Dickinson-Belskie Birth Series Sculptures Presentation

Rose Holz Author

12/07/2022 Added

53 Plays

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Women's and Gender Studies' Associate Director, Rose Holz, gave a presentation at Columbia University in October 2022.

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[00:00:00.520]Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your patience.
[00:00:05.680]This is a lecture two years in the making, as they say.
[00:00:09.800]So first of the evening, my name is Stephen Novak. I'm
[00:00:12.080]head of Archives of Special Collections at Columbia's Health Sciences Library.
[00:00:16.640]If you don't know anything about us, we are the archival repository
[00:00:21.320]for the universities' four
[00:00:22.880]schools, health science schools, medicine, nursing, dentistry and public health.
[00:00:26.800]We also collect personal papers of distinguished faculty members
[00:00:30.320]and of New York City organizations involved in health care,
[00:00:34.240]including the visiting nurse service of New York
[00:00:37.360]and the Maternity Center Association, of which we'll learn more about tonight.
[00:00:42.280]We also have 27,000 rare books, part of the library of Sigmund Freud,
[00:00:48.480]a very nice audio collection and the Hyman collection
[00:00:51.560]and a history of anesthesiology.
[00:00:54.960]Before I introduce our speaker, there are some ground rules.
[00:00:58.280]Please mute yourself.
[00:00:59.480]And if you have questions, put it in the chat and we will
[00:01:03.600]get to the questions after the lecture.
[00:01:06.160]I will have somebody here read them out.
[00:01:09.280]Also for you in the room, please have a mask on.
[00:01:12.120]And also, I'm told that my microphone is very sensitive.
[00:01:16.920]And if you like chatter among yourselves, people will hear it
[00:01:20.560]and they'll get confused and won't be able to hear the speaker.
[00:01:22.800]Last, I want to thank
[00:01:26.760]Michael Caine, our deputy director
[00:01:29.240]and resident technical expert, for making this happen.
[00:01:33.320]And lastly, the Jerome B.
[00:01:35.080]Webster Endowment, which pays for all this.
[00:01:38.760]So to introduce our speaker,
[00:01:41.160]two and a half years ago, we were getting ready to welcome tonight's
[00:01:44.240]Speaker to Columbia as part of our history of the Health Science Lecture Series.
[00:01:48.640]When we were told that the administration had canceled all extracurricular events
[00:01:53.040]that month. Hmm.
[00:01:54.880]I thought maybe we can reschedule it later in the semester.
[00:01:59.440]As we know, that wasn't possible for that semester or for many more to come.
[00:02:05.080]But now I'm very pleased to welcome Professor Holz at last.
[00:02:09.760]Rose Holz our speaker received her Ph.D.
[00:02:12.200]in history from...
[00:02:18.680]From the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
[00:02:21.880]Currently, she is Professor of Practice at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln,
[00:02:27.520]where she serves as Associate Director of the Women's and Gender Studies Program
[00:02:31.760]and until 2019, Director of its Humanities and Medicine Program.
[00:02:36.280]Her research focuses on a history of reproduction in America,
[00:02:39.800]with particular emphasis on the medical and commercial provision of birth control.
[00:02:44.600]The history of Planned Parenthood and more recently,
[00:02:47.360]the use of art to teach the process of in utero development.
[00:02:51.960]She's the author of "The Birth Control Clinic in a Marketplace World"
[00:02:55.960]published by the University of Rochester Press in 2012.
[00:02:59.240]"The 1939 Dickinson Belsky Birth Series Sculptures: the rise of Modern
[00:03:04.760]Visions of Pregnancy, the roots of modern pro-life imagery, and Dr.
[00:03:08.320]Dickinson's Religious Case
[00:03:09.520]for Abortion", published in the Journal of Social History in 2018.
[00:03:13.760]And "Why the Classroom is a Sacred Place for Me" and "Why
[00:03:17.440]I'll Keep Venturing Out Into
[00:03:19.840]No Man's Land, Even During These Abortion Wars," published in The American
[00:03:22.640]Historian in 2017 and "Nurse Gordon
[00:03:25.880]on Trial, Those Early Days of the Birth Control Clinic Movement
[00:03:29.600]Reconsidered," published in the Journal of Social History in 2005.
[00:03:34.760]Please welcome. Professor Rose Holz at last to Columbia.
[00:03:46.960]Hello, everyone.
[00:03:48.640]I figure, you know, 10 minutes more of waiting
[00:03:51.440]after two and a half years of waiting is okay.
[00:03:54.640]But it's a real pleasure to be here.
[00:03:55.960]And I want to thank you all for being here.
[00:03:58.520]And I want to say thank you for everyone for coming in person
[00:04:01.720]and a shout out to all the people on Zoom.
[00:04:03.520]I know there's a Nebraska contingent, so I'm delighted to have
[00:04:06.440]all of you here as well.
[00:04:08.480]So I am delighted to be here.
[00:04:10.160]I haven't traveled on a plane
[00:04:11.800]since 2019 and I haven't given an in-person talk since 2019.
[00:04:15.880]So I'm just like, okay, well, this was a very momentous start back into that world.
[00:04:21.160]So anyway, before I begin with my talk, I want to just put this slide up front.
[00:04:26.560]Thanks to the following archives, museums and other repositories
[00:04:29.840]and the people found within historians are nothing, nothing
[00:04:34.520]without the archive and the archivists who labor within.
[00:04:38.280]So I'm very grateful to all these people because it really has been quite the ride
[00:04:42.760]and I've met some, some lovely people and of course the other people
[00:04:45.880]who gave me some time off, some money and other things money can't buy.
[00:04:50.280]So I just want to say a few words of thanks to them first. So.
[00:04:55.040]All right. I also want to say
[00:04:56.320]thanks to Steve Novak for inviting me to give this talk.
[00:05:00.160]Also, the History of Medicine Club for thinking this was a good idea,
[00:05:03.400]but most especially to Dr.
[00:05:04.640]Robert L. Dickinson for inviting me to experience his many worlds.
[00:05:08.360]So hold onto your breath.
[00:05:09.480]This is very visual lecture,
[00:05:11.560]so hold on to your hats, I should say, because we're going for a ride.
[00:05:15.480]All right. So first, a few important disclaimers.
[00:05:18.480]I'm not a medical practitioner.
[00:05:21.360]Nor have I ever been pregnant.
[00:05:24.080]And so I defer respectfully to the authority and wisdom that people
[00:05:27.920]have based on their own knowledge and their own experiences.
[00:05:31.080]I just happen to be a social historian of the history of medicine,
[00:05:34.360]sexuality, who stumbled across a really, really interesting story.
[00:05:37.720]So which I'm going to share with you today.
[00:05:41.800]And so I want us to take a moment to linger on this image.
[00:05:45.160]Just put a couple of questions in front of you.
[00:05:48.160]What do you see?
[00:05:50.680]What don't you see?
[00:05:53.960]What else does it conjure up?
[00:06:01.160]And so we begin.
[00:06:03.880]All right. So here's Dr.
[00:06:05.240]Robert L. Dickinson.
[00:06:07.000]This is in his 70s and a talk around the time
[00:06:10.480]that he gave a talk at the Charaka Club in 1933.
[00:06:13.080]So I'm going to start with reading to you a passage
[00:06:17.240]that he gave when he was speaking.
[00:06:19.480]So in 1933, the 72 year old Dr. Robert L.
[00:06:23.320]Dickinson gave a presentation
[00:06:24.640]to the Charaka Club, a group founded in the late 1800s
[00:06:27.960]by a handful of neurologists interested in engaging
[00:06:30.600]in the intersections between medicine and the humanities.
[00:06:33.840]Himself a member, this is what Dickinson had to say.
[00:06:37.000]Quote, writer and illustrator alike will welcome
[00:06:39.600]the first drafting room to appear in the medical library.
[00:06:42.920]He noted with characteristic enthusiasm and added, quote,
[00:06:46.560]the new wing of the New York Academy of Medicine
[00:06:48.720]Building has a high ceiling room with three windows for this purpose.
[00:06:52.640]He then waxed with four further poetics about this brand-new
[00:06:55.680]space, a space notably that he would go on to occupy,
[00:06:59.680]much to the Academy's dismay for over ten years.
[00:07:02.000]Quote Your charts and drawings can be thumbtacks on the wall.
[00:07:05.000]Dickinson bubbled with delight here a large architect's table permit spreading
[00:07:09.080]big Atlases wide open for the marshaling of a series of authorities
[00:07:12.600]in a graphic presentation for comparison or selection or copying.
[00:07:17.560]Here, no impetus should be given.
[00:07:19.040]He thus passionately concluded to art in the service of medical education.
[00:07:24.160]Therein perhaps lies the overarching mission of Dickinson's
[00:07:26.720]long and productive career.
