WEBVTT 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.860 Good afternoon, everybody. I'd like to welcome you to this afternoon's session in the Festival of Ideas. 2 00:00:07.020 --> 00:00:11.180 My name's Ian Gibbons. I'm from Flinders University. I'm just getting this session started. 3 00:00:11.720 --> 00:00:21.620 And it's with immense pleasure, I have to say, that today we're introducing Professor Londa Schiebinger 4 00:00:21.620 --> 00:00:27.420 to hear her talk about some of her amazing work that she's been doing over recent years. 5 00:00:28.120 --> 00:00:33.460 Londa Schiebinger is currently the John L. Hines Professor of History of Science at Stanford, 6 00:00:34.120 --> 00:00:38.140 and she's a Barbara D. Feinberg Director of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research. 7 00:00:39.880 --> 00:00:46.660 For over 20 years now, she's been a leading authority on the interaction between gender and science. 8 00:00:47.640 --> 00:00:54.160 And I'm a scientist, and the work that she's been doing over this time, 9 00:00:54.300 --> 00:00:57.320 I have to say, and I'm pleased to admit, has completely changed. 10 00:00:57.420 --> 00:01:02.740 The way I, as a professional scientist, look at the way that we interact with each other in the profession 11 00:01:02.740 --> 00:01:09.160 and the rest of the world, and the way in which knowledge is structured by the social environment within which we work. 12 00:01:09.640 --> 00:01:13.380 I'm sure I'm not the only one who's responded that way to her work. 13 00:01:13.980 --> 00:01:21.300 She's been the recipient of numerous prizes and awards, including the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Research Prize 14 00:01:21.300 --> 00:01:23.620 and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. 15 00:01:23.920 --> 00:01:27.120 She's worked internationally in various other places around the world, 16 00:01:27.420 --> 00:01:32.480 especially in Germany, and you can read a list of that in the little handout you've got. 17 00:01:33.340 --> 00:01:43.720 But she's probably best known for a series of books which have, in an incredibly accessible style, 18 00:01:43.860 --> 00:01:48.720 I think what makes the work so good is that it's challenging, it's authoritative, 19 00:01:48.900 --> 00:01:51.180 but it's also fun and entertaining to read. 20 00:01:51.560 --> 00:01:55.900 And including the one which changed my life, if you like, 21 00:01:58.020 --> 00:02:02.380 called The Mind Has No Sex, Women's in the Origin of Modern Science. 22 00:02:02.860 --> 00:02:06.740 And then other ones which relate a bit more closely to my own area, I suppose, 23 00:02:10.160 --> 00:02:14.360 books to do with feminism in the body, gendered innovations in science engineering, 24 00:02:15.340 --> 00:02:20.040 and more recently, she's moved into areas looking at interaction between 25 00:02:20.660 --> 00:02:27.400 the colonisation of the new world and the economic component of it, 26 00:02:27.420 --> 00:02:29.020 and the importance of botany, of all things, 27 00:02:29.240 --> 00:02:36.600 and using botany as a way of looking at the interaction between the colonialists, if you like, 28 00:02:36.820 --> 00:02:42.740 and the knowledge bases which are embedded within the local societies that were being colonised. 29 00:02:43.580 --> 00:02:46.780 I'm not going to say a huge amount more about it, 30 00:02:46.820 --> 00:02:52.300 but just to throw out some of the questions that she's thrown up and answered to a large degree is, 31 00:02:52.340 --> 00:02:53.820 why are mammals called mammals? 32 00:02:54.740 --> 00:02:56.360 What's it got to do with mammary glands? 33 00:02:58.400 --> 00:03:03.260 What's Linnaeus' famous work on the classification of plants got to do with reproduction, 34 00:03:03.360 --> 00:03:06.700 reproductive organs, and the words that we use to describe those sort of things? 