Lydia Reeder

Well-written and properly researched, oftentimes drawing upon the words of the players themselves, Dust Bowl Girls grabbed my interest from the first page. Prior to reading this book, my Dust Bowl images were all in black and white, as if the times were so hard they removed the very color from the world. Basketball did not figure in my images of the Great Depression at all, all, much less female college students playing basketball! This book brought color and life to my knowledge of this show more time in American history.

Not only did I learn a lot, it was a surprisingly cheerful read. The photographs were great; I loved seeing what the players looked like as I got to know them. As the suspense builds toward the championship game, the author took me on little side trips that really helped me see both the game of basketball and these young women in the right context for their times. This would make a fantastic movie, educational and entertaining.

Some friends and I were discussing world history recently, a conversation that at a certain point led right to a discussion of this book and the courage and strength of Sam Babb and his women’s basketball team. We talked about how events weave themselves together, one thing leading to another, and because of them the world changes. These events eventually become history. History in turn, itself shapes change and growth. I wonder whether the young women who played basketball for OPC during the Great Depression knew that their actions, courage, and perseverance would still be making a positive impact today. Lydia Reeder did a great job bringing this story to light. I look forward to reading more by her. show less

By the end of the Victorian age, men had dominated medical practice for centuries, but women were beginning to make inroads into the profession. A few, Mary Putnam Jacobi being the first, made inroads in European training centers and returned to the US to integrate women into American medicine. In this book, Lydia Reeder narrates their struggle and eventual victory that depathologized being a woman. By pursuing their personal questions, these women physician-scientists brought obstetrics and show more gynecology towards a more scientific basis.

Mary Putnam Jacobi was the first female graduate of the Sorbonne medical school in Paris and had a world-class intellect that impressed the greatest of her era, including William Osler. The first female winner of Harvard's Boylston Prize, she demythologized menstruation and showed it should not be an obstacle to women's accomplishments. Throughout her barrier-breaking career, she became rich, famous, and influential.

Besides the nobility of Putnam Jacobi's character, this book is worth reading just to laugh at the masculine misunderstandings of femininity. So much prejudiced dominated the Victorian era, and those false understandings, though less muted, can still influence contemporary discourse - like the idea that women only need to rest during menstruation or that women are more innately prone to worse mental health.

I love reading about how paradigms shift in science and medicine, and Putnam Jacobi and her contemporaries certainly enacted that shift in women's health. Their impact eventually spanned into the political arena and women's suffrage. They faced setbacks and struggles, but persevered to overcome false opposition. It's funny how truth stands the test of time and further investigation better than quackery, no? I appreciate the author's educating me about this story of how women bettered their own lot by challenging hubris and tradition with deep science. show less

Through exhaustive research, Lydia Reeder's The Cure for Women shows how gifted women like Mary Putnam Jacobi fought back. Her arsenal of weapons included things that the male physicians' did not: the first-ever data-backed, scientific research on women's reproductive biology. Jacobi fought back with the facts, and the medical profession has never been the same.

I learned so much from reading The Cure for Women, unfortunately, a great deal of it with my teeth clenched. Men writing "learned" show more treatises on women's reproductive organs when they wouldn't know an ovary or a uterus if one came up and punched them in the nose. Why? Because they'd never seen any of these organs and had no idea how they worked. You would think that we would have all the misinformation squared away here in the twenty-first century, but we don't. The fight for control over women's bodies is still happening, proving that we need more people like Mary Putnam Jacobi-- and more people to read this marvelously researched book.

(Review copy courtesy of the publisher and Net Galley) show less

The Cure for Women by Lydia Reeder is a well-researched account of the fight for, and barriers against, women doctors in the US in the Victorian era. The story focuses mainly on the life and accomplishments of Dr Mary Putnam Jacobi, one of the first women to become an accredited MD in US by studying in Europe. The book outlines the often shoddy and frequently downright dangerous treatment of women by male doctors who fought against women becoming doctors, arguing that their supposed show more emotional personalities made them unsuitable to the rigours of the profession. However, Putnam, through logical, fact-based and well-documented treatises, was able to refute these unfounded prejudices as well as showing the fallacies behind the accepted gynaecological as well as psychological treatment of women and she quickly became an important leader in the feminist movement.

This is a well-written, fascinating, and damn near unputdownable history of the fight for women doctors as well as some of the horrifying treatment of women patients by male doctors during the Victorian Age. But perhaps, at least for me, was the similarities of many attitudes between then and now including a push to end abortions, which were legal at the time, by the fledgling AMA supposedly on ‘scientific’ ie the rise of Eugenics rather than religious grounds but with many of the same arguments recently used to end Roe v Wade.

For anyone interested in the history of medicine and women in the 19th c., how far we've come and how much we have to lose, this is an excellent read. I read an e-arc of this book from St Martin’s Press while listening to the audiobook from Dreamscape Media narrated by Sara Sheckells who does an excellent job.

Thanks to Netgalley, St. Martin’s Press, and Dreamscape Media. All opinions are my own. show less