Medical Bondage by Deirdre Cooper Owens;

Author:Deirdre Cooper Owens;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)
Published: 2017-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 3.1. Daguerreotype of Drana, a South Carolina slave, by J. T. Zealy, commissioned by Louis Agassiz, 1850. Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Photographic Archives Collection, Harvard University.

CHAPTER FOUR

IRISH IMMIGRANT WOMEN AND AMERICAN GYNECOLOGY

Oh brave, brave Irish girls,

We well might call you brave

Should the least of all your perils

The Stormy ocean waves.

—James Connally, Labour in Ireland

Accordingly it is found, that the patients generally are irregular

and careless in their attendance, and pay but little attention

to direction. The greater part are extremely ignorant.

—William Buell, writing on the behavior of his poor Irish immigrant patients

THE GYNECOLOGICAL EXPERIENCES OF IRISH IMMIGRANT WOMEN IN America began following the transatlantic voyages they took after they fled Ireland because of a potato famine that left them and their nation hungry and desperate. Their sexual exploitation, however, began before these ships reached their destination. Like African women who were forced to board slave ships for the Americas three centuries earlier, nineteenth-century Irish immigrant women also suffered sexual abuses on “coffin ships,” so named because of the number of people who died during oceanic voyages to America. The thousands of Irish women headed to the United States were young, alone, and unprotected as they traveled aboard these vessels. For those women who were sexually abused, the boats represented floating prisons where they were unable to escape the sexual violence inflicted on them. The notes and published writings of ship captains, newspaper reporters, and others who chronicled the Irish immigrant seaboard experience described the collective sufferings that both male and female immigrants endured. While they did not emphasize sexual assaults, they compared the atrocities the Irish experienced with those that West African captives had undergone on slave ships. A March 10, 1847, article published in the Cork Examiner detailed conditions aboard the Medemseh, a ship carrying Irish passengers to New York City. The author wrote, “It reflects disgrace upon the regulations of the Government that creatures in this condition should be suffered to proceed to sea, with no other dependence against a long and enfeebling voyage than the kindness of persons whose treatment of their passengers, on an average, is hardly less brutal than that experienced from the masters of slave-ships.”1

More broadly, maritime travel was intimately connected to medicine because of the physical examinations passengers underwent when they arrived in the United States. When the ships reached their destinations, doctors examined the surviving passengers’ bodies for deformities, diseases, and perceived abnormalities. Before the 1880s, few governmental and social agencies devoted considerable resources to assessing who met the criteria for “unfit immigrants.” In addition, women with gynecological disorders might have been able to escape examination because their illnesses were sometimes internal rather than external. Further, the journal articles that doctors wrote about Irish immigrant women, which detailed their medical practices and thoughts, helped to create the foundation for racist laws that colored the Irish as not quite white and sometimes placed them alongside black people as biological models for racial inferiority.2 As such, immigration became enmeshed in

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