[00:07:28.160]To insist that art should
[00:07:29.880]rather must be taken up in the service of medical education.
[00:07:33.120]Indeed, in the service of medicine as a whole.
[00:07:36.120]And so for those familiar with Dr.
[00:07:38.080]Dickinson, I'm just going to talk a little bit about him.
[00:07:40.160]I have some images to show you.
[00:07:42.120]He's born in 1861 in New Jersey and he dies in Massachusetts in 1950.
[00:07:47.360]He earned his medical degree in 1882 from the Long Island College Hospital,
[00:07:52.040]and he practices obstetrics and gynecology for approximately 40 years,
[00:07:55.760]primarily in New York City.
[00:07:58.000]He's active in and a prominent leader in the birth control movement.
[00:08:01.240]He is in the 1940 vice president of Planned Parenthood.
[00:08:04.720]And here he's the one who really helped
[00:08:07.360]win the medical profession over to the birth control class at the time.
[00:08:11.480]And so he's really important to that movement.
[00:08:15.360]And in addition, he's the unrecognized but deeply influential sexologist.
[00:08:19.160]He's like the bridge between Ellis and Freud before him
[00:08:22.600]and then Kinsey and Masters and Johnson after him.
[00:08:26.280]Other notable things about him is that he is a devout Episcopalian
[00:08:29.800]and he's a prolific artist.
[00:08:31.720]And in part for his own personal pleasure.
[00:08:34.680]But it was also central to his work as a doctor and a scientist.
[00:08:37.960]And he would say things like this, quote, I am really twins,
[00:08:41.520]doctor and artist, and I defy you to tell me apart.
[00:08:44.480]So this gives you a real sense of Dickinson.
[00:08:48.400]And just getting a feel for RLD.
[00:08:50.520]My husband and I,
[00:08:51.360]we were just at New York Medical Museum
[00:08:53.040]and we're just looking at some of these things. So these are some of the
[00:08:58.080]book plates that he'd done likely later in life
[00:09:01.240]to see the one for himself Robert Latou Dickinson,
[00:09:05.240]then for Abram Belsky, who would help him do the Birth Series sculptures.
[00:09:09.280]And just to give you a sense of, you know, the people he was hanging out
[00:09:11.760]with, we've got Alfred Kinsey off to the right there.
[00:09:17.120]He also loved the outdoors,
[00:09:19.160]hiking, water and boats, which, of course, he would draw.
[00:09:22.200]And he wrote and illustrated the walk books for parks
[00:09:25.120]in New York City and elsewhere.
[00:09:26.880]And here are some of the drawings in the New York Academy of Medicine Collection.
[00:09:31.840]And of course, I'd like the photo up to the right there. Very kind of.
[00:09:35.880]I could just imagine that Dickinson liked this photo,
[00:09:41.400]and he designed his family summer home on Westhampton Beach, Long Island.
[00:09:44.960]And I just looked this up.
[00:09:46.200]The name of it that they called this is at the Countway Library in Boston.
[00:09:51.240]Kokoro, I think I'm saying that right.
[00:09:52.880]I looked it up and that's Japanese.
[00:09:55.280]That means like we don't have the words to explain it, but it's something
[00:09:58.520]like heart, spirit, soul.
[00:10:00.360]It's, it's something very profound.
[00:10:04.520]And so this is what they called their summer home, which he did designs for.
[00:10:10.120]But here's some of his examples in his medical texts.
[00:10:13.560]This is a very early example.
[00:10:14.920]This is from 1890.
[00:10:17.240]And this is an Alexander Skene's "Treatise on the Diseases of Women
[00:10:20.400]for the Use of Students and Practitioners".
[00:10:23.000]And again, you can see his fascination with this architectural view,
[00:10:26.840]kind of looking downward, showing you how to lay out
[00:10:30.200]a surgical clinic and where people should be standing and and how to position
[00:10:33.760]a patient to really get a sense of his exactitude in and his drawings.
[00:10:41.560]And this is in Dickinson's "Control of Conception", 1938.
[00:10:44.840]So this is right around the time of the story that we're going to get to.
[00:10:48.160]And here and this is, of course, much later in his life,
[00:10:51.520]and he's educating doctors
[00:10:52.960]about methods of fertility control and birth control clinics set up.
[00:10:56.960]And so in this book, he's, you know, showing people he's educating doctors
[00:11:00.480]about all sorts of different methods of birth control at the time.
[00:11:03.600]And he's also showing you how to kind of lay out a gynecological clinic.
[00:11:07.600]And so, again, you get some of that
[00:11:08.680]architectural view of and here is kind of one more from the horizon.
[00:11:13.120]And I put this this book up here because remember this book,
[00:11:16.240]it will return our story.
[00:11:21.080]And of course, also later in
[00:11:22.320]life and around the time of the story, there's Dickinson's "Human Sex Atlas"
[00:11:26.320]first came out in 1933,
[00:11:28.560]the revised edition in 1949, the year before he passed away.
[00:11:32.120]Which is this his illustrated guide to male and female sex
[00:11:35.040]anatomy, which is a whole other story for a whole other time.
[00:11:38.160]I mean, I could say that with just about every one of these slides.
[00:11:40.320]The whole other story for a whole other time.
[00:11:42.600]So I'm going to put that aside as well.
[00:11:47.400]And as well, he was a deeply religious man.
[00:11:50.120]He was obsessed with the architecture and stained glass
[00:11:52.640]windows of the Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn, now St. Ann's.
[00:11:55.520]And we walked by it yesterday.
[00:11:57.800]And so here are some photographs that I swiped from the Internet of
[00:12:02.760]St. Ann's. But these are these two photos right here to the right are ones
[00:12:06.160]that I took in 2017 when I made my own personal pilgrimage there.
[00:12:10.000]And I think I got into a little bit of trouble when I was taking these photos.
[00:12:14.440]But it really is a spectacular, spectacular place.
[00:12:18.200]So he regularly penned religious psalms and prayers.
[00:12:21.160]He wrote a biography of Jesus called "Jesus Himself: His Story
[00:12:24.640]Without Physical Miracles of Harmony Drawn to the Synaptic Gospels"
[00:12:29.560]and is to phrase it, the favorite phrases were Praise be and glory
[00:12:33.080]to God, which he would say anytime he was struck with a moment of wonder,
[00:12:36.200]which, according to other observers, was all the time.
[00:12:39.520]So he would say these things regularly.
[00:12:44.280]And then, of course, there's also the other half
[00:12:46.760]of those collaborative relationship.
[00:12:48.320]There's Abram Belsky,
[00:12:49.520]and he's born in London to Russian Jews who eventually settle in Scotland.
[00:12:54.000]And he took his training at the Glasgow School of Art.
[00:12:57.920]He moved to the United States in 1929, landing in New York City,
[00:13:01.560]and he ultimately moved to Gloucester, New Jersey, where he lived
[00:13:04.760]for the rest of his life.
[00:13:06.120]And he was a fine sculptor
[00:13:07.840]who supported himself in his craft, his entire career, doing things
[00:13:11.680]religious art, medical school, coins, and medallions.
[00:13:15.600]So here is here we have a photo of a young Belskie.
[00:13:18.000]And this is his first publicly known work, "The Christ Child".
[00:13:21.000]Here's some medallions. Here's another sculpture.
[00:13:24.280]And then here are some somethings.
[00:13:26.200]This was at the Belskie Museum of Art and Science in Gloucester, New Jersey.
[00:13:29.400]I encourage you to go. It's a really great place.
[00:13:32.520]And here's me. I mean, it's the kind of place where I was
[00:13:35.080]literally interacting with the materials that were there.
[00:13:38.280]So it's it's really wonderful.
[00:13:42.480]So, I want to turn to the Birth Series.
[00:13:46.480]And what we need to do is we need to appreciate some of the other
[00:13:49.480]other people in the organization and the events behind that.
[00:13:54.160]And the other organization that you need to know about is the New
[00:13:57.600]York Maternity Center Association, which was established in 1960.
[00:14:00.920]And we have the papers here. This is where I looked at them here.
[00:14:04.080]This is how Steve and I know each other because of the MCA papers.
[00:14:07.960]And if you know anything about the early 20th century,
[00:14:09.840]you know that infant maternal mortality rates were really high.
[00:14:13.280]And so organizations like the New York Maternity Center Association, the MCA,
[00:14:18.280]their goal was to improve maternal and infant health.
[00:14:22.440]And so they do this through all sorts of educational outreach programs,
[00:14:27.000]and they set up classes, they
[00:14:29.560]have literature, midwifery programs.
[00:14:33.680]And so, you know, they're the ones who actually would
[00:14:36.360]would commission the sculptures themselves.