35 00:03:07.100 --> 00:03:10.580 What are the relationships between anatomy, gender, and race, 36 00:03:10.720 --> 00:03:13.820 and the prejudices that we develop as a consequence of looking at those things, 37 00:03:13.920 --> 00:03:17.420 the type of language that we use, the types of pictures that we use to illustrate it? 38 00:03:17.820 --> 00:03:24.660 But today she's going to talk about something which sounds an amazing combination 39 00:03:25.320 --> 00:03:27.400 of many of her interests that have developed over the years, 40 00:03:27.420 --> 00:03:33.220 and this is probably one of the longest words we've got in the title, I think, for the Festival of Ideas, 41 00:03:33.300 --> 00:03:36.600 is exotic abortifacients, the gender politics of plants. 42 00:03:37.080 --> 00:03:39.220 I'm sure it's going to be an absolutely fascinating discussion. 43 00:03:39.840 --> 00:03:45.220 So Londa's going to speak for a while, and then she's going to take questions from the audience, 44 00:03:45.320 --> 00:03:48.000 so if you've got things you'd like to say or ask her about, 45 00:03:48.080 --> 00:03:51.760 she's going to be happy to spend some time answering your questions 46 00:03:51.760 --> 00:03:53.640 and opening up the discussion to all of you. 47 00:03:53.840 --> 00:03:56.660 So with great pleasure, I'd like to introduce Professor Londa Sheebingham. 48 00:03:58.200 --> 00:03:58.880 Thank you. 49 00:04:03.180 --> 00:04:03.700 Hello. 50 00:04:04.360 --> 00:04:06.980 It's a pleasure to be here today in your beautiful city. 51 00:04:07.140 --> 00:04:10.220 It's raining a bit, but still, it's a pleasure to be here. 52 00:04:10.420 --> 00:04:17.500 If you want to move down, I always like to get close to my audience and speak right to their hearts. 53 00:04:18.000 --> 00:04:24.620 So, last evening the festival sponsored a session called Big Ideas, Where Do They Come From? 54 00:04:25.000 --> 00:04:26.420 And as a society, 55 00:04:26.420 --> 00:04:30.000 we tend to focus on new ideas and the creation of knowledge. 56 00:04:30.200 --> 00:04:32.500 We celebrate this, we reward it. 57 00:04:32.720 --> 00:04:36.160 This afternoon, I'm going to focus on knowledge lost, 58 00:04:36.540 --> 00:04:39.520 on how once big ideas disappeared. 59 00:04:40.120 --> 00:04:42.680 A colleague and I have coined the term 60 00:04:42.680 --> 00:04:46.680 agnotology to describe the study of this phenomenon. 61 00:04:47.140 --> 00:04:48.800 This is our big idea. 62 00:04:49.920 --> 00:04:53.980 And I hope that you'll be hearing a lot about agnotology in the next years. 63 00:04:54.860 --> 00:04:56.400 Agnotology serves as a campaign 64 00:04:56.400 --> 00:05:03.480 counterweight for traditional concerns about epistemology. Agnotology refocuses questions 65 00:05:03.480 --> 00:05:10.960 about how we know to questions about what we do not know and why not. Knowledge is not pure, 66 00:05:11.080 --> 00:05:18.120 but like any cultural product, arises from and succumbs to deep cultural and political struggles. 67 00:05:19.160 --> 00:05:23.480 The knowledge I will be talking about this afternoon is women's knowledge of abortifacients. 68 00:05:23.480 --> 00:05:31.360 And not only have we lost the knowledge, but we nearly lost the word, the word abortifacient. When 69 00:05:31.360 --> 00:05:34.940 I started this project, I would say I'm working on abortifacients, and people would say, 70 00:05:35.060 --> 00:05:42.200 what was that again? What exactly? So abortifacients, for the most part, are herbal remedies 71 00:05:42.200 --> 00:05:49.600 that women ingest to induce abortion. Most work by inducing uterine contractions. 72 00:05:51.100 --> 00:05:53.460 Now, this afternoon, I'm going to take you through a little bit of a look at the 73 00:05:53.460 --> 00:05:57.180 research that I've been doing. I'm going to take you on a voyage. We're going to go halfway around 74 00:05:57.180 --> 00:06:04.680 the world and back 250 years in time. I think today the seas will be heavy. So prepare yourself. 