To coincide with Black History Month, we are naming our three galleries after the Mothers of Gynaecology: Anarcha, Betsey and Lucy.
The history of gynaecology is a history of racism and violence. In recent years, activists and educators have excavated this history and foregrounded the experiences of the women without whom modern gynaecology would not be possible. The enslaved women on whom the so-called “father of modern gynaecology” experimented and who worked on those experiments with him.
In naming our galleries after Anarcha, Betsey and Lucy, we are ushering them into public discourse about racism in medicine. We are acknowledging the horrific violence that they suffered. We are reckoning with the racism and injustice still faced by Black women and women of colour in gynaecological care.
We are so grateful to be joined by three incredible women for the galleries' inauguration:
The Panel
Edem Ntumy (she/her) is the Chief Exec of Reproductive Justice Initiative (Formerly Decolonising Contraception), with over a decade of experience working with communities and advocacy in sexual and reproductive health. A recipient of the 2022 Olive Morris Memorial Award in remembrance of community leader and activist Olive Elaine Morris.
AZ (she/her) is a mixed heritage Muslim and a pregnancy ending doula. She is the founder and one of the community doulas at the Ad'iyah Collective, who support Muslims and their communities navigating abortion, miscarriage and stillbirth. Outside of the doula world, AZ is a writer, researcher and facilitator, with a particular focus on gendered racial violence.
Princess Banda (she/ her) is a socio-medical anthropologist who, amongst many things, is a writer, educator, and researcher. Princess is currently a DPhil Anthropology student at the University of Oxford and is cultivating a research pathway which embraces the intersections between socio-medical anthropology, women’s health, racial and social justice, and critical qualitative research methods. Her areas of interest include racial health disparities, socio-structural and political determinants of health, biopolitics, biopsychosociality, maternal health and, more recently, bioethics.
This can only ever be the beginning. Our fervent hope is that we are and can continue to be a space in which the histories some take for granted, the histories that blanket the world in centuries of undisturbed sediment, are challenged by the very people they have sought to bury.
Join us on Wednesday 23rd October at 7.30pm for a night of reflection, reckoning and, hopefully, catharsis.