Dust Bowl Girls, was a Junior Library Guild Selection, a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award and the WILLA literary Award, and won the For the Love of the Game award from the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame. A regional bestseller in Oklahoma and Colorado, it was named as a 2017 top nonfiction book by Amazon, Bustle, Romper, and Bookbub, and optioned for film five times. A native of Oklahoma, Reeder now lives in Denver, CO.
She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Cure for Women: Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Challenge to Victorian Medicine That Changed Women's Lives Forever, and reported the following:
Page 99 of my book reveals the duplicitous behavior of surgeon Horatio Storer, MD toward Dr. Marie Zakrzewska and her women-run hospital, the New England Hospital for Women and Children. In 1863, Zakrzewska hired Storer, whose father was dean of the faculty of medicine at Harvard Medical School, as the attending surgeon at her hospital. It was a decision she came to regret. When the hospital’s board of directors put a stop to the dangerous experimental surgeries Storer had been performing, he resigned in a scornful letter that he also published in a popular medical journal. Page 99 discusses that letter:Visit Lydia Reeder's website.Storer then bluntly revealed that he had been lying to them for years, and his tenure with the hospital had all been a deception. The entire time, he claimed, he had been performing an important experiment by “testing the ability of women to become fitted to practice as general physicians.” Overall, his conclusion was dire. 'It is sufficient for me to say,' he wrote, that because of their reproductive biology, 'women can never, as a class, become so competent, safe and reliable medical practitioners as men, no matter what their zeal or opportunities for pupilage." ...A woman's nature, far from being an asset, was an insurmountable liability." … Storer’s argument proved to be very persuasive, and its effects were far reaching. As a leading physician and one who had recently been elected vice president of the AMA, he had supposedly risked his entire reputation to conduct hazardous research in enemy territory.The Page 99 Test works well to highlight the extent to which reputable male physicians resorted to personal opinion, threats, and innuendo to stop women from becoming doctors. It also depicts the growing claim by noted physicians that women were, by nature, biologically unfit for anything other than motherhood. The Cure for Women reveals the nineteenth century origin of this pseudoscience that connects all of women’s ills to her uterus.
Unfortunately, while page 99 highlights a significant theme, it does not mention the most important person in my book: Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, who led the fight against this attempt to control women’s bodies and lives. She is absent from page 99 and from that entire chapter, which features one of her mentors, Dr. Zakrzewska. Jacobi’s research upended the false claims by doctors like Storer and led to the beginning of a paradigm change for women: that they have a right to be educated and choose their own destinies.
My Book, The Movie: Dust Bowl Girls.
--Marshal Zeringue
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