This paper considers the postwar experiences of disabled or chronically ill veterans of the First World War through an examination of pension files kept by the US Bureau of War Risk Insurance and the Veteran's Bureau. While this work will demonstrate how gendered notions of service, suffering, and recovery influenced the treatment available to both men and women, it will specifically focus on the treatment of women veterans, caretakers, and widows as documented in these files. The pension and insurance system tended to obscure the physical and emotional labor performed by women in the war and postwar period. At the same time, individual investigations frequently made spectacles of women whose behavior transgressed imagined prewar gender norms, or whose testimony disrupted dominant narratives of victory and resilience. These stories challenge familiar historical narratives of war and recovery, while drawing connections to our own postwar present.

This chapter analyzes the use of “flap anatomies”, or layered, printed illustrations of human anatomy, in three sites of medical training in the late 19th century: Harvard University, the University of Edinburgh, and the Université de Paris. In an era characterized by rampant anxiety concerning both physical and moral ‘degeneration’, the role of flap anatomies in disseminating anatomical knowledge and helping shape public opinion regarding the medical profession was especially crucial in matters related to human reproduction. How was the flap anatomy – with its nudity, references to sexuality, and exploration of the body’s interior – able to reconcile these competing tensions? 

This panel brings together two projects on reproductive healthcare and childbirth in early America. As Nora Doyle’s work shows, scholars of early American and Atlantic World history have shown particular interest in the link between perceptions of childbirth pain and the nascent concept of race. Yet by focusing primarily on racial ideology formation, historians have missed opportunities to understand the rich medical cultures in which these women were participants and practitioners. Doyle’s paper focuses on the medical cultures of Native women in early North America to show that these women were concerned about painful and difficult deliveries and therefore availed themselves of a variety of medical techniques and practitioners to manage their birth experiences. Jennifer Reiss’s paper places early American medical and social approaches to impregnation, gestation, parturition, and mothering in the context of early American disability history. It argues that both the male dominated, professionalizing, medical community and women themselves understood the female body and its reproductive labor as disabled and disabling, respectively. While providing a deep history for the current crisis in reproductive healthcare, the paper also suggests that thinking about reproduction as disablement should give additional meaning and nuance to how historians assess the concept of disability before the antebellum era.

This paper reconsiders 1970s lesbian feminist periodicals as precursors to aromanticism, examining discourse around themes that arise in 2010s aromantic zines: advocacy against the hierarchization of relationships, proposed new relationalities and intimacies, and a vision of aromantic futurity. Using the framework of resonances, it shows a longer lineage of aromantic ideas than is currently understood and demonstrates the value of aromanticism as a historical lens.

If it weren’t for a typo, few members of the American Medical Association in 1895 would have given much thought to sexual relations between women. But a dutiful reader -- stumped by the use of the word “tribaism” -- set off an exchange about a search for the definition of the word “tribadism.” How did this old term, with roots in ancient Greece, become a flashpoint in the emergent scientific study of sexuality? Why does it matter?

This chapter shows how psychiatrists and homophile activists in the post-WWII period challenged understandings of homosexuality as rooted in experiences of same-sex “seduction” in childhood. They did so, in part, because of the ways this understanding of homosexuality’s etiology facilitated stereotypes about gay and lesbian “recruitment” and “corruption” of children. In undermining these stereotypes, however, some psychiatrists and activists fostered problematic arguments of their own, namely that only children who were already inclined toward homosexuality were vulnerable to same-sex seduction, and that they had unknowingly incited or willingly participated in such encounters.

This paper considers the postwar experiences of disabled or chronically ill veterans of the First World War through an examination of pension files kept by the US Bureau of War Risk Insurance and the Veteran's Bureau. While this work will demonstrate how gendered notions of service, suffering, and recovery influenced the treatment available to both men and women, it will specifically focus on the treatment of women veterans, caretakers, and widows as documented in these files. The pension and insurance system tended to obscure the physical and emotional labor performed by women in the war and postwar period. At the same time, individual investigations frequently made spectacles of women whose behavior transgressed imagined prewar gender norms, or whose testimony disrupted dominant narratives of victory and resilience. These stories challenge familiar historical narratives of war and recovery, while drawing connections to our own postwar present.

For over a century, elite Bostonians attempted to keep “pernicious and dangerous” contraceptive knowledge from poor and working-class citizens. During the Great Depression, a group of socially prominent women set out to upset this status quo, establishing a statewide network of low-cost birth control clinics. Although the clinics operated for years to great acclaim, all came crashing down after a dramatic police raid in 1937. The case sparked a statewide debate and set the stage for the next four decades of birth control battles.