[00:14:39.600]But before that happens, so they're doing all these outreach efforts
[00:14:44.160]and they decided they're going to do, they're going to step up their efforts.
[00:14:46.880]And they put on an exhibit at the 1933 World's Fair in Chicago.
[00:14:52.320]And the purpose of this was to educate the public about all that took place
[00:14:56.280]during pregnancy, before birth took place to encourage medical supervision.
[00:15:02.240]And another kind of moment that you need to understand is that
[00:15:05.280]people if they brought a doctor in and that was an IF they brought a doctor
[00:15:08.880]and they only brought a doctor
[00:15:10.280]in at the very end when somebody was actually going to deliver their baby.
[00:15:14.080]So they're trying to change this practice.
[00:15:16.160]They want to encourage medical supervision throughout the entire pregnancy period.
[00:15:21.160]And so they put on this exhibit
[00:15:24.160]and this first one in
[00:15:25.280]1933, and it's really just kind of a mock up nursery.
[00:15:28.480]You know, it's got a bassinet, got a diaper changing table,
[00:15:32.720]and there was an attendant there who answered all sorts of questions
[00:15:35.320]that you might have.
[00:15:36.440]And the MCA decides that this is really successful
[00:15:39.160]and they're going to do it again.
[00:15:41.280]So that was 1933 in Chicago, and that's the planning
[00:15:45.720]for the 1939 World's Fair in New York City begins in 1937.
[00:15:51.680]And so here we have Dickinson again.
[00:15:54.280]Now in his seventies, he is put on the MCA planning committee.
[00:15:57.800]And, you know, there's all sorts of pieces
[00:15:59.520]to this exhibit they put on the at the New York City World's Fair.
[00:16:03.280]But he decides he envisions a 3D sculptural installation that depicts
[00:16:07.800]embryonic and fetal development from fertilization through discovery,
[00:16:11.680]that his contribution to it.
[00:16:14.720]And so, I mean, he's an artist, but he's not a sculptor.
[00:16:18.600]So he's trying to figure out how to do this.
[00:16:20.960]He turns to his friends and noted sculptor Malvina Hoffman.
[00:16:24.560]She trained under Rodin.
[00:16:28.560]She's also the the creator of the
[00:16:31.880]the the now controversial 'Races of Mankind' series.
[00:16:35.640]And so anyway, those two were friends at the time
[00:16:39.720]and he asks her and she says No.
[00:16:43.200]But she's like, you know, I know about this other guy is young.
[00:16:47.160]He's good. He needs money and he need work.
[00:16:51.120]And so she introduces him to Abram
[00:16:53.800]Belskie and Belskie, who was a little, kind of skittish about this Dickinson guy.
[00:16:57.480]But it's really interesting to think about this. Belskie is really young.
[00:17:00.440]He was in his late 20s, Dickinson was in his seventies
[00:17:03.200]and boom, they just hit it off like like gangbusters.
[00:17:07.480]And so they really just work very well together.
[00:17:10.640]And so, as I like to say, and voila, in 1939, the Birth Series sculptures is born,
[00:17:17.080]the original set had 34 sculptures.
[00:17:20.200]I just show eight here,
[00:17:21.480]but it gives you a sense of what they are, what they look like.
[00:17:25.680]One of the early ones, of course, is the moment of conception fertilization.
[00:17:30.120]This next one takes you through, I think it's four
[00:17:32.840]and a half weeks to three and a half months.
[00:17:36.320]Then this one is four and a half months.
[00:17:39.320]And then there's these last ones illustrate
[00:17:41.720]what's called the birth sequence of the Birth Series.
[00:17:45.000]And so it's as the baby is emerging from the
[00:17:50.080]the birth canal, and I should say early on, he has
[00:17:54.080]Dickinson has helped because the first few are done by
[00:18:00.520]a Dickinson and he's working with a guy by the name of Dr.
[00:18:03.920]Vladimir Fortunato, which I was just talking about with Arlene Shaner.
[00:18:08.240]And he dies unexpectedly in this process.
[00:18:12.240]He's died pretty young. He's like 53 years old.
[00:18:14.520]I just always assumed he was old, but apparently not.
[00:18:17.640]So this was very unexpected. And Dickinson is freaking out.
[00:18:21.240]He's he's he's he's like this far along,
[00:18:24.480]and it's January of 1939, the Fair is set to open in April.
[00:18:29.040]And so this is why he's panicking, why he's reaching out to Hofmann,
[00:18:32.720]who says now she can put him in touch with Belskie, and boom,
[00:18:36.120]the two are just able to work together really quickly.
[00:18:40.000]So. All right. But what I want to do
[00:18:43.360]is back up for a moment, a lesson in the creative process.
[00:18:47.720]I mean, though art can feel like, voila, you know, when it comes out.
[00:18:52.640]But it's this moment, though, where you have to realize that there's actually
[00:18:55.080]a lot of work that goes on in advance of this stuff.
[00:18:58.400]And you know, what's interesting
[00:18:59.560]is that Dickinson have been working towards this for decades.
[00:19:03.400]And the source books look like this.
[00:19:06.240]You have all these pictures of embryonic development,
[00:19:10.760]and he's charting a side he in a location of the embryo.
[00:19:16.640]And I just know that this is actually a later picture here.
[00:19:20.520]I'm thinking he's like already doing some editing on it.
[00:19:23.040]So I need to look at that this week,
[00:19:24.680]whether it was the last great addition to the PowerPoint.
[00:19:28.000]But anyway, so here's another one where you can see
[00:19:30.760]he's charting the size of the development, the location.
[00:19:33.960]And so he's been thinking about this stuff for a long time.
[00:19:38.680]The captain was also what I call a tracer
[00:19:41.840]and much enamored with X-ray detection technology.
[00:19:44.880]And he wanted to capture, I have the word living in quotes.
[00:19:48.520]They really shouldn't have the word living in quotes because he wanted that.
[00:19:51.680]He wanted a captured living bird.
[00:19:53.360]Because we have to understand is at the time all knowledge
[00:19:56.840]about the pregnancy and delivery process was derived from the dead.
[00:20:01.480]So it was from a hysterectomy.
[00:20:04.040]So it wasn't even about the delivery process.
[00:20:06.320]It was it was from hysterectomies, it was from abortions,
[00:20:10.200]it was from pregnant cadavers.
[00:20:13.560]And so all this knowledge was from the dead.
[00:20:15.480]And he wanted to capture kind of the living process of
[00:20:20.120]in utero development and then, of course, delivery.
[00:20:22.840]And so what they did was, with the help of physician colleagues,
[00:20:27.440]they made thousands of X-rays and active deliveries among women at prominent
[00:20:31.120]hospitals, including Johns Hopkins, Bronx, Sloane, Harlem and New Haven.
[00:20:36.040]And it's just fascinating. And this is, again, another thing that
[00:20:39.920]we came across in the New York Academy of Medicine and this X-ray here,
[00:20:44.080]you can see here, but it looks like the left side, the woman's hip,
[00:20:49.120]and you can see a rib cage and you can see her femur.
[00:20:54.280]And then, of course, you see in between her legs, you can see
[00:20:56.360]the skull of the baby emerging.
[00:20:59.480]And so and, you know, this seems surprising to us.
[00:21:01.760]But again, at the time, this was really common to do x rays.
[00:21:05.400]It was just kind of standard practice
[00:21:07.680]of whether or not these women gave consent. I don't know.
[00:21:11.880]That's a whole other thing that needs to be unpacked.
[00:21:15.640]And whether or not
[00:21:16.120]we can find that information, that's another piece of the puzzle.
[00:21:20.080]But you have these x rays and x rays are just really good.
[00:21:22.440]Then you can trace them. Right.
[00:21:26.200]And then this captures the living delivery process.
[00:21:29.440]And then what happens is these drawings are then passed on
[00:21:32.480]to Abram Belskie, who I guess is watchful.
[00:21:35.800]I did call the bulk of the sculptural work with assistance provided
[00:21:39.880]by medical artists and his own and Emily Foray.
[00:21:43.080]And I really like this photo, too.
[00:21:44.800]I mean, this, this
[00:21:45.160]this project has just been filled with photographs from start to finish.
[00:21:48.400]I and it's just it's just really unusual that way.
[00:21:50.840]And so this is a photo. This is done.
[00:21:52.600]This is not on the birth stories.
[00:21:53.640]This is the stuff that they did after the birth year.
[00:21:56.280]It it's called the
[00:21:58.480]pelvic anatomy collection.
[00:22:00.040]I'm blanking on the name.
[00:22:02.040]But anyway, so here you have the drawing in the background.
[00:22:05.440]You have Abram Belskie here, and then he is really in
[00:22:08.800]the drawing as a guide to do the sculpture.
[00:22:14.960]So again. Voila.
