America@250: Honoring the “Mothers of Gynecology”
After learning about the “father of gynecology” J. Marion Sims’ place in history, visionary artist Michelle Browder is on a mission to make sure the enslaved women he experimented on without anesthesia or consent are honored as well.
Inspiration for The Mothers of Gynecology Sculpture
During a 2022 Smarthistory interview Michelle Browder told art historian Dr. Beth Harris “in the state of Alabama and Montgomery in particular, there is a statue of J. Marion Sims that sits at our state’s Capitol. The Capitol was built by enslaved African people and their descendants. And there’s no recognition, posts and/or iconography to talk about those people that were enslaved and that he experimented on. In many medical circles, Sims is known as the “father of gynecology,” I would often drive by that statue that sits at our state’s Capitol. This man did nothing in terms of legislation, but in 1939 the MASA, Medical Association for the State of Alabama, deemed him worthy to erect a monument in his image and name. And I thought, “Well, where are the mothers? If he’s a father, there must be a mother somewhere.” And so from there, the research continued with the goal to make sure we tell their stories, to honor three women whose sacrifice has been lost to history: Anarcha, Betsey and Lucy.
The Mothers of Gynecology recognizes three enslaved teenagers —Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey and the many other unnamed victims who endured torturous experiments from 1845 to 1848. Through their suffering, these girls played a significant role in the development of gynecological instruments in treating disease, yet they have never been acknowledged. They changed the world only to be forgotten by it.
Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey were enslaved girls from plantations in and around Montgomery, Alabama. With neither consent nor anesthesia, they were experimented upon by Dr. J. Marion Sims in the 1840s. After publishing the results of his “success,” Sims moved to New York to seek fame and fortune. Within a decade, he became known as the Father of Gynecology.
Sims built a hospital referred to as a “surgical infirmary for Negroes,” for enslaved women whose owners brought them for treatment. At that facility in Montgomery, Sims developed and performed dozens of experimental surgeries on enslaved women, without their consent and without anesthesia, to repair and reconstruct their organs. He had no training because there was no training at that time, and no discipline. He even purchased one enslaved woman from her owner, specifically with the intention of performing experimental surgeries on her. And while many of the names of these women are lost, three of the women he named in his journal are known: Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy.
In the Smarthistory interview Michelle told Beth Harris, “we talk about the women, but Anarcha, Betsey and Lucy were girls ages 17, 16, 18 who were sexually trafficked. They were raped. One of their main duties was to breed.
Michelle: In 1808, the transatlantic slave trade is outlawed. So, in the United States, if you’re no longer bringing Africans over to be enslaved, how do you replenish your stock? You make these women have children.
We know specifically about Anarcha, Betsey and Lucy because these are girls that J. Marion Sims wrote about in his memoir, Story of My Life. He described them as subjects in need of repair because they weren’t able to perform their duties for breeding more enslaved people due to multiple and difficult childbirths that resulted in vesicovaginal fistulas.
Beth: Anarcha was the first patient suffering from fistula to be brought to Sims. The other 10 or so women that he experimented on were also enslaved women, who he purchased or rented, a population who had absolutely no choice in the matter. This is before the development of anesthesia, so these women were operated on – cut and sutured – all without anesthesia. And it was something that white male doctors felt entirely privileged and had a right to do to Black women’s bodies and not something that they felt they had a right to do to white women’s bodies.
Michelle: Right, because there was the notion out there that Black women had a high tolerance for pain or that they didn’t feel pain at all, or that Black people had thicker skin; this lie was told. So, these doctors were able to do whatever they wanted.
◊ ◊ ◊
Monument Details
Beth: So, let’s look closely at the three figures. Each figure is individualized.
Michelle: We did that because each one of them had their own identity. On the back of Betsey, (right) you could see the scarification and the bodies of men (upper right on her shoulders).
Around Anarcha’s legs are bodies of people (left).
Also, around Lucy’s waist (right) there are bodies. That represents the slave ship. And if you notice, their backs are straight. There’s a posture, a beauty about each one of them. There’s a serving platter that adorns Lucy’s chest with the adinkra symbol. I wanted all of them to have an adinkra symbol to honor African ancestry and language.
I wanted to make sure that these girls and this monument showed the type of trauma they went through. They’re made of discarded metal. There are bicycle chains, scissors, gynecological tools, the Sims retractor, the speculum, the knees are scuffed up for the Sims position. There’s perforated metal with the holes in it that represents the poking and the prodding.
Beth: Anarcha in the front raises her head, arches her neck, and looks up.
Michelle: Because if you can imagine being in a horrific situation like this, you’ve got to have some kind of faith that one day it ends. So, she’s in a constant state of prayer.
On Lucy (right) you can notice the designs on her back that represent the whippings, the beatings.
Beth: I also see chains and other materials that remind me of torture.
Michelle: Her hair is made of bicycle chains.
Beth: They have these porous surfaces that suggest the penetrating tools and gaze of the white men who operated on them. And then there’s a fourth part on the pedestal, the same shape as the space in the body of Anarcha.
