Kera Lovell When sixteen-year-old Jane wrote into Ms. Magazine in the mid-1970s, she did so in a desperate search for hope. As a queer teenager, she had torn through adult feminist publications, particularly soaking up now-classic texts on lesbianism like Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon’s Lesbian/Woman (1972) and Sappho Was a Right On Woman (1972) by Sidney Abbott and Barbara Love. The fear and shame expressed by these authors shook Jane, who now wrote to Ms. out of fear: “How can a young woman even think about being gay in this society and still be happy? I really need someone to tell me ‘It’s ok ..read more

Jacqueline Antonovich Nursing Clio’s fourth annual best article prize went to Courtney E. Thompson, an associate professor of the History at Mississippi State University, for her article, “Child-Mothers and Invisible Fathers: The Paradox of ‘Precocious Maternity’ and the Pervasiveness of Child Sexual Abuse in Nineteenth-Century America.” I had the pleasure of interviewing Courtney about her important work on the history of pregnant children and sexual abuse in the nineteenth century. Jacki: Congratulations on winning Nursing Clio’s award for best article! Could you tell our read ..read more

Stephanie Gorton Since the fall of Roe v. Wade, it’s clearer than ever how far attention-seeking political rhetoric about reproductive rights clashes with people’s lived experiences. Ohio’s recent vote to affirm abortion rights in the state constitution broadcasted this effectively. Yet, in all the righteous arguments over who gets to control pregnant bodies, the history of our ever-changing assumptions about pregnancy—when it starts, how it should proceed, who gets to call it to an end—too rarely comes up for investigation. Jesse Olszynko-Gryn takes us back to the beginning with A Woman’s Rig ..read more

Livia Arndal Woods When I wrote a dissertation about literary pregnancy, I had never been pregnant. By the time I submitted a manuscript iteration of that project for publication, I had been pregnant five times (one stillbirth, two miscarriages, two live births). During this timespan, I also applied to over 250 academic positions. I was lucky enough to get a few jobs out of that labor, but not lucky enough to get maternity leave. So, I answered student emails in the hospital between regular monitoring for my dangerously high blood pressure. When my youngest child was born, I did this masked be ..read more

Introduction In early January 1890, Mexico City awaited two anticipated events: the spread of a global influenza epidemic and a series of performances by opera singer Adelina Patti. The so-called “Russian influenza” began spreading from the Russian capital of St. Petersburg in early December 1889, reached the United States within a few weeks, and was anticipated in Mexico at the start of the new year. Patti, perhaps the most famous opera singer in the world, was scheduled to begin a series of performances in Mexico in the second week of January 1890. The convergence of these two events, as doc ..read more

For those of us who teach pre-modern English history and literature, there’s a conversation that happens nearly every semester. When the subject of sex comes up in class, some well-meaning student offers a version of the following: “Well, of course, people back then didn’t believe in sex outside of marriage.” What the student means by this, of course, is not that they think no one ever had sex outside of marriage. What they really mean is that they assume sex has a progressive history: that, if they’re having one kind of sex, then the sex Shakespeare and his contemporaries had 400 years ago wa ..read more

Favorite book: R.E.: In Whose Ruins: Power, Possession, and the Landscapes of American Empire by Alicia Puglionesi. I picked this up at a Barnes & Noble in June simply because the cover looked cool, and my wife and I read it together over the course of the summer. It’s a book about many things, but primarily the surprisingly hard-to-shake mythologies of an ancient non-Indigenous white civilization that shaped the American landscape, and the way those mythologies intertwined with extractive capitalist industry in the history of the U.S. I’m not doing justice to the complexity of the researc ..read more

In a shocking 2023 Oklahoma District Court ruling, lesbian mother Kris Williams lost custody of her son, Warren, to sperm donor Harlan Vaughn.[1] Williams, an active co-parent, was listed as a parent on Warren’s birth certificate and was married to his birth mother, Rebekah Wilson. Vaughn had contractually relinquished paternity upon Warren’s conception. Nonetheless, after Williams and Wilson divorced, a judge ruled that Williams “could not establish a mother-child relationship.” He cited Oklahoma’s 2006 Uniform Parentage Act, which required her to either birth or adopt a child to be considere ..read more

In his new book Love Your Asian Body, writer Eric Wat uses oral history to tell the stories of Asian American AIDS activists who confronted the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Los Angeles during the 1980s and 1990s. His book is an important contribution to our understanding of AIDS and AIDS activism during that time, since stories of white gay men still dominate both scholarly and popular narratives of AIDS history. Love Your Asian Body also received the 2023 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award for History. I spoke with Wat about the challenges activists faced, his personal connection to th ..read more

Most people have a small, butterfly-shaped gland in their neck sitting in front of their trachea. I am no longer one of them. Almost seven years ago I had my thyroid surgically removed along with several lymph nodes and (thankfully) all of the cancer that caused unusual swelling in the gland. Realizing that I knew very little about thyroid history, I did what any curious historian does: I started down a rabbit hole of research on thyroid diseases that brought me not to cancer, but to endemic goiter, sometimes called “simple goiter,” which is typically caused by iodine deficiency. This quiet en ..read more