[00:22:16.240]In 1939 the Birth Series is born.
[00:22:20.640]And it immediately goes on display at the MCA's exhibit at the 1940
[00:22:25.920]World's Fair, where it's viewed by hundreds of thousands of people.
[00:22:29.560]And you could just see
[00:22:30.160]people are just you know, they're standing up in line in droves.
[00:22:33.280]It was a really popular exhibit.
[00:22:35.840]And it was it was viewed by young people, viewed by children.
[00:22:41.040]It was viewed by medical practitioners. It was viewed by laypeople.
[00:22:44.400]It was viewed by religious people.
[00:22:46.280]I mean, it was all walks of life.
[00:22:48.880]And I mean, it's worth
[00:22:49.680]pointing out that all of these images here depict white people.
[00:22:53.800]And so I don't I don't know
[00:22:55.880]what the attendance was like at the World's Fair by people of color.
[00:22:59.720]And so that's another thread that needs to be explored.
[00:23:02.280]But all the photos that I could come across and I was delighted that I found
[00:23:05.200]photos, that these were the people that were photographed
[00:23:11.440]and they were just people just over the moon
[00:23:13.240]that just they had never seen anything like this before.
[00:23:17.240]So thereafter, demand for the series is massive.
[00:23:20.880]People see this and they're like, Oh my gosh, we need to have these
[00:23:24.440]these sculptures in our own collections.
[00:23:27.000]And so replicas of the sculptures are made and sold with sets making their way
[00:23:30.680]into museums of natural history and public health
[00:23:32.960]galleries across the United States.
[00:23:35.200]And here you can see a, you know, kind of a
[00:23:37.240]I don't know what you would call that, a pamphlet or advertisement something,
[00:23:40.000]but that's showing you here. You can buy the sculptures
[00:23:43.480]and have them in your own collection.
[00:23:48.840]And they even made them excuse me.
[00:23:51.280]They even made their way to the University of Nebraska in 1952 in the Ralph
[00:23:55.600]Mueller health galleries, which is where I first encountered them in 2014.
[00:24:00.760]And so here you have I mean, this I mean, this is how that stuff works.
[00:24:03.920]So you have the school busses full of kids that they take in to, you know,
[00:24:08.800]go and look at the public health exhibits.
[00:24:11.560]And so here's what this looks like.
[00:24:12.920]It looks like the early 60s.
[00:24:15.800]Here's one. There's more photos that I found where they looked like they
[00:24:20.480]kind of revision of the exhibit.
[00:24:22.280]And so this was from the late sixties,
[00:24:24.200]early seventies, and it's called The Miracle of Growth.
[00:24:27.960]And so you got to see how they're putting this display together
[00:24:32.480]in the Ralph Mueller galleries.
[00:24:35.960]Most importantly, however, it's mass produced
[00:24:38.200]and other more what I call more affordable and more transportable ways.
[00:24:41.960]I mean, think about the sculptures
[00:24:43.080]are just like they're big, they're clumsy, they're hard to move around. They break.
[00:24:47.360]I saw many letters in the collections of sculptures that were
[00:24:50.720]that were broken, have pieces chipped off them.
[00:24:53.520]And so they got smart and they put together something called the Birth Atlas.
[00:24:58.480]And it's I mean, it's a giant.
[00:24:59.680]It's like this big, I think the size of an Atlas we have. Yes.
[00:25:03.960]Okay, there we have it. Okay.
[00:25:05.440]And there's six editions of it.
[00:25:06.800]And even as it, in his infinite wisdom, when he got the MCApapers,
[00:25:11.160]he got all editions of the Birth Atlas and we're trying to get them digitized.
[00:25:16.400]So the Birth Atlas, they took
[00:25:18.040]photographs, beautiful photographs of each one of the sculptures.
[00:25:21.400]So then this is what goes just becomes this massive phenomenon.
[00:25:25.320]And there's, like I said, six editions
[00:25:28.760]well through the 1960s, and it's just it's just all over the place.
[00:25:33.760]You'll also see that here, the photograph.
[00:25:36.240]Where, here it's in use by the nurse midwife, Maude Callen.
[00:25:39.560]Somebody ask me more about this in the Q&A because it didn't quite
[00:25:43.080]make it into the lecture.
[00:25:44.160]But I have stuff I want to talk about with that.
[00:25:46.760]It also becomes part of sex education, teaching kids.
[00:25:50.440]So the images are disappearing,
[00:25:52.320]the sculptures, they're not
[00:25:53.360]as in the Birth Atlas, but they're in sex ed kits. Okay.
[00:25:55.920]So the stuff is just ubiquitous. It's like everywhere.
[00:25:59.360]It's in filmstrips, in Kodachrome slides and all which goes across the globe
[00:26:03.360]and everywhere for the next 30 plus years like a phenomenon.
[00:26:09.120]But then, as quickly as they appeared, the sculptures disappeared.
[00:26:14.040]Lost from public knowledge and public memory.
[00:26:19.120]Replaced in the meantime by more modern ways
[00:26:21.640]to view pregnancy in the 1970s and 80s.
[00:26:25.320]And in the meantime, of course, 1973, you know, this whole time
[00:26:29.280]that I've been talking about, the time period I've been talking about
[00:26:31.640]abortion is illegal.
[00:26:33.200]And so in 1973, Roe v Wade legalizes abortion.
[00:26:37.040]It becomes the new law of the land.
[00:26:42.000]But then, strangely enough, 40 years later,
[00:26:44.160]the sculptures mysteriously bubble back to the surface
[00:26:46.720]in, of all places, the Nebraska State Museum and Nebraska Hall,
[00:26:50.440]and here they are exhumed at my request, I had to really kind of be persistent
[00:26:54.320]about it because people are like, Go away, we're busy.
[00:26:56.880]Like, I think you have these sculptures here.
[00:26:58.800]I think you have the sculptures here.
[00:27:00.600]And finally somebody followed it up.
[00:27:03.080]And George Corner, he's like the resident oral historian over there.
[00:27:08.280]He he kind of gathered them all up in their collection
[00:27:11.640]and assembled all these beat up old boxes on this this metal
[00:27:17.400]shelving unit. And, you know,
[00:27:19.280]it's just fascinating because usually these old repurposed boxes are
[00:27:22.800]when I took the exhibit down in 1970s, and that's where they had been, you know,
[00:27:26.520]since I started pestering them and around 2012 and 13.
[00:27:32.400]And they really - I sent them on a scavenger hunt
[00:27:35.320]because he wanted to make sure
[00:27:36.280]he got all of them in one place because he remembered them.
[00:27:39.320]He had been around when they had been up in the seventies.
[00:27:42.240]And so the moment of discovery put into motion a veritable
[00:27:45.400]scavenger hunt I had in the fall of 2015
[00:27:49.200]when I visited all those archives that I mentioned on that initial slide.
[00:27:53.120]That's when I met Arlene Shaner, when I met Steve Novak.
[00:27:56.160]I've met all sorts of people,
[00:27:57.480]and we're just really just starting to put together, you know, this
[00:28:00.640]fascinating story.
[00:28:03.240]And here's to the treasures we found inside those dusty old boxes.
[00:28:06.400]Do they look familiar? Yes, they do.
[00:28:09.840]And so they are set at the Ralph Mueller health galleries.
[00:28:15.560]It was so much fun.
[00:28:18.040]So while this origin story is fascinating
[00:28:20.200]to tell historians, of course you also want to know other things.
[00:28:24.280]What other stories about the path to the sculptures tell us?
[00:28:28.560]What else can we learn from them?
[00:28:30.440]So here I'm going to propose five different things.
[00:28:33.080]I mean, there's -
[00:28:36.200]So many stories that could be unpacked of this one,
[00:28:39.160]but I'm just going to put five in front of you
[00:28:41.920]and encourage other people to, you know, to tell more.
[00:28:45.320]So story number one, the first series helps explain
[00:28:48.240]the change in conceptions of pregnancy from the 1800s to what we have today.
[00:28:52.400]So in the 1800s, the understanding in terms of pregnancy
[00:28:56.600]was that life begins with quickening, which is roughly 3 to 4 months in,
[00:29:00.480]which is when a woman feels movement inside the womb.
[00:29:03.760]This is often very much determined by the woman.
[00:29:06.840]Pregnancy is seen as a
[00:29:07.800]shared process between the woman and the contents of her womb.
[00:29:11.880]And up until the 1870s, ending
[00:29:13.960]a pregnancy before quickening was culturally and legally accepted.
[00:29:17.560]They didn't even see it as an abortion if it ended before quickening.
[00:29:22.920]So that's kind of the way in which they understood.
[00:29:27.000]They understood pregnancy.
