Episode 33: This Influential Female Author and Anthropologist Blazed a Trail for Women
04/03/19 • 40 min
This trailblazer became the most successful and significant black woman writer of the first half of the 20th century. In the 1970s, during the second wave of feminism, Alice Walker helped revive interest in this pioneer’s writings, bringing them back to public attention. Have you ever heard of Zora Neale Hurston?
Credit:
It was a deep honor and absolute pleasure to speak with Valerie Boyd, author of Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston, and DaMaris Hill, a professor at the University of Kentucky and author of A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing, for this episode.
Sources:
Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston; Boyd, Valerie; Scribner; February 3, 2004.
Dust Tracks on a Road; Hurston, Zora Neale; Harpers; 1942, updated 2017.
A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing: The Incarceration of African American Women from Harriet Tubman to Sandra Bland; Hill, DeMaris; Bloomsbury Publishing; January 15, 2019.
Zora Neale Hurston; Official Website; Maintained by the Zora Neale Hurston Trust; Retrieved February 2019.
Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography; Hemenway, Robert; University of Illinois Press, September 1, 1980.
This trailblazer became the most successful and significant black woman writer of the first half of the 20th century. In the 1970s, during the second wave of feminism, Alice Walker helped revive interest in this pioneer’s writings, bringing them back to public attention. Have you ever heard of Zora Neale Hurston?
Credit:
It was a deep honor and absolute pleasure to speak with Valerie Boyd, author of Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston, and DaMaris Hill, a professor at the University of Kentucky and author of A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing, for this episode.
Sources:
Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston; Boyd, Valerie; Scribner; February 3, 2004.
Dust Tracks on a Road; Hurston, Zora Neale; Harpers; 1942, updated 2017.
A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing: The Incarceration of African American Women from Harriet Tubman to Sandra Bland; Hill, DeMaris; Bloomsbury Publishing; January 15, 2019.
Zora Neale Hurston; Official Website; Maintained by the Zora Neale Hurston Trust; Retrieved February 2019.
Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography; Hemenway, Robert; University of Illinois Press, September 1, 1980.
Previous Episode
Episode 32: This Strange Civil Disturbance Changed How Americans Study Medicine
In the US, doctors are held in high esteem. But that wasn’t always the case. There was time when the medical field was riddled with controversy and public scrutiny. Tensions between the world of medicine and society reached a boiling point in New York City during April of 1788, when resurrection, the common practice of grave robbing, came under scrutiny.
Have you ever heard of the New York Doctors Riot?
Credit:
I want to give a special thanks to Andrea Janes, owner and founder of Boroughs of the Dead LLC, a boutique tour company dedicated to dark and unusual walking tours of New York City, and Bess Lovejoy, journalist and author of Rest in Pieces: The Curious Fates of Famous Corpses.
Sources:
The Gory New York City Riot that Shaped American Medicine; Lovejoy, Bess; Smithsonian Magazine; June 17, 2014.
Doctors' riot, New York, 1788; Bell, Whitefield J.; American Association for the History of Medicine; December 1971.
Grave Robbing And The Doctors Riot of 1788; Hernandez, Miguel; The New York History Blog; December 20, 2016.
The Doctors’ Riot of 1788; Ancestry.com; Retrieved February 2019.
American resurrection and the 1788 New York doctors' riot’; de Costa, Caroline and Miller, Francesca; Perspectives, The Art of Medicine; January 22, 2011.
Prelude and Aftermath of the Doctors' Riot of 1788: A Religious Interpretation of White and Black Reaction to Grave Robbing; Swan, Robert J.; New York History, Fenimore Art Museum; Vol. 81, No. 4 (October 2000), pp. 417-456.
American Heritage Book Selection: The Body Snatchers; Gallagher, Thomas; American Heritage Magazine; June 1967.
Next Episode
Episode 34: The Government Program that Imprisoned "Promiscuous" Women
In the United States, the war against women took a particularly dark and secretive turn in the early 1900s—around the start of World War I. Under a government-sponsored “social hygiene” campaign, to protect newly recruited soldiers, tens of thousands of women were arrested on “suspicion” of having a venereal disease. Sex workers were the prime targets, but any woman who raised an eyebrow could be apprehended. The women were subjected to invasive gynecological examinations. If they tested positive for an STI, they were incarcerated in hospitals, reformatories, and prisons, without any semblance of due process.
Once imprisoned, the women became test subjects—receiving painful injections of mercury and other ineffective treatments. Many were beaten and forcibly sterilized. Most were held indefinitely until they were deemed “cured” or “reformed.” The program persisted for decades, well into the 1950s, and even shades of this discriminatory practice are present today.
Have you ever heard of the American Plan?
Credit:
It was an absolute pleasure to speak with Scott Stern, author of The Trials of Nina McCall, the first book-length history of the American Plan, and Jeana Jorgensen, a scholar and sex educator who has written extensively, from a feminist angle, on the impacts of the American Plan.
Sources:
The Trials of Nina McCall: Sex, Surveillance, and the Decades-Long Government Plan to Imprison "Promiscuous" Women; Stern, Scott W.; Penguin Random House; May 15, 2018.
The American Plan: The U.S. Government's Forgotten Plan to Lock Up Women and Free the Country from the Scourge of Disease; Stern, Scott W.; Yale University; 2015.
The U.S. Detained 'Promiscuous' Women in What One Called a 'Concentration Camp.' That Word Choice Matters; Stern, Scott W.; TIME; May 15, 2018.
The American Plan and World War I; Jorgensen, Jeana; Patheos; January 1, 2019.
The Impact of the American Plan; Jorgensen, Jeana; Patheos; January 1, 2019.
American Social Hygiene Association History and a Forecast; Virginia Commonwealth University, Social Welfare History Project; Retrieved May 2019.
Brief History of Syphilis; Tampa, M; Journal of Medicine and Life; March 25, 2014.
Sexually Transmitted Disease Control in the Armed Forces, Past and Present; Emerson, Lynn A.C.; Military Medicine; 1997.
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