I’m really excited that an essay coming from my time as a National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Fellow has been published in the Quarterly Journal of Speech. This essay follows the changes in gynecological “vision” instituted by the scientific, pedagogical writings of Dr. Sophia Kleegman in the mid-twentieth century, and it compares Dr. Kleegman’s vision of the emergent field of infertility studies with that of Dr. J. Marion Sims, the notorious “father” of U.S. gynecology who engaged in horrific violence against enslaved Black women and impoverished Irish-immigrant women in the process of establishing gynecology as a discipline in the mid-nineteenth century. *The photograph, which comes from the NYU Archives, features Dr. Kleegman seated with fellow members of the NYU Medical Alumni Association. She was the first female president of this organization.*
More than anything else, Dr. Kleegman’s writings reveal how faulty medical trajectories can be changed and shifted in increasingly humane, ethical directions. Over the past few years, it has become clear to me that much of Dr. Kleegman’s writings and speeches have not been widely preserved in the archives. So I am especially grateful to have access to the published works that I draw from in this essay to get a better sense of the impact she had for the many women seeking infertility and gynecological care in the mid-to-late 20th and 21st centuries. Please find a copy of the published essay here.