In the late 1840s, Anarcha, Betsey, Lucy, and at least nine other unnamed Black women enslaved in Alabama were subjected to multiple experimental surgeries — without anesthesia and in front of an audience — by a White physician named J. Marion Sims. Historically credited as the “Father of Modern Gynecology,” Sims’s legacy has undergone a cultural reckoning in the last several years that has led to the dismantling of public monuments honoring his racial violence guised as medical contributions. It has also ushered in the long-overdue visibility of Sims’s victims and uplifting of Anarcha, Betsey and Lucy in artist Michelle Browder’s 2021 mixed metal sculpture, “The Mothers of Gynecology.”
This month, these women were honored at London’s Vagina Museum. In correspondence with the United Kingdom’s observance of Black History Month, the institution has renamed its galleries after Anarcha, Betsey and Lucy, unveiling the permanent signage in an inauguration ceremony that centered on reflection, reckoning, and community healing last Wednesday.
“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 color in gynecological care,” the museum posted earlier this month on Instagram.
Established in 2017, the Vagina Museum is a brick-and-mortar institution housed in Camden dedicated to the female reproductive system. Its programming, which includes permanent and rotating exhibitions and touring pop-up shows, is aimed at dispelling bodily shame and celebrating gynecological anatomy. The museum is currently fundraising for the upcoming exhibition Menopause: What’s Changed, which is slated to open in February and will explore the natural body changes that typically follow a person’s last menstruation cycle.
In Betsey’s gallery, the museum has on view the permanent show From A to V — an installation focusing on destigmatizing gynecological anatomy, health, vulva diversity, and activism through visuals and open-discussion. On view until February in Lucy’s gallery, the parody exhibition Museum of Mankind delves into the historical misogyny and oppression of cultural heritage institutions through the fictional character Guy Manson, who stumbles upon a series of ancient objects while gardening in the year 4024. And in Anarcha’s Gallery, the installation “Know Your Body Like Nobody Else: Cervical Screening Redesigned” by Ella Clancy confronts the awkwardness of routine cervical screening exams, commonly known as pap smears. It will remain on view until December.
“This can only ever be the beginning,” the museum further stated in another post. “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.”
