This summer I was thrilled to be able to access the Helen Rodríguez-Trias Papers at the CENTRO Library & Archives. Rodríguez-Trias was a community focused pediatrician and women’s health movement leader who fought against sterilization abuse in the 1970s and 1980s. She is an important figure in my current book project, and it was such an incredible experience to get to engage with some of her papers and artifacts directly.
I was lucky to find artifacts I was expecting to find, such as the speech below, as well as artifacts of all kinds that I had not anticipated finding (such as boxed VHS and cassette tapes–it has been a long time since I’ve seen those).
I only hope that I can do Dr. Rodríguez-Trias justice in my book. She was an incredible person who really altered the trajectory of gynecological medicine in the twentieth century. I am so grateful to the wonderful staff at CENTRO for allowing me to visit their collections and become more familiar with the persuasive strategies she used to make the case for change.