“Never again will anyone look down on these women,” Browder told the Post. The names of Black women are welded to the statues.īrowder sculpted the figures from recycled metal objects because “these women were discarded,” she told the Washington Post’s Linda Matchan after unveiling the statues last year. Another wears a tiara created out of a speculum-a device Sims invented for vaginal exams. Medical scissors are attached to one woman. Her womb sits nearby, full of cut glass, needles, medical instruments, scissors and sharp objects intended to help viewers feel the women’s pain and suffering. Anarcha’s abdomen is empty, except for a single red rose where her uterus would be. The statues incorporate meaningful-and painful-symbolism. Marion Sims, “ the father of gynecology” who experimented on the women, still stands in front of the Alabama State Capitol.Ĭreated by artist Michelle Browder from scrap metal, the monument includes three larger-than-life statues depicting Anarcha (15 feet tall), Betsey (12 feet tall) and Lucy (nine feet tall). Now, a monument honoring the Mothers of Gynecology stands in Montgomery, not far from where the procedures took place and roughly a mile from where a statue of J. For five years in the late 1840s, Anarcha, Betsey, Lucy and other unnamed enslaved women suffered at the hands of a white doctor who performed painful surgeries on the women without anesthesia, pain relief or consent.
