor and chair of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Stanford University School of Medicine.
Mary Lake Polan is an American obstetrician and gynecologist whose research on genetics and hormones involved in reproductive endocrinology, along with her fiction and non-fiction books on related subjects, helped normalize the general public's understanding of in-vitro fertilization during the 1970s through the 1990s. A Las Vegan, she grew up in the aftermath of World War II in a large Jewish family and developed an interest in medicine due to her father's work in ophthalmology.
Delia Garlic was a formerly enslaved woman originally from Virginia. Garlic is best known for her first-hand account of enslavement, the Civil War, and post-emancipation freedom. In 1937 when she was one hundred years old, the Federal Writers' Project of The Works Project Administration recorded her oral history, in Montgomery, Alabama. During this testimony, she offered first-person testimony of the horrors of the slave trade, "when babies were snatched from their mothers breasts," and of being sold six times before emancipation.