75 00:06:05.380 --> 00:06:11.920 Let's board our sailing ship and head for the Caribbean, where we will have three key 76 00:06:11.920 --> 00:06:16.580 destinations, and I wish we could really go. We would have planters punch, a little rum. 77 00:06:16.740 --> 00:06:21.800 It would be a lovely day. We're going to go to Jamaica. Now, I don't think my laser pointer 78 00:06:21.800 --> 00:06:23.440 really... Anyway, you can see it. 79 00:06:23.460 --> 00:06:29.940 Jamaica. We're going to go to Haiti, which in the 18th century was called Saint-Domingue. 80 00:06:30.100 --> 00:06:36.020 It was a French territory. And we're going to Suriname, which is not on this map, but 81 00:06:36.020 --> 00:06:42.400 it's below... It's on the northern coast of South America, there below Trinidad and Tobago. 82 00:06:44.560 --> 00:06:52.360 Yeah, it's there. You just can't see it. That's right. Now, in the 18th century, these territories 83 00:06:53.460 --> 00:07:00.860 were colonized by the Europeans, much like Australia would be later. They were colonized 84 00:07:00.860 --> 00:07:06.120 by the Spanish, the Dutch, the French, and the English. The Europeans routed out and killed 85 00:07:06.120 --> 00:07:14.120 the Indians, felled the trees, and made these into very lucrative sugar islands. Sugar was big 86 00:07:14.120 --> 00:07:21.080 business in the 18th century. It was huge. This little tiny part of Haiti was a cash cow for the 87 00:07:21.080 --> 00:07:23.440 French. It was their most valuable overseas asset. And it was a very valuable asset for the French. 88 00:07:23.460 --> 00:07:29.780 The Europeans imported slaves from Africa to work the cane fields, and this is where our story begins. 89 00:07:30.640 --> 00:07:36.800 What I present to you today is not the story of a great man. I'm not going to talk about Joseph 90 00:07:36.800 --> 00:07:42.840 Banks or even Carl Linnaeus, whom I like to talk about. It is not a story of a great woman, 91 00:07:43.020 --> 00:07:49.100 though I might sneak that in somewhere, but it's the story of a great plant. The plant whose 92 00:07:49.100 --> 00:07:53.440 history provides the leitmotif for my remarks today is the Flos Paulina. The plant is the 93 00:07:54.160 --> 00:07:56.560 plant that was used to grow the peacock flower in the 94 00:07:56.560 --> 00:07:56.700 Indian 95 00:08:00.140 --> 00:08:00.780 ! 96 00:08:09.700 --> 00:08:16.100 If you hail from the Malabar coast in India, it's called the Tsideti Mandaru, though it has dozens 97 00:08:16.100 --> 00:08:21.340 of names specific to the cultures where it was used. 98 00:08:21.340 --> 00:08:23.440 And here you see the plant in the middle of the land, and it's called the Flos Paulina. It's a 99 00:08:23.440 --> 00:08:28.720 plant that is in situ. This is in Martinique, where I first saw the plant. And you see a rather studious 100 00:08:28.720 --> 00:08:35.300 historian of science, also in situ in Martinique. We historians must, in fact, go where we are 101 00:08:35.300 --> 00:08:41.320 called. And I'm included here to give you a sense of the plant's size and proportion. 102 00:08:42.200 --> 00:08:48.500 The peacock flower is not a historic plant of the stature of chocolate, the potato, quinine, 103 00:08:48.520 --> 00:08:53.360 coffee tea, or even rhubarb. I would say that these plants have had their biographies 104 00:08:53.360 --> 00:08:55.220 written in recent years. 105 00:08:55.520 --> 00:08:58.060 I lavish attention on the peacock flower 106 00:08:58.060 --> 00:09:00.060 not because it's exquisitely beautiful, 107 00:09:00.380 --> 00:09:02.520 growing in stunningly inviting places, 108 00:09:02.820 --> 00:09:05.220 but because it's a highly political plant, 109 00:09:05.500 --> 00:09:08.380 deployed, as we shall see, in the struggle against slavery 110 00:09:08.380 --> 00:09:09.900 throughout the 18th century, 111 00:09:10.640 --> 00:09:12.820 used by slave women in the Caribbean islands 112 00:09:12.820 --> 00:09:14.420 who aborted their offspring 113 00:09:14.420 --> 00:09:16.940 so that they would not be born into bondage. 