The Cure for Women by Lydia Reeder

 

First Line from Prologue: One afternoon in the summer of 1985, my grandmother and her four sisters, ages seventy-two to eighty-nine, gathered to celebrate their mother, Ellen Babb, who had passed away in 1953.

 

Before the 1850s, abortion was an accepted practice and midwives held valued positions in their communities. Women had to fight to pursue medical professions. Places like Harvard refused to admit women into their medical schools, so women built their own first-rate medical schools and hospitals. 

 

There was bound to be a backlash.

 

Distorting Darwin's theory of evolution, the top male physicians of the day wrote bestselling books which stated women should never be allowed to attend college or enter any profession because their menstrual cycles made them perpetually sick.

 

Through exhaustive research, Lydia Reeder's The Cure for Women shows how gifted women like Mary Putnam Jacobi fought back. Her arsenal of weapons included things that the male physicians' did not: the first-ever data-backed, scientific research on women's reproductive biology. Jacobi fought back with the facts, and the medical profession has never been the same. 

I learned so much from reading The Cure for Women, unfortunately, a great deal of it with my teeth clenched. Men writing "learned" treatises on women's reproductive organs when they wouldn't know an ovary or a uterus if one came up and punched them in the nose. Why? Because they'd never seen any of these organs and had no idea how they worked. You would think that we would have all the misinformation squared away here in the twenty-first century, but we don't. The fight for control over women's bodies is still happening, proving that we need more people like Mary Putnam Jacobi-- and more people to read this marvelously researched book.

The Cure for Women: Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Challenge to Victorian Medicine that Changed Women's Lives Forever

by Lydia Reeder

eISBN: 9781250284464

St. Martin's Press © 2024

eBook, 336 pages

 

Non-Fiction

Rating: B+

Source: Net Galley