[00:29:29.400]And by the 1960s and 70s, the fetus has emerged
[00:29:33.080]as a separate identity in the pregnancy process.
[00:29:35.440]And the doctor now has two patients to treat.
[00:29:39.160]And the shift is what feminists in the 1990s, I should say feminist
[00:29:42.520]scholars in the 1990s, would call the rise of the public fetus
[00:29:47.520]with a face of sex, a desire to suck
[00:29:51.200]its thumb, which has been at the center
[00:29:52.160]of the abortion debate since Roe v Wade in 1973.
[00:29:57.840]But interestingly, when those scholars, those first scholars discuss
[00:30:01.240]the rise of the public fetus, they regularly pointed to Leonard Nelson's
[00:30:05.000]illustrated photos and 1965 as the moment that this took hold.
[00:30:09.520]And so here's the cover of Life magazine in 1965.
[00:30:14.160]This is what people usually point to
[00:30:15.680]in terms of this purpose, this emergence of this public fetus.
[00:30:19.200]But here in I've got I'm looking at the Birth Series, I'm going 1939.
[00:30:22.600]This is several decades earlier.
[00:30:25.120]So, you know, something more was at work here.
[00:30:28.520]But for me, the Birth Series served as that missing 20th century link
[00:30:33.080]to help explain the shift from the 1800s to the mid 1960s.
[00:30:40.400]Though, in truth, there's actually a long history
[00:30:42.440]of visualization, of enduring development, which goes back for centuries.
[00:30:46.640]Hence, Story number two,
[00:30:49.400]how different the Birth Series Pregnant narrative was to that which exist at
[00:30:52.640]the time of their creation in the 1930s.
[00:30:55.560]So for example, people might have been familiar with
[00:30:58.160]things like Friedrich Ziegler's 3D wax embryos,
[00:31:02.520]which were displayed at earlier world's fairs like 1893.
[00:31:07.080]You also have what I call the quote unquote mason jar collections
[00:31:11.040]of real embryos and fetuses which were regularly displayed
[00:31:14.840]at world's fairs and elsewhere. This is coming.
[00:31:17.720]These images are coming from the Carnegie collection.
[00:31:20.320]But there's this these Mason Jar collection
[00:31:22.880]that they were all over the place and then they just kind of disappeared.
[00:31:26.160]I think people just kind of were like, what is it
[00:31:28.440]that we have in our collections?
[00:31:29.400]Because it was becoming somewhat controversial to have them.
[00:31:35.840]Post Roe v Wade.
[00:31:38.920]In other words, the narratives
[00:31:41.040]which existed at the time were clinical, scientific and even grotesque.
[00:31:44.800]In a story they told
[00:31:45.840]about the origins of human life, the in-utero origins of human life.
[00:31:49.800]And these are specimens to be studied, right?
[00:31:53.440]I mean, these are cross-sections
[00:31:56.920]not of baby to be
[00:31:58.680]tenderly loved, as you see in the Birth Series sculptures.
[00:32:04.800]But as I also learned, I need to back up even further in time.
[00:32:07.880]I got the chance to meet several art historians and a really great
[00:32:13.280]workshop I was at on the public fetus,
[00:32:16.480]and professors Jessica Dandona and Jennifer Kosmin,
[00:32:19.880]and they pointed out to me that Dickinson was also riffing off of
[00:32:25.080]clay models in the obstetric school,
[00:32:27.120]in the school of Surgery, in Bologna, Italy, in the 1700s.
[00:32:30.560]And so these are those sculptures that were there in the 1700s.
[00:32:35.040]And I looking at these and I was having an intellectual crisis.
[00:32:39.040]Because, I was like, wait a minute, Dickinson's not the first.
[00:32:42.080]What's going on here?
[00:32:42.960]And I had already published my article,
[00:32:44.600]and I was just really kind of in a tailspin about it.
[00:32:48.160]And then I also realized, you know, too,
[00:32:50.200]that Dickinson was also clearly influenced by the drawings of William Smellie,
[00:32:55.160]you know. So I was grappling with all this stuff.
[00:32:58.600]And but such imagery only reinforces how complete
[00:33:02.080]the Birth Series narrative was and the story it told about pregnancy.
[00:33:05.320]I mean, these are the other images, right, to have, you know, David Daniel Davis's.
[00:33:11.360]And this is like, you know, this kind of this headless fetus been extracted.
[00:33:15.280]Um, you know, this one here is a American textbook
[00:33:18.080]of obstetrics in 1903, this baby don't get pulled out.
[00:33:22.120]And, you know, of course, these these other images that we were
[00:33:24.280]just looking at before the wax embryo donations are collections.
[00:33:28.520]And so, you know, the story was this
[00:33:31.760]then to this in 1939,
[00:33:34.720]a story of creative perfection with the union of each sperm and egg.
[00:33:40.440]And it's really interesting when you look at these because it's almost like,
[00:33:43.400]the It's almost like the baby just kind of like like
[00:33:48.000]asleep and then springs to life, right?
[00:33:50.840]It's just kind of this really kind of
[00:33:53.400]amazing movement.
[00:33:58.560]So story number three.
[00:34:00.200]In contrast to existing visual narratives, the 1939
[00:34:03.880]birth series also told a romantic and idealized story
[00:34:07.440]about the origins of human life from the moment of conception forward.
[00:34:11.480]And here we can see it in the language, in the pamphlet
[00:34:14.360]that was part of the exhibit at the 1939 1948 World's Fair.
[00:34:20.120]Firmly asserts that life begins at conception that refers to embryo
[00:34:24.000]fetus as the baby throughout the pregnancy process and it really pushes
[00:34:27.440]childbearing is central to planning fulfillment in marriage.
[00:34:30.320]The purpose of human existence and the scope this this pamphlet is
[00:34:35.400]that the text is reinforced by images of the Birth Series sculptures.
[00:34:40.000]In fact, I learned that this pamphlet also became part of
[00:34:45.600]the Gerber baby food.
[00:34:46.960]They distributed this pamphlet.
[00:34:49.080]So there's that commercial connection, too, which also deserves exploration.
[00:34:55.840]And this is the story that foreshadows what would later become
[00:34:59.520]that would be taken up for the modern pro-life movement in 1788, precisely
[00:35:03.840]when the sculptures themselves disappear to make the case of abortion as murder.
[00:35:09.360]And this is a pro-life exhibit.
[00:35:11.160]May 2015 in Illinois.
[00:35:13.880]And you can see kind of this, you know, the the 3D
[00:35:17.120]sequential narrative of neurodevelopment.
[00:35:21.040]One of my favorites is this one here. You know,
[00:35:24.560]I was raised Catholic
[00:35:25.840]and is you know, that the baby, you know, I knew you before you were born.
[00:35:29.360]So, you know, the hand here of God, they're not even you know,
[00:35:32.320]it's not the woman's body. It's the hands of God inside the womb.
[00:35:36.320]So anyway, so this this imagery really becomes
[00:35:38.720]a part of pro-life educational material after Roe v Wade.
[00:35:44.160]And this narrative would become a staple educational tool
[00:35:47.560]within the pro-life movement after the passage of Roe v Wade in 1973.
[00:35:51.600]And this is a more recent example from Life News.com.
[00:35:54.520]And it just kind of shows the ways in which fetal models
[00:35:57.560]help save babies from abortion. Mom already had abortion appointment.
[00:36:01.280]And so you can see how they do it.
[00:36:03.080]And there's just this massive business
[00:36:05.480]around the selling of these sorts of fetal models.
[00:36:08.600]So, you know, this has become a really powerful tool.
[00:36:13.040]Like I said, after Roe v Wade in 1973 and it's still out there,
[00:36:18.160]this is probably from within the last five years.
[00:36:22.720]So for a long time, I wondered where Dickinson stood on the abortion issue.
[00:36:27.160]Having myself been raised pro-life, Catholic in the 1970s and eighties
[00:36:31.120]and served a steady diet of imagery like this in the exhibit
[00:36:34.480]at my parent's church, outside the church.
[00:36:38.280]When I look at the Birth Series sculptures,
[00:36:40.120]I could feel it evoking something deep inside of me,
[00:36:43.040]even though I since become a pro-choice adult.
[00:36:46.000]But I wasn't quite sure what was going on.
[00:36:51.800]So I did what historians do.
[00:36:54.160]Oh, plus, I also knew that for Dickinson,
[00:36:55.960]the birth series conjured up something spiritually profound
[00:36:59.560]and as he effused in a 1942 letter to Melvina
[00:37:02.560]Hofmann, the response you received from a Catholic nun who says, I asked
[00:37:07.080]quote, Sister, why is it that you feel your girls will want these? ?
[00:37:10.680]And she answered, They always ask, How is a baby born?
[00:37:14.600]And that's just the most reverent way of answering that question that I have seen.