114 00:09:18.060 --> 00:09:19.580 How do we know this? 115 00:09:19.580 --> 00:09:24.000 The most remarkable information about the peacock flower 116 00:09:24.000 --> 00:09:26.280 comes from Maria Sibylla Marion's book 117 00:09:26.280 --> 00:09:30.860 where she recorded how the slaves and Indian women in Suriname 118 00:09:30.860 --> 00:09:34.120 used the seeds of this plant as an abortifacient. 119 00:09:34.240 --> 00:09:36.860 And this is her beautifully hand-colored... 120 00:09:36.860 --> 00:09:41.300 Well, it was her beautifully hand-colored illustration. 121 00:09:42.240 --> 00:09:44.840 If you don't know Maria Sibylla Marion, you should. 122 00:09:44.900 --> 00:09:47.340 There's a new documentary film coming out on her. 123 00:09:48.640 --> 00:09:49.280 And... 124 00:09:49.280 --> 00:09:51.600 And she is an exquisite artist, 125 00:09:51.680 --> 00:09:53.320 but she was also a scientist, 126 00:09:53.380 --> 00:09:55.980 and I'm interested in her here as a scientist. 127 00:09:56.220 --> 00:09:59.580 And here's what she wrote about this plant. 128 00:09:59.960 --> 00:10:01.100 She wrote, quote, 129 00:10:01.260 --> 00:10:02.920 The Indians and Africans, 130 00:10:03.060 --> 00:10:05.140 who are not treated well by their Dutch masters, 131 00:10:05.540 --> 00:10:08.880 used the seeds of this plant to abort their children 132 00:10:08.880 --> 00:10:12.500 so that their children will not become slaves like they are. 133 00:10:12.600 --> 00:10:14.540 They told me this themselves. 134 00:10:16.180 --> 00:10:19.260 Now, Marion's passage is reminiscent 135 00:10:19.280 --> 00:10:19.520 of the book of the French writer, Jean Barret, 136 00:10:19.520 --> 00:10:20.540 which is remarkable for several reasons. 137 00:10:20.880 --> 00:10:22.880 First, it was written by a rarity. 138 00:10:23.240 --> 00:10:26.860 To my knowledge, Marion was the only European woman 139 00:10:26.860 --> 00:10:28.900 who voyaged in pursuit of her science 140 00:10:28.900 --> 00:10:31.640 in all of the 17th and 18th century. 141 00:10:32.080 --> 00:10:34.740 There were other women who voyaged 142 00:10:34.740 --> 00:10:37.280 and other women who were interested in science. 143 00:10:37.580 --> 00:10:40.580 Don't miss the fabulous Jean Barret, 144 00:10:40.860 --> 00:10:43.840 who was the first European woman to travel around the globe. 145 00:10:44.060 --> 00:10:47.960 In 1766, she sailed with Bougainvilleau. 146 00:10:48.620 --> 00:10:52.800 But she did not go for her own scientific project. 147 00:10:53.100 --> 00:10:55.760 She went disguised as a male. 148 00:10:55.960 --> 00:10:58.500 No women were allowed on French ships overnight. 149 00:10:58.900 --> 00:11:00.500 She went disguised as a male, 150 00:11:00.540 --> 00:11:03.700 but in fact, she was the lover of the botanist on board, 151 00:11:03.860 --> 00:11:04.640 Philibert Commerson. 152 00:11:04.860 --> 00:11:08.020 They had had a child previous to the voyage together. 153 00:11:08.620 --> 00:11:10.520 Now, other women also voyaged, 154 00:11:10.560 --> 00:11:14.560 women like Anne Monson and Maria Riddle. 155 00:11:14.660 --> 00:11:16.700 They collected botanical specimens, 156 00:11:16.860 --> 00:11:17.940 but only in the form of 157 00:11:17.940 --> 00:11:19.520 colonial wives or daughters, 158 00:11:19.700 --> 00:11:21.760 traveling where their families happened to take them, 159 00:11:21.900 --> 00:11:23.880 and not primarily for the purpose 160 00:11:24.440 --> 00:11:26.680 of pursuing their own scientific interests. 161 00:11:27.340 --> 00:11:31.640 So, on now to Maria Sibylla Marion 162 00:11:33.260 --> 00:11:36.000 and bioprospecting in the Caribbean islands. 