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117 Taking Care of Bodies, Babies, and Business Black Women Health Professionals in South Carolina, 1895–1954 —darlene clark hine Anne Firor Scott enjoined my generation of students and scholars to make women and their activism for social reform visible, to relocate their experiences and contributions from the intellectual, cultural, and political margins to the core of American and southern history. She, in her own body of work, made centering and seeing critical processes essential to truth telling and the reconstruction of our nation’s past.1 Without her scholarship and friendship, and her enormous mentoring of countless women scholars , myself included, women’s history would not today stand as a legitimate and respected field of inquiry. Her gifts and our debts are beyond measure. I published my first essay in black women’s history, “Female Slave Resistance and the Economics of Sex,” in 1979.2 I theorized about enslaved women’s strategies to thwart their owners’ economic profiting from the exploitation of their reproductive labor. I suggested that black women’s biological resistance to slavery, that is, the assumption of control over reproduction, was manifested in the practices of sexual abstinence, abortion , and infanticide. In a follow-up theoretical piece, I historicized how rape and the threat of rape informed the development and practice of the art of dissemblance, that is, the cultivation of psychic space within which black women in slavery and freedom shielded or masked their innermost selves and were thus able to craft identities, at once positive and empowering , in opposition to widely accepted dehumanizing stereotypes of their morality.3 The historian Deborah Gray White concedes that dissemblance “was a good strategy,” one that was deployed to great effect by leaders of women’s clubs in the early twentieth century. Accordingly, they allowed darlene clark hine 118 “their public identities to stand in for the private.”4 These theoretical and conceptual ruminations inspired and informed my monographic study of black women’s social activism, community building, and emergence as professional nurses in the first half of the twentieth century. In Black Women in White: Racial Conflict and Cooperation in the Nursing Profession , 1890–1954,5 I focused on the struggles of nurse leaders to break down the barriers of segregation, discrimination, and exclusion that characterized black professional life during the era of Jim Crow.6 The historian Stephanie Shaw astutely observed, “Professional women worked both to repair and to prevent the damage that frequently resulted from systematic discrimination, and thus their work reflected, if it was not defined by, the neglect of existing public institutions.”7 Returning full circle, I now engage a different set of questions concerning black women professionals who devoted their private lives and public works not to the destruction of fetuses or the prevention of birth but to building programs and institutions that would facilitate black survival by keeping black babies and their mothers alive and healthy “on the black side of town,” where, as the sociologist Aldon Morris observed, “life expectancy was lower because of poor sanitary conditions and too little income to pay for essential medical services.”8 I focus on one central question: what were some of the political implications and incremental consequences of the work of black medical and nursing professionals who provided health care to impoverished black residents in segregated southern communities ?9 Or framed another way, how did a small core group of black women health-care personnel transform health care from being a private affair or privilege into a civic right and a government responsibility? How did their early local struggles to heal black bodies and save black babies prepare and inspire the subsequent activist generation that would lead and serve as foot soldiers in the modern civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s?10 Before introducing the four representative black women health-care activists and reformers—nurse Anna De Costa Banks (1869–1930), physician Lucy Hughes Brown (1863–1911), physician Matilda A. Evans (1872– 1935), and nurse-midwife Maude Callen (1898–1990)—who, throughout the first half of the twentieth century, took care of business, bodies, and babies, it is important to underscore the dehumanization and disfranchisement of African Americans that prevailed after the collapse of Reconstruction . The fear of black and white bodies sharing intimate relations became one of myriad forces that propelled white disfranchisement of black men. Miscegenation erupted as a divisive issue during South Carolina’s 1895 [18.189.178.37] Project MUSE...

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