"The War on Postpartum Psychoses:
Elizabeth B. Davis, Family Planning, and Racial Uplift in Black Harlem, 1960 – 1970"
In this talk, Dr. Okwandu focuses on Black psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Elizabeth Bishop Davis and her efforts at Harlem Hospital Center (HHC) to reduce the incidence of postpartum psychoses and unwanted pregnancies among Black female Harlemites. With medical and political discourses increasingly articulating a link between postpartum psychoses, poverty, and disorderly Black families, Davis advocated for voluntary sterilization and family planning to “uplift” the local Black Harlem community. While she envisioned her initiative as liberatory, Dr. Okwandu argues that it inherently positioned poor Black women’s psyches as deficient and was fundamentally guided by the contention that transforming the Black family and, by extension, the Black community, required embodying white, middle-class visions of familial life. In doing so, Dr. Okwandu not only situates Dr. Davis' efforts within a longer tradition of Black physicians' civil rights activism but also exposes the contradictions inherent in and the limitations of the politics of racial uplift.
Dr. Udodiri R. Okwandu (she/her) is a Presidential Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. As a historian of science and medicine, Dr. Okwandu's scholarship and teaching analyze how sociocultural and scientific constructions of race and gender have shaped medical knowledge and practice in the United States. Focusing on the late nineteenth century to the present, her work highlights the history and legacies of reproductive and psychiatric health injustices and their implications for Black communities – especially Black women. She earned her PhD and MA in the History of Science at Harvard University, where she was a Presidential Scholar.