163 00:11:36.720 --> 00:11:40.020 Marion was indeed bold to travel to Suriname, 164 00:11:40.180 --> 00:11:44.180 then a Dutch colony, in 1699 at the age of 52, 165 00:11:44.940 --> 00:11:47.440 in search of exotic plants and insects. 166 00:11:48.200 --> 00:11:51.220 Moral and bodily imperative kept the vast majority 167 00:11:51.220 --> 00:11:53.140 of Europe's women closer to home. 168 00:11:53.620 --> 00:11:56.740 Medical doctors often warned that white women, 169 00:11:56.900 --> 00:11:58.540 taken to warmer climes, 170 00:11:58.680 --> 00:12:01.160 would succumb to copious menstruation, 171 00:12:01.200 --> 00:12:04.340 which almost always ends in fatal hemorrhages. 172 00:12:04.720 --> 00:12:08.300 Certainly not the stuff that gets you on the ship 173 00:12:08.300 --> 00:12:11.660 for a nice, you know, sail around the Caribbean. 174 00:12:11.860 --> 00:12:15.540 And as I crossed the equator on my way to your land, 175 00:12:15.820 --> 00:12:17.920 this passed through my mind, 176 00:12:17.940 --> 00:12:19.900 but in fact, I was fine. 177 00:12:21.560 --> 00:12:24.420 Despite warnings from the mayor of Amsterdam, 178 00:12:24.800 --> 00:12:28.140 who lost his four daughters in Suriname, 179 00:12:28.620 --> 00:12:32.580 Marion deposited her will and set sail for Suriname 180 00:12:32.580 --> 00:12:35.860 only a decade after upheavals in that colony 181 00:12:35.860 --> 00:12:39.040 left the governor dead, shot by his own soldiers. 182 00:12:39.360 --> 00:12:42.180 And so now we'll look to see where Suriname is. 183 00:12:42.300 --> 00:12:43.940 You can see these are all the botanical, 184 00:12:44.500 --> 00:12:47.440 European botanical explorers who fanned out 185 00:12:47.440 --> 00:12:50.180 around the world before 1732, 186 00:12:50.480 --> 00:12:53.980 and Marion was active there in Suriname, 187 00:12:54.120 --> 00:12:55.880 the northern part of South America. 188 00:12:57.100 --> 00:13:00.260 Maria Sibylla was accompanied by her daughter Dorothea, 189 00:13:00.440 --> 00:13:03.500 trained from an early age to work as her mother's assistant. 190 00:13:03.860 --> 00:13:06.760 For two years, mother and daughter collected, studied, 191 00:13:06.940 --> 00:13:09.680 and drew insects and plants of the region. 192 00:13:10.320 --> 00:13:13.180 Now, what I like about this is the example 193 00:13:13.180 --> 00:13:16.480 of a mother who trained her daughter in science. 194 00:13:16.480 --> 00:13:19.060 Marion had two daughters. She didn't have any sons, 195 00:13:19.180 --> 00:13:21.020 so she didn't have an opportunity to train them, 196 00:13:21.120 --> 00:13:25.240 but she trained both of her daughters in her arts and in her science. 197 00:13:26.360 --> 00:13:30.020 There's another German woman who did that as well in the 18th century. 198 00:13:30.220 --> 00:13:34.480 These German women were quite unique and interesting in doing that. 199 00:13:34.580 --> 00:13:36.680 Marion was German and then moved to Amsterdam 200 00:13:36.680 --> 00:13:39.840 so that she could get in on the big voyaging 201 00:13:39.840 --> 00:13:41.440 that was happening in this period. 202 00:13:42.320 --> 00:13:45.360 Marion tells us that she learned about the abortive virtues 203 00:13:45.360 --> 00:13:49.620 of her peacock flower directly from the enslaved females of Suriname. 204 00:13:50.020 --> 00:13:52.480 Now, when I started this project, 205 00:13:52.700 --> 00:13:57.180 I assumed that abortion numbered among the many women's secrets 206 00:13:57.180 --> 00:14:01.320 in this period, and that male physicians and naturalists 207 00:14:01.320 --> 00:14:03.780 had only rudimentary knowledge of such things. 208 00:14:04.220 --> 00:14:09.060 So did only women know about abortifacients in the 18th century? 209 00:14:09.140 --> 00:14:10.840 Was this women's knowledge? 210 00:14:11.380 --> 00:14:13.340 Well, yes and no. 211 00:14:13.580 --> 00:14:15.340 For over 2,000 years, 212 00:14:15.340 --> 00:14:20.140 women were in charge of birthing, birth control, and its attendant issues. 