Gallery Viewing Hours: Tues-Thurs 12pm-3pm, Sat 10:30am-2:30pm*
On Display: June 19th through July 5th
free entry
*appointments can be made for other times by emailing admin@artscollabmedford.org
Come step into the lives of ancestors Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy in this impactuful retelling of our real American history.
Sisterly Resistance
Jules Arthur, 2019 | Oil Paint on Woo
RESILIENT SISTERHOOD PROJECT PRESENTS:
Call and Response: A Narrative of Reverence to Our Foremothers in Gynecology
Guided by the Sankofa principle of looking to the past to understand the present, RSP uses art as a medium and catalyst to raise awareness of historical medical malfeasance around Black women’s reproductive health and rights. To accomplish that goal, RSP commissioned artist Jules Arthur to create six paintings for RSP for this groundbreaking educational art exhibition.
Out of RSP’s six paintings, half of them bring a focus to the lives of three enslaved women. During the 1840s in Montgomery, Alabama, Dr. James Marion Sims, long lauded by the medical establishment as “the father of modern gynecology,” exercised inhumane and unethical conduct through his experiments on nearly a dozen Black women. Unfortunately, we know the names of only three women he operated on—Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy. In an era when anesthesia was beginning to be used for operations, these multiple surgeries were done without the benefit of anesthetics because he claimed that Black people did not feel as much pain as white people.
Dr. Sims is credited with inventing the vaginal speculum and a corrective method for vesico-vaginal fistula—a severe disability often caused by prolonged labor, particularly among young women. Vesico-vaginal fistulas were a common problem for all women in the 19th century. Still, they were frequently by-products of slavery due to malnutrition, repeated rapes, and unspaced pregnancies demanded by slave owners. Dr. Sims noted that he conducted thirty experimental surgeries on Anarcha before finally perfecting the techniques to repair this condition.
The other three paintings highlight the roles of different doctors for being complicit in upholding the institution of slavery, beginning with the Middle Passage. Among other things, these physicians used their positions as medical professionals to provide certificates of “soundness” that commodified and determined the monetary value of enslaved people to insurance companies and slave owners. In addition, some doctors also produced pseudoscientific research to justify and promote slavery.
Ultimately, this collaboration between the Hutchins Center and RSP is part of our call and response to educate and draw attention to the intersection of the socio-political concepts of race, gender, and Black women’s reproductive health and rights. We must all work together to continue telling the story of Anarcha, Betsey, Lucy, and the many unnamed ancestors. We want to lift their memory because they helped create the paths that make our lives possible today as doctors, researchers, scientists, and so much more. Onward we go with our Call and Response: A Narrative of Reverence to Our Foremothers in Gynecology.