[00:37:19.160]And so Dickinson was just delighted with the fact that it was being described
[00:37:23.000]as reverence that has being described as reverence by nuns.
[00:37:26.560]And he would talk about this
[00:37:28.840]achievement of reverence in the Birth Series sculptures
[00:37:32.800]to anybody who would listen.
[00:37:34.840]So he was really proud of this.
[00:37:36.080]So again, I was still just kind of like trying to figure out
[00:37:38.360]where do I still stand on this and on the issue of abortion.
[00:37:43.320]And so I did what I do.
[00:37:44.720]I dove back in the historical record and first came across
[00:37:48.280]this private document in his personal papers.
[00:37:50.360]And these are at the Countway in Boston
[00:37:54.440]for abortion, as a blessing whenever really from intolerable burden
[00:37:58.000]of added maternal care or freedom from lifelong shame or stigma a bastard.
[00:38:02.360]It is the stake, the issue, the core, of the inescapable,
[00:38:06.480]judged by the kind of court before which the action is summoned.
[00:38:09.240]One would suppose there was this one single bit of human behavior
[00:38:12.520]that had no variations, no shadings, no class, but one that one crime,
[00:38:18.920]that one allocated by the Almighty as the deadly sin.
[00:38:21.880]The world's chief horror, and there's no date on this.
[00:38:27.720]They went back to those published birth control manuals for the 1930, published
[00:38:32.080]just on the eve of the Birth Series debut.
[00:38:36.400]And I was familiar with these manuals, like way back when I was doing
[00:38:39.680]my dissertation in the nineties and I just, I couldn't
[00:38:42.880]believe that like this was like it was right in front of my nose. And, and
[00:38:47.440]so he was not only doing the layout of gynecological clinics,
[00:38:51.920]but he was talking about birth control methods.
[00:38:54.720]But he also has chapters Chapter 17, Abortion
[00:38:58.880]with illustrations showing how to do it properly and improperly.
[00:39:04.080]And like always, that's kind of have this moment like, oh, my God, you're
[00:39:09.480]so... hence, story number four.
[00:39:12.240]For Dickinson, a devout Episcopalian supported the practice of birth
[00:39:16.080]control and abortion for religious and medical reasons
[00:39:21.160]that we must celebrate the divine creation of human life
[00:39:24.000]as what reverently illustrated by the Birth Series sculptures,
[00:39:26.680]while at the same time understanding how difficult human life could be,
[00:39:30.640]how difficult pregnancy could be, how difficult raising children could be.
[00:39:35.280]And so this was all a bit of help was sometimes necessary, indeed
[00:39:38.520]the only merciful thing to do.
[00:39:40.360]And so although he crafted the story, the sculptural story
[00:39:44.760]of creative perfection, the union of sperm and egg produces this,
[00:39:51.920]he understood how difficult that using imperfection was in daily life.
[00:39:56.240]And so for him, the provision of contraception,
[00:40:00.120]abortion was the only merciful and the only Christian thing to do.
[00:40:05.280]And so he chastised religious clergy,
[00:40:08.880]quote, from 1929, though an Episcopalian and lover of nature,
[00:40:13.600]my 40 years as father confessor to human beings who love and find honor me
[00:40:18.280]to differ from Lambeth and Lambeth was the 1929 Conference
[00:40:22.040]of Episcopalian Clergy discussed the birth control question
[00:40:25.520]to which it added, quote, Abstinence is found to be
[00:40:28.040]no answer and the bishops safe period, no solution.
[00:40:31.560]Perhaps the patients of bishops all have opposite wings of palaces
[00:40:35.000]to retire to at night, mine sleep in the same bed, chastises Dickinson.
[00:40:42.440]Dickinson chastises everybody
[00:40:46.640]- he chastises the medical profession.
[00:40:48.360]So this is 1938.
[00:40:49.960]And this was in that
[00:40:52.320]manual that I just showed you, quote, Ours is the responsibility
[00:40:56.200]for her health and nervous stability and the well-being of her children.
[00:40:59.840]Dickinson chided fellow doctors, reminding them it was as much of their
[00:41:03.240]medical duty to protect women as it was to protect their children.
[00:41:07.080]To which, she added, It is cowardice and neglect to fail
[00:41:09.840]to see the case through to an end.
[00:41:14.520]He wrote reappropriated language from Dr.
[00:41:16.840]Leo Latz's 1938 manual on the Rhythm Method.
[00:41:20.480]And so during this time, I mean, a lot of stuff is picking up steam in the 1930s
[00:41:24.920]with the birth control movement challenging Comstock laws that forbid
[00:41:30.400]dispensing of contraception.
[00:41:32.960]But you have somebody by the name of Dr.
[00:41:35.200]excuse me, Dr. Leo Latz.
[00:41:36.400]He's a Catholic doctor,
[00:41:37.800]and he puts out a manual about the rhythm method, which was I mean,
[00:41:41.000]even this was kind of walking a line with the Catholic Church,
[00:41:44.800]but promoting the rhythm method as the only method
[00:41:47.560]that was allowed by the Catholic Church to practice fertility control.
[00:41:51.840]So he put out this manual in 1936, which Dickinson then quotes from verbatim
[00:41:58.320]in the control of conception to justify abortion.
[00:42:02.240]So there's the religious text by Dr.
[00:42:05.120]Leo Letts, which is then quoted By Dr.
[00:42:07.280]Dickinson, quote: Burdens attests excuse me, burdens that test human
[00:42:11.600]endurance to the utmost limit and to which all too many succumb will be lightened.
[00:42:16.120]I speak of economic burdens, the burdens of poverty, of inadequate income,
[00:42:20.080]of unemployment, which makes it impossible for parents to give their children
[00:42:24.320]and themselves the food, the clothing, the housing, education,
[00:42:27.960]and the recreation they are entitled to as children of God.
[00:42:31.920]And then he says, I.
[00:42:32.840]He goes on, I speak of physiological burdens.
[00:42:35.640]I speak of psychic burdens.
[00:42:38.360]And so this is the language that large uses.
[00:42:41.280]Never mind. The next line in his book is "The greatest game
[00:42:45.880]that will accrue to the human race
[00:42:47.560]with judicious dissemination of this knowledge is the prevention
[00:42:50.200]of countless crimes against nature, especially abortion and contraception.
[00:42:55.200]Jacobson was perfectly happy to stop right before that sentence when he quoted it.
[00:43:01.840]It might have created problems.
[00:43:05.000]Also in 1942, he even proposes a new logo for the newly named Planned
[00:43:09.720]Parenthood Federation of America, which he was now as president.
[00:43:13.840]He cracks me up.
[00:43:14.600]He's like his vice president "Well, I'm just going to draw you a logo.' You know,
[00:43:17.600]so this is the kind of guy that he was.
[00:43:20.680]And so he comes up with something
[00:43:23.760]to counter representations of abortion and birth
[00:43:27.360]control and Planned Parenthood that increasingly look like this.
[00:43:31.320]So this is from the Catholic Mirror of 1948.
[00:43:33.560]So this is, but this kind of language has been around for for a couple of decades.
[00:43:38.320]But here you have
[00:43:40.520]here you have a you know,
[00:43:42.000]it says tomorrow's children, an innocent babies is lying in a bassinet.
[00:43:46.000]And, of course, over the hand of it, you know, this dagger
[00:43:50.000]and it says birth control a dagger.
[00:43:52.080]And then it says Planned Parenthood, Federation of America.
[00:43:54.760]And so this is kind of the imagery in the rhetoric that's being put up
[00:43:58.240]by opponents of the organization and the practice of birth control.
[00:44:02.640]And he comes up with this.
[00:44:03.960]He actually comes up with a number of different things.
[00:44:06.480]And I found these in the Sophia Smith collection in Amherst,
[00:44:10.280]Massachusetts, and I almost fell over it when I came across this.
[00:44:13.880]So this is the one that particularly struck me
[00:44:15.840]because there are other ones that look very different from this one.
[00:44:18.160]But this one in particular really hit me because there's a real religiosity to it.
[00:44:23.080]And so I'm going to go to the next slide and we can look at a little bit closer.
[00:44:28.560]Because, I mean, at first it's
[00:44:30.000]got a cross and a center where it has the word creation.
[00:44:35.520]So the people are the opponents were always talking
[00:44:38.840]about Planned Parenthood and the provision of fertility control in terms of death.
[00:44:43.080]And he wants to know this is about life.
[00:44:45.440]And so it puts creation in the center bar.
[00:44:48.720]And this is this is a connection that a friend of mine
[00:44:51.040]who's a lay Catholic missionary, he pointed out to me,
[00:44:55.320]he said, God, that really looks like the medal of Saint Benedict.
[00:44:59.520]And so, you know, there's, you know, kind of at the cross, at the center of bar.
