This is the story of a famous Russian woman and author,, Anna Akhmatova. Here she is in 1924 at age 35, looking weary and seductive. By this time, Anna (neé Anna Andreyevna) had lived through fin-de-siecle Europe, the artsy cabaret scene in St Petersburg, the First World War, and the Communist Revolution. Well might she […]
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The ability to control when to have a child has had different histories for women of color and white women in the United States. Then as now, African American women experienced higher levels of poverty and risk of dying in childbirth than their white American sisters. Before Roe v Wade between 1965/67, black maternal death
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These are the faces of Irish people overjoyed with the passing of the Health Act 2018, allowing abortion in limited cases. The bureaucratic title belies the long history of abortion’a outlawry in Ireland. Two women galvanized the country to change Irish law — and their stories show how ubiquitous abortion debates have been in modern
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Here are the mug shots of some members of the Jane Collective — seven were arrested, but none put on trial, saved because the 1973 Roe v Wade decision was pronounced just in time. The Janes were a group of women who provided safe but underground abortions in the Chicago area before the procedure was
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You are looking at a Colonial American recipe for abortion. Published in 1748, it was not the only at-home herbal abortifacient of the time, but it was one of the most well read. And given the publisher, that makes sense — it was Ben Franklin. Eager to adapt a British guidebook that had set out
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I know a joke isn’t funny after you explain it, but at least after reading this you might find phlogiston humorous (and also, I just made a pun). Phlogiston isn’t real, but Early Modern scientists thought it was. They used it as a way to explain the ash or calx (for metals) residue after something
Washington DC’s Sackler Gallery has an exhibit right now called “Staging the Supernatural: Ghosts and the Theater in Japanese Prints.” It’s a fascinating view of the ways different artists thought about monsters and ghosts as popular subjects of Japanese “Noh” Theater, a type of performance that moved from elite circles to the masses in the
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Japanese artists before the 20th century were mostly men, and so the painter and calligrapher Tokuyama Gyokuran (aka Ike Gyokuran) was a wonderfully talented anomaly. Living during the last age of the Shogun in the 18th-century Edo period, Gyokuran really departed from traditional women’s roles — she didn’t even shave her eyebrows, like married women
As a Medieval historian, one of the things I do is study saints of the Middle Ages — they were akin to our modern-day superheroes, and their special qualities give us a good lens for understanding the values of the distant past. The holy woman featured here today — Rita of Cascia, nee Margherita Ferri
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Medieval culture repeatedly drew connections between animals and moralistic qualities. The pig — an animal ubiquitously eaten by Christians throughout the Middle Ages — developed an unusually bad reputation. This detail from a 15th-century prayer book shows a woman stroking a pig. While the overall image looks benign — the larger painting is all about
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“At one glanceI love youWith a thousand heartsLet the zealots thinkLoving is sinfulNever mindLet me burn in the hellfireOf that sin”This is just one snippet of a poem from an unusual source: Mihrî Hatun of the Ottoman Empire (1460-1515). In a place and time where most written voices were of men, the _meclis_ were intellectual
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In the late 1600s, a young wealthy Englishwoman decided to lead a very different life than her aristocratic sisters: this was one Celia Finnes (1662-1741), who decided not to marry and instead to travel all over the countryside on horseback — for over two decades. Celia Finnes had a couple servants who joined her, but
This is the face of Queen Nanny of the Maroons, a hero so important to Jamaican history that she earned her visage on the $500 Jamaican bill. Living from indeterminate dates from the 1600s to 1700s, accounts of Queen Nanny largely come from oral histories and are difficult to pin down with certainty. She probably
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Miracle stories from the early Middle Ages include some accounts of saints who could successfully induce abortions. One such legend is from a seventh-century book of the life and miracles of the Irish St. Brigid of Kildare, who was said to have died around 525 CE. In the story, a woman had sex for pleasure
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This is Hertha Ayerton, a British Engineer whose discoveries unveiled mysteries about the behavior of electricity and helped develop technology to protect soldiers in the trenches of the First World War from poisonous gasses. Sarah Phoebe Banks was born in 1854 to a family of eight children, her father dying when she was just eight.
Just in time for the fall season, *and* Halloween, comes the news of a recent discovery in Poland of a 17th-century “Vampire” burial. An archaeological team led by Dariusz Polinsky of the Nicholas Copernicus University was conducting excavations around an Early Modern graveyard near Bydgoszcz when they unearthed the skeleton shown here. It belonged to
The title here “A brief discourse of a disease called the Suffocation of the Mother” is really misleading. Not a tract about matricide, instead it was the first English publication (1603) on hysteria — thought to be a disease that only infected women. And it’s pretty messed up from every angle. For instance, the intent
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The woman you see in this 15th-c illumination is mounted on a warhorse, and leading a surprise attack upon her enemies — this is Joanna of Flanders (c. 1295-1374), and so famed were her military ventures that philosopher David Hume called her “the most extraordinary woman of the age”. Joanna, born into the nobility of
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This African mask from the 1500s is on display this fall of 2022 at the NYC Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of an exhibit on the African origins of civilization. Exquisitely carved from precious ivory, it provides testimony to one of Africa’s more recent civilizations, the Kingdom of Benin. The capital city of Benin
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Both birth control and abortion were common practices in the Ancient Mediterranean world. Although many examples of imperfect methods exist in our sources, (for instance, in the fourth century BCE Hyppocrates suggested that prostitutes wanting to abort should jump up and down, slamming their heels into their glutes) there were effective ways of ending or
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