213 00:14:20.820 --> 00:14:23.340 Physicians knew how to perform abortions. 214 00:14:23.860 --> 00:14:25.040 They had to. 215 00:14:25.800 --> 00:14:30.520 Since Aristotle, European culture preferred the life of the mother 216 00:14:30.520 --> 00:14:31.900 when something was going wrong. 217 00:14:32.340 --> 00:14:35.060 But if a woman aborted without incident, 218 00:14:35.420 --> 00:14:38.380 physicians were rarely told anything about it. 219 00:14:38.580 --> 00:14:44.720 Women and their midwives handled birthing, miscarriages, and abortion on their own. 220 00:14:45.540 --> 00:14:46.720 But interestingly, 221 00:14:47.160 --> 00:14:50.840 Hans Sloane, here in full wig and regalia, 222 00:14:51.100 --> 00:14:54.640 who would become the future president of the Royal Society of London, 223 00:14:54.900 --> 00:15:00.620 worked as a young man in Jamaica a decade before Marion voyaged out to Suriname. 224 00:15:00.880 --> 00:15:05.000 And he also reported the abortive qualities of a plant 225 00:15:05.000 --> 00:15:08.160 he called the flower fence of Barbados. 226 00:15:08.640 --> 00:15:13.200 Later on, he realized this plant was the same as Marion's peacock flower, 227 00:15:13.200 --> 00:15:14.940 and noted this in his book. 228 00:15:15.400 --> 00:15:19.700 Now, one reason I chose this particular plant for study 229 00:15:19.700 --> 00:15:23.880 is that naturalists from three separate European countries 230 00:15:23.880 --> 00:15:29.240 each independently discovered its use as an abortive in the Caribbean islands. 231 00:15:29.500 --> 00:15:33.660 This was a plant that was widely used, and for centuries. 232 00:15:34.320 --> 00:15:38.640 Marion reported its use for this purpose as an abortifacient in Suriname, 233 00:15:38.940 --> 00:15:40.840 Hans Sloane reported it in Jamaica, 234 00:15:40.840 --> 00:15:45.220 and some time later, Michel Descourteils, a French naturalist, 235 00:15:45.280 --> 00:15:49.340 observed the same use in Saint-Domingue, which we today call Haiti. 236 00:15:50.360 --> 00:15:54.800 Altogether, these naturalists identified a total of eight specific plants 237 00:15:57.020 --> 00:16:00.180 used for abortion in the Caribbean islands. 238 00:16:00.480 --> 00:16:02.700 Now, I'm sure there were many more than eight, 239 00:16:02.840 --> 00:16:08.840 but very often the reports of these plants will just be an herb. 240 00:16:08.960 --> 00:16:10.240 An herb was used. 241 00:16:10.360 --> 00:16:10.820 And we don't know. 242 00:16:10.840 --> 00:16:11.960 We don't know what that might be. 243 00:16:13.500 --> 00:16:19.040 Now, we don't know who the women were who approached Sloane for an abortion. 244 00:16:19.800 --> 00:16:24.560 They might have been some of the fashionable free women of color 245 00:16:24.560 --> 00:16:26.020 shown here in this slide. 246 00:16:27.000 --> 00:16:31.920 Sloane did not discuss the ethnic or social status of the women he treated in Jamaica. 247 00:16:32.200 --> 00:16:36.700 He didn't tell us whether they were English, Creole, or slave, for example. 248 00:16:37.340 --> 00:16:40.820 Hans Sloane, like many of the physicians of his day, 249 00:16:40.840 --> 00:16:42.780 was against abortion. 250 00:16:43.500 --> 00:16:47.360 It's because physicians did not actually handle these things, 251 00:16:47.540 --> 00:16:54.000 and whenever they saw a woman who needed an abortion or was in the midst of one, 252 00:16:54.840 --> 00:16:58.200 she was probably going to die, and that's why the physician was called. 253 00:16:58.380 --> 00:17:02.520 But physicians did know how to induce abortions, as I said earlier, 254 00:17:02.740 --> 00:17:06.080 and Sloane did not use herbal abortifacients. 255 00:17:06.400 --> 00:17:10.100 As he wrote in his book, the method he preferred was the hand. 256 00:17:10.920 --> 00:17:13.520 Okay, he assumed everybody knew what this was. 257 00:17:13.780 --> 00:17:17.620 It took me about two years to find out what he was talking about. 