Michelle: The hole.
Beth:. And so we have a displaced womb that’s been removed from Anarcha.
Michelle: That womb was done by Deborah Shedrick, Black woman artist here in Montgomery. She wanted to show the trauma to the womb.
Beth: I noticed inside the womb, specula, scissors, chains.
Michelle: Which represents the bondage, not able to be free.
Beth: They’re cut off at the arms and legs.
Michelle: They didn’t have the capacity to help their situation. Sure, they could’ve killed themselves, but they chose to continue to live. And now because of their lives and the procedures they endured, other lives are now being saved.
Beth: Today, these procedures help cure thousands of women. One of the things I notice is how embellished the figures are. I recognize tools like wrenches or scissors, but also beautiful decorative forms such as flowers and butterflies that I associate with femininity.
Michelle: Everything that you see in the sculptures were discarded items, but they still add value. I think it speaks to the situation in which Anarcha, Betsey and Lucy they found themselves. They were stripped of humanity, their identity. So the thought was to give them some identity: Bantu knots, the braids, the cornrows.
Beth: And Betsy is also inscribed with names of important women.
Michelle: You have women like Big Momma Thornton. You have Augusta Savage, Fannie Lou Hamer, Tamika Mallory and Barbara Ross Lee. You have Eartha Kitt, you have Harriet Jacobs. Each one of these names are either enslaved women or women who have struggled through the civil rights movement or women who are making progress today.
Beth: What we’ve done over the last hundred years, or more is make monuments to white men that are very fraught. Leaving these women out, it’s tragic.
Michelle: But monuments must change and they are changing. It’s taken a creative approach to do it, but I think now the season is ripe and ready to change the narrative using art.
Beth: So even if the old monuments, and there is one right nearby to Mr. Sims, don’t come down, we still have your monuments.
Michelle: Absolutely. That’s what we’re hoping that people will get from this – the history behind it. And that’s not what you’re going to get from these other statues around the city. You’re not going to get the real education as to what happened.
◊ ◊ ◊
◊ ◊ ◊
October 8, 2025, Mother Jones article excerpt: One Woman’s Quest to Reclaim the Ugly History of Black Maternal Health
Sims achieved his surgical breakthroughs by experimenting on Black girls and women from plantations around Montgomery, including three teenagers named Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy. As female slaves, one of their primary jobs was breeding – “replenishing the stock of chattel,” Browder puts it. Sims believed he could repair their childbirth injuries—holes in their vaginas, bladders, and rectums that had left them incontinent—so they could resume their labors. “He would use wire and silk suture,” Browder shudders. But no anesthesia, even though opium was readily available. And, because his patients were enslaved, no meaningful consent. “This,” Browder says, “was torture.”
It’s an origin story the American medical establishment has spent almost 180 years trying to reconcile, whitewash, or ignore. Sims’s innovations may have revolutionized the reproductive care of women around the world, helping to save and improve countless lives, but his denial of his enslaved patients’ suffering and autonomy helped shape a broader medical culture that has contributed to vast inequities in Black maternal and infant health.
◊ ◊ ◊
“In Montgomery, Alabama, one mile from the State Capitol and a block from Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice, Michelle Browder’s The Mothers of Gynecology monument stands as a new beacon of truth telling and historical acknowledgement. Dedicated in September 2021, the 15-foot-tall metal ensemble sculpture honors three Black women—Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy—who were enslaved and brutally experimented upon without consent by Dr. J. Marion Sims, dubbed the ‘father of gynecology’ despite his horrific and inhumane practices. In New York City (where Sims is buried), following a grassroots campaign from groups including Black Youth Project 100, a statue to Sims was removed by the city in 2018. However, in Montgomery, the city where Sims conducted his heinous experiments, a statue remains on the grounds of the state capitol and is prohibited to be altered under state law designed to protect Lost Cause Confederate monuments.
“Artist Browder first learned about Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy as a student at the Art Institute of Atlanta over two decades ago. As she recalled to the Washington Post, she has long pondered: ‘What am I going to do to change the narrative?’ Browder, who also founded and operates More Than Tours through a fire-engine-red trolley with ‘1619’ emblazoned on one side of the front hood, has shifted the practice of storytelling in a city that that claims status as both the ‘Cradle of the Confederacy’ and ‘Birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement.’ Over the last several years, in consultation with metal artists including several who produce projects for Burning Man, Browder took up welding and installed a fabrication lab in the back of a massive family-owned warehouse that also became her studio. There, she fashioned The Mothers of Gynecology monument with collected common metal objects including discarded medical tools and surgical implements. The resulting sculptures are intricate and layered, as they mark presence and absence in place.
“Since its dedication in September 2021, Browder’s The Mothers of Gynecology has emerged as another meaningful site of reckoning and reimagining monuments in Montgomery and beyond.
—Paul Farber for Artsynet, The Best Public Art of 2021
◊ ◊ ◊
