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Friend,
On pedestals a mile apart in Montgomery, Alabama, two sculptures rise into the air. The first, about 8 feet tall, is a traditional bronze statue of the so-called “father of modern gynecology,” a physician named J. Marion Sims who in the 1840s performed experimental surgeries on enslaved women with neither consent nor anesthesia in the name of medical progress.
The second just went up in September. Almost twice as high as the Sims statue – and that is no coincidence – it uses steel, shards of glass and discarded metal objects to depict, in searing, intimate and bold detail, Anarcha, Lucy and Betsey, three of the women whose bodies were mutilated by Sims. Its title, “The Mothers of Gynecology,” stands as rebuke and reckoning.
The two sculptures are just a short walk from each other. But they represent an understanding of history that could not lie at any further remove. And while the Sims statue, erected in 1939, stands on public ground at the Alabama State House, the Mothers of Gynecology monument is the concept and creation of one bold Black woman who cobbled together the money for it out of her own savings and private donations.
The Southern Poverty Law Center recently granted $50,000 to Michelle Browder, the artist who created the monument and who has ambitious plans to construct around it a center for education, art and discussion about Black women leaders, women’s health and a broad array of issues surrounding civil rights, activism and social justice.
The grant was one of five awarded by the SPLC to support the work of museums, monuments and cultural centers devoted to Black history. In addition to Browder’s project, the recipients are the Zora Neale Hurston National Museum of Fine Arts in Eatonville, Florida; the Thiokol Memorial Project in Woodbine, Georgia; the Fannie Lou Hamer Civil Rights Museum in Belzoni, Mississippi; and the Cecil Williams South Carolina Civil Rights Museum in Orangeburg, South Carolina.
The SPLC has also commissioned artwork for billboards honoring each museum. The billboards will be displayed along highways near each museum throughout February in celebration of Black History Month.
“If there’s a father of gynecology, there must be a mother,” Browder said. “This is our legacy, in all its pain and all its strength. Why aren’t we talking about the mothers and what Black women have contributed to this country for the past 400 years?”
The grant will help Browder get people talking.
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In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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