258 00:17:18.560 --> 00:17:22.120 But quite literally, the physician used his hand. 259 00:17:22.280 --> 00:17:24.400 He would anoint it with some kind of oil. 260 00:17:24.660 --> 00:17:29.180 If he had it available, he would give the woman some opium, if not a little wine, 261 00:17:29.320 --> 00:17:34.360 and then he literally went in and pulled out the conceptious. 262 00:17:36.340 --> 00:17:39.900 Now, let's look at abortion in the Caribbean islands. 263 00:17:39.900 --> 00:17:41.620 We know about the abortifacients. 264 00:17:41.640 --> 00:17:44.620 We know about the reports of the use of the peacock flower. 265 00:17:45.060 --> 00:17:51.080 To what extent was abortion practiced by the native and slave populations in the Caribbean? 266 00:17:51.880 --> 00:17:56.140 There's good evidence that the Indians in this area, 267 00:17:56.360 --> 00:17:59.880 the peoples called the Tainos, the Caribs, and Arawaks, 268 00:18:00.060 --> 00:18:04.080 made extensive use of abortive herbs long before European contact. 269 00:18:04.520 --> 00:18:08.440 And here we have a beautiful illustration 270 00:18:08.440 --> 00:18:11.800 of a Carib woman. 271 00:18:12.000 --> 00:18:16.040 The Europeans really did not distinguish between the different Indian peoples 272 00:18:16.040 --> 00:18:20.040 in the 18th century, so we don't know if she was Carib, Taino, or Arawak. 273 00:18:20.240 --> 00:18:25.780 But Jean-Baptiste Labatt, who did this beautiful illustration in 1722, 274 00:18:26.140 --> 00:18:28.080 calls her the generic Carib. 275 00:18:29.300 --> 00:18:34.760 Now, we know that these women used abortifacients long before European contact. 276 00:18:34.820 --> 00:18:38.020 The first Spanish accounts from the New World described 277 00:18:38.440 --> 00:18:42.120 how Carib women aborted in the face of extreme circumstances. 278 00:18:43.000 --> 00:18:47.660 Las Casas in 1502 recorded the horrors of the Spanish cruelty, 279 00:18:48.020 --> 00:18:53.640 the fierce attack dogs, the swords used to disembowel or hack off women's breasts, 280 00:18:53.880 --> 00:18:58.920 and how this caused at least some Indian women to drown their infants 281 00:18:59.440 --> 00:19:04.760 or to, quote, take herbs to abort so that the fruit would be expelled stillborn. 282 00:19:06.220 --> 00:19:08.420 We actually know very little about the history of the Caribbean, 283 00:19:08.440 --> 00:19:12.420 but we know about how and why Native Americans developed abortive techniques. 284 00:19:13.200 --> 00:19:19.040 Alexander von Humboldt, who traveled into the interior of South America 285 00:19:19.040 --> 00:19:21.100 in the early part of the 19th century, 286 00:19:21.300 --> 00:19:24.820 was one of the first Europeans to encounter the peoples there. 287 00:19:25.160 --> 00:19:30.360 And he reported rather extensively on Native Americans 288 00:19:30.360 --> 00:19:32.740 and why Indian women practiced abortion. 289 00:19:33.120 --> 00:19:38.020 He noted that Indian women often wished to time their pregnancies precisely, 290 00:19:38.720 --> 00:19:42.780 some apparently thinking it best to preserve their freshness and beauty when young, 291 00:19:42.900 --> 00:19:46.240 and therefore to delay childbirth until later in life. 292 00:19:46.760 --> 00:19:49.580 Others preferred to become mothers when they were very young, 293 00:19:49.720 --> 00:19:52.600 thinking that this was the best way to fortify their health 294 00:19:52.600 --> 00:19:54.420 and attain a happier old age. 295 00:19:54.660 --> 00:19:58.760 When I was reading this, it reminded me of the debates we today have about, 296 00:19:58.900 --> 00:20:02.520 well, when exactly should I have a child because I have a career, 297 00:20:02.700 --> 00:20:06.480 I have to do all of these things, and what makes me healthier? 298 00:20:06