[00:45:03.920]And the fact that this is the medal instead of the medal of Saint
[00:45:07.800]Benedict is actually a really prominent symbol.
[00:45:11.560]And he was telling me that's even often associated like
[00:45:14.800]it'll be part of like the crucifix, like in the backside of a crucifix.
[00:45:19.080]And so this, you know, and this is kind of how Dickinson works.
[00:45:21.440]It goes riffing off of other people, other religions.
[00:45:24.200]So, you know, and religious imagery,
[00:45:26.200]you know, shows up in a lot of his sculptural stuff.
[00:45:28.920]And so for me, you know, maybe I'm drawing
[00:45:31.880]too big of a leap here, but I'm willing to go with that.
[00:45:35.760]But anyway. But nonetheless, it's like he's using the word creation
[00:45:38.960]that really drives home how we're trying to counter the images of disease and death
[00:45:43.520]that opponents are saying about Planned Parenthood.
[00:45:49.160]So but the tides against abortion could not be shifted, not even by Dr.
[00:45:52.560]Robert L. Dickinson.
[00:45:53.520]A historian, Leslie Regan, found by the 1940s and fifties,
[00:45:57.480]an era of renewed crackdown on abortion would emerge.
[00:46:00.560]And it's interesting because despite Dickinson's frustration
[00:46:03.400]with his medical peers
[00:46:04.680]for failing to take on the abortion cause the 1930 had actually witnessed
[00:46:08.480]during the Great Depression a loosening of medical, excuse me,
[00:46:12.360]a loosening of attitudes about this procedure, despite its illegality.
[00:46:16.080]And in fact, you know,
[00:46:17.040]when I thought about that, that that book that he had
[00:46:18.920]put out, the Control of Conception, with the whole chapter
[00:46:22.200]on abortion, with the illustrations, was part of that era's more
[00:46:25.760]tolerant attitude towards the procedure.
[00:46:28.600]But in this new era of crackdown by the 1940s, all that stuff would disappear.
[00:46:32.800]His manual gets revised, and such rights to frank discussions
[00:46:37.040]and visual depictions would no longer be tolerated in that manual.
[00:46:41.120]And for those wanting,
[00:46:42.440]providing and wanting abortions, things have become much more difficult,
[00:46:46.080]which would not change until 1973 and Roe v. Wade.
[00:46:51.280]So that's our last story.
[00:46:52.880]The past is a messy place, has little use for the battlelines we often draw
[00:46:57.360]between secular, pro-choice and religious, pro-life and today's reproductive wars.
[00:47:04.280]In short, Dickinson was a man who could create images like this.
[00:47:09.440]The baby to be tenderly loved.
[00:47:12.280]And yet it can also say things like less of the abortion
[00:47:15.400]imagery and sentiments were simply not together anymore.
[00:47:20.040]And so for me, this opens up avenues of dialog.
[00:47:24.240]I always call myself a never quite ex Catholic.
[00:47:26.280]I'm always looking for dialog.
[00:47:28.400]And so this opens up avenues of dialog because the same avenues of dialog
[00:47:32.280]I've been promoting for years, even before the Dobbs decision this summer,
[00:47:36.920]and I still stand by what I wrote in 2016.
[00:47:40.760]And this is how I ended my - the article I wrote on the Birth Series.
[00:47:45.360]And so I write: "What astonishes me most about the Birth Series story is the space
[00:47:49.760]it affords for dialog, a space borne of shared curiosity
[00:47:53.040]and interest between the most unlikely of people,
[00:47:56.160]those avidly pro-choice and those avidly pro-life.
[00:47:59.280]For those of us long caught in the crossfire, as I have been roughly
[00:48:02.880]for roughly 15 years in the class I teach in the history of sexuality
[00:48:06.560]in which abortion is a dominant theme,
[00:48:08.200]there's a moment to breathe, a heavy sigh of relief.
[00:48:10.880]It was as if the riddle from which the Birth Series was born
[00:48:13.560]denied us our ability to believe.
[00:48:15.160]We each have the only right opinion about the vexing issue of abortion.
[00:48:19.120]We are thus free to dive for one brief but beautiful moment
[00:48:23.720]into the morass together.
[00:48:26.480]And there's just something.
[00:48:27.360]I have a Birth Atlas in my office
[00:48:30.880]and anybody who comes to my office and I pull it out
[00:48:33.520]and I don't know anything, it just brings people in. And so
[00:48:38.600]it's like I said, this is this is important.
[00:48:40.960]You know, inside those beautiful boxes and the dusty bowels
[00:48:44.160]of UNL's Nebraska Hall, there's something quite magical
[00:48:47.360]which allows us to have conversations
[00:48:49.520]about the abortion question important before in the era of Roe.
[00:48:52.880]Ans important now, in the era of Dobbs.
[00:48:56.440]In closing, I want to end where we began.
[00:48:59.400]What do you see?
[00:49:00.800]What don't you see?
[00:49:02.600]What else is to come here?
[00:49:06.760]Thank you for letting me share my story.
[00:49:15.440]So let's see if we have any questions here. Okay. Okay.
[00:49:20.120]Let's wait and see if there are questions.
[00:49:36.920]Along the way if you do not see them.
[00:49:39.160]We have two issues editions of the Birth Atlas, the 1940 first edition,
[00:49:44.600]and the sixth edition of 1968, which is, I think, the last edition.
[00:49:49.040]What was the date on that one? 68, the sixth edition. Yup.
[00:49:53.480]Are there sculptures here?
[00:49:55.160]No, not in New York at all.
[00:49:58.080]Not that I know.
[00:49:58.880]So we have a question.
[00:50:02.600]We acquired the MCA records.
[00:50:05.360]They were in a warehouse in New Jersey. And you had them?
[00:50:07.880]I joked that everything, everything
[00:50:10.440]missing in the world is in a warehouse in New Jersey. Oh,
[00:50:14.400]but they. they were sculptures there.
[00:50:17.080]But we are not a museum.
[00:50:18.320]And I specifically said we would not take them.
[00:50:21.160]Now, in a few years later, they merged
[00:50:25.800]with the National Partnership for Women and Children, I believe it's called.
[00:50:29.800]And they moved to Washington.
[00:50:31.120]So everything in the warehouse, I believe, was gotten rid of what was left.
[00:50:35.720]So I don't know what happened.
[00:50:38.360]They're probably in a dump somewhere in New Jersey, which is really a shame.
[00:50:44.200]So you have a question.
[00:50:45.920]Okay. So we have a question.
[00:50:50.480]Will you touch on the midwife using the flip chart?
[00:50:53.200]I think it was Maude Callen. Yes. Thank you. Yes, yes. Thank you.
[00:50:56.600]I'm glad somebody is asking that.
[00:50:59.040]So I have some more slides here. Yeah. So,
[00:51:04.080]you know, there's a lot more that needs to be done
[00:51:07.200]in terms of research with regard to race, in the Birth Series sculptures.
[00:51:12.000]And so and I'll get to the Maude Callen image in just a moment.
[00:51:16.040]So, you know, number one, there's, you know, the connection for the inspiration
[00:51:19.200]for the first period in the larger American digital public health movement.
[00:51:23.360]But Dickinson was really fascinated
[00:51:25.960]with the German health and hygiene movement in the 1920s.
[00:51:29.120]So this is, you know, as eugenics is picking up steam and Germany
[00:51:35.120]is is very much influenced by this.
[00:51:37.400]And so need to dig more into that story.
[00:51:43.560]Number two, the Norma and Norman sculptures of 1945.
[00:51:49.480]After the Birth Series sculptures were over, were done, Dickinson and Belskie,
[00:51:54.000]they wind up doing this whole other
[00:51:57.720]set of sculptures depicting the male and female sexual anatomy.
[00:52:00.920]And they also do the none-too-subtle names, Norma and Norman,
[00:52:06.840]kind of the models of of development
[00:52:10.280]of what the average male, the average female would look like.
[00:52:13.600]And there's a lot of criticism that's already come out about this.
[00:52:16.120]Anna Creadick and Julian Carter argued both
[00:52:19.000]the Aryan look and eugenicist overtones of Norm and Norma
[00:52:22.720]were not aberration, but signs of a midcentury obsession.
[00:52:26.240]Their boldly European features, their alabaster whiteness, their youthful,
[00:52:30.200]able bodied to reveal what quote normally had been designed to include and exclude.
[00:52:34.680]So people are starting to ask these questions.
[00:52:39.080]And you know, as I'm thinking about this, just asking more questions,
[00:52:43.160]I think back to that photograph of Maude Callen and adding to it another.
[00:52:48.400]So just a little bit about Maude Callen.
[00:52:50.760]She's a nurse midwife in South Carolina and the low country for over 30 years,
[00:52:54.680]it's estimated that she delivered over 800 babies over the course of her career
[00:52:59.080]and trained over 400 women as midwives of largely African-American women.
[00:53:04.360]She's a graduate of Florida A&M University
[00:53:07.120]and member of the black sorority Alpha Gamma Chi.
[00:53:10.760]And she took her medical training at Tuskegee, Georgia Infirmary
[00:53:13.880]and the Homer Jay Phillips Hospital in Saint Louis.
[00:53:17.040]So and she's also the subject of this massive spread photo spread.
[00:53:22.280]And I think it's in Life magazine in the 1950s. And
[00:53:26.280]it's fascinating because this
[00:53:27.800]photograph, the top one that I showed earlier in the PowerPoint,
[00:53:31.960]I was delighted when I found this photograph,
[00:53:34.120]I think it was on the Childbirth Connections website.
[00:53:37.240]And I was like, oh, my gosh, just really the stuff is really ubiquitous.
[00:53:40.960]You know, it's being used even in these settings as well.
[00:53:44.200]And then I was just kind of trying to find out more about
[00:53:48.920]Maude Callen, and I came across this documentary called Angel and Twilight,
[00:53:52.920]and then watching the documentary, this is a screenshot from the documentary.
[00:53:58.080]And I saw this and I think this photograph here was also from that
[00:54:02.880]that photo spread in the 1950s.
[00:54:05.160]And I looked at it and like it made me do a double take because here
[00:54:09.240]she was giving the lesson to the nation they had been training
[00:54:13.760]and the Birth Series is nowhere to be found in this one.
[00:54:16.520]And so, like, suddenly it made me read the first image very differently.
[00:54:21.520]Like, like all of a sudden, it almost looked like they had, you know,
[00:54:25.400]they wanted a photograph of Maude Callen giving this instruction,
[00:54:30.040]but using the Birth Atlas, that was whether she wanted it there, I don't know.
[00:54:34.760]So seeing this photo here really made me think about the ways
[00:54:38.560]in which they just kind of propped it up, you know, and said, use this,
[00:54:42.040]you know, because this is important to show that you're doing it
[00:54:43.920]scientific and doing it properly and all this sort of stuff.
[00:54:46.360]And so it just really got me thinking more about how much more
[00:54:50.720]we need to unpack in terms of race, about the story in the creation
[00:54:55.320]Birth Series sculptures and also in their practice.
[00:54:58.040]And then of course, the other thing then is with
[00:55:01.400]because yes, the importance of representation
[00:55:04.880]and I don't know if any of you caught this on Twitter,
[00:55:07.400]but last fall, 2021, this just went viral.
[00:55:12.160]And this was imagery created by the Nigerian illustrator, Chidiebere Ibe.
[00:55:16.360]Right. And it's this just people were just kind of blown over,
[00:55:21.320]blown away by this imagery of a black pregnant body and a
[00:55:28.720]black baby inside a black woman's body.
[00:55:31.640]And it was just you know, it really kind of stopped people in their tracks
[00:55:36.320]and saying, okay, what kind of imagery are we putting out there?
[00:55:40.240]And it's always these white bodies.
[00:55:42.400]And so that it kind of took off
[00:55:45.520]really says a lot about what's lacking in terms of the stories.
[00:55:50.120]So I hope that answers the question.
[00:55:53.200]One question. Okay.
[00:55:56.920]So one. So not a question, just an observation.
[00:56:01.600]One of the most prominent resources for abortion referral in the 1960s
[00:56:06.200]was the Clergy Consultation Service, sort of a Catholic priest,
[00:56:10.600]an Episcopal minister, and a rabbi, just like the beginning of a joke. But
[00:56:16.680]and then there's a
[00:56:17.600]question of thank you so much for the scholarship and energies.
[00:56:21.440]How much do the medical schools
[00:56:23.000]utilize these images or were they too neat for that?
[00:56:27.280]Oh, that's a really great question.
[00:56:30.880]I have not much evidence for how much there is.
[00:56:36.360]I only have one kind of piece of evidence when they came out.
[00:56:40.680]I think it's like in 1945,
[00:56:43.640]a guy, he was talking about the medical students,
[00:56:47.200]how they were looking at the Birth Atlas a lot.
[00:56:50.640]And they would go to particular images of the kind of the delivery sequence.
[00:56:55.880]And so just that one moment
[00:56:58.840]where I have, you know, some anecdotal evidence in terms
[00:57:01.440]of how widespread they were used for medical students.
[00:57:05.560]So to answer that question, I just I need to do more research on it.
[00:57:11.360]But I think there was embedded in the question,
[00:57:13.920]something about that they were too neat. Right. Yeah.
[00:57:18.840]When Dickinson made the sculptures, he was very explicit
[00:57:22.200]about how they needed to be alabaster white.
[00:57:26.520]He wanted them to because he wanted them to reflect high art.
[00:57:30.800]He didn't like what he saw, the butcher
[00:57:32.440]shop color of other exhibits at the World's Fair.
[00:57:35.520]And he said, no, no, no, no, no.
[00:57:36.720]Especially because that was lay audiences.
[00:57:40.200]He thought, you know, he thought that medical students could actually have
[00:57:42.880]the more colorized stuff, but they don't appear like this.
[00:57:46.480]Later, versions of the Birth Series,
[00:57:48.480]which I have seen at the Countway Library in Boston, actually are colorized.
[00:57:52.640]So it's really interesting.
[00:57:54.680]Anyway, so I hope I'm giving you some insight into that question?
[00:57:58.560]I've got one too. Oh.
[00:58:01.080]What were the sculptures made of, the originals?
[00:58:04.960]Is it terracotta?
[00:58:06.320]I'm not entirely sure, but they were they have a mold
[00:58:11.560]and then they just mass produce them. I see. Yeah.
[00:58:16.440]So we've not got a lot more time before we zoomed out, but.
[00:58:21.000]So two questions.
[00:58:23.120]What a wonderful presentation.
[00:58:24.440]Thank you. I'm wondering about the relation between medical knowledge
[00:58:28.400]as part of the efforts to enforce the authority of allopathic medicine
[00:58:33.280]and especially shift childbirth to a medical event,
[00:58:36.320]thinking of the rise of hospitals and the events to quash midwifery. Mm.
[00:58:40.720]And then take that one.
[00:58:42.640]Yeah. In fact, when they were doing the planning in 1937 for this exhibit,
[00:58:47.280]there were two questions that came up all the time.
[00:58:49.760]Number one, whether they discussed birth control.
[00:58:53.440]They squashed that one.
[00:58:54.600]And the other one was whether or not they would present nurse midwives
[00:58:58.160]as appropriate medical practitioners to go to.
[00:59:01.880]And that was classed as well.
[00:59:03.560]So that was all part of, you know, the doctors in charge sort of story.
[00:59:07.520]Which is interesting because MCA started the first midwifery school
[00:59:11.680]in the United States a few years before that.
[00:59:14.120]They lost their entire medical ward actually over but one, I think.
[00:59:19.440]Second question, do you find that you can use a birth atlas to open dialog
[00:59:23.600]without invoking this extraordinary history? Oh, yes.
[00:59:30.720]When I pull it out and put it on my desk,
[00:59:32.920]it's like people say, Oh, let me just show you the Birth Series.
[00:59:34.800]And they're like, you know, open it up.
[00:59:35.920]And like, they're kind of like, maybe not interested.
[00:59:37.760]And all of a sudden they'll just, like, stop dead in their tracks.
[00:59:40.480]And you can just it just like, draws them in and we just start.
[00:59:44.080]Talking about it.
[00:59:46.600]It's really quite phenomenal.
[00:59:48.560]And I've had people, with people who are pro-life
[00:59:50.200]and people who are pro-choice, and it just kind of they just start get drawn in.
[00:59:54.240]This is probably the last question was the work of Dr.
[00:59:56.880]Dickinson superseded by the development and widespread use of 3D ultrasonography?
[01:00:02.800]Was that a positive occurrence?
[01:00:05.560]I don't know anything about 3D sonography,
[01:00:07.920]so I'm going to have to pass on that question. Okay.
[01:00:12.960]I don't get we're running out of time, unfortunately. I'm
[01:00:16.520]so pleased that Professor.
[01:00:21.880]Well. I'm sorry.
[01:00:22.920]We are running out of time.
[01:00:25.960]So if you did not see the Birth Atlas down there
[01:00:30.040]and then we have a reception and another room so we can all go out
[01:00:34.000]and have something to eat and drink, which I'm sure you'll want. Okay.
[01:00:38.080]Thank you all for coming.
[01:00:39.080]I really appreciate that. Thank you.

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Dickinson-Belskie Birth Series Sculptures Presentation

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