This panel delves into the multifaceted landscape of reproductive healthcare amongst poor and racially marginalized women in the first half of the twentieth century United States. With the emergence of eugenics and colonialist public health projects, as well as the rise of institutionalized health care, female reproduction became a contested site as different entities sought to control both women and their families by shaping if, when, and how they gave birth and received medical attention. Yet access to advances in medicine also gave women the option to assert more control over their own reproduction, as they navigated a complex medical marketplace that continued to include traditional healing practices and beliefs as well as the scientific medicine provided by hospitals and government health programs. This panel will illuminate the social, economic, and infrastructural factors that contribute to these multifaceted and even oxymoronic qualities of public health and medical care in the twentieth century. The papers explore the tensions and negotiations between folk healing practices and institutionalized medicine and investigate how systemic biases and discrimination perpetuate disparities in healthcare delivery and outcomes, while also showing how access to new types of care presented opportunities for women to assert control over their own medical care.

This complex interplay between control and liberation is illustrated through four case studies spanning the breadth of the United States. The West is represented by two papers focusing on the complex experiences of Latinx women in places being transformed by American capital and the socio-political consequences of annexation. Gianna May Sanchez examines a clinic providing contraceptives and academically trained midwives to Latinx women as an extension of an international birth control effort, underscoring the continued perceived ‘foreignness’ of the West as well as showing how the lives of women in New Mexico were impacted by the introduction of new methods and standards of healthcare. Sarah-Louise Dawtry will examine the experience of Latinx women in Western and Northern Mexican hospitals and educational sanitation programs, showing how women used these options to increase their own independence. On the Eastern side, Pietra Diwan looks at how the rural poor were both exploited by eugenical birth control efforts and also able to use them to assert independence and control over their own reproduction. Finally, Jeanna Kinnebrew examines how elite women in Salem, Massachusetts created a birth control clinic designed to empower all women with reproductive choice, only to become the center of a legal controversy after being raided by police. Together, these papers show a complex narrative of restriction and empowerment, and how women have found strategies for their own narratives in the face of reproductive control, a critical conversation for historians and activists alike in light of the recent repeal of reproductive protections and the ongoing crisis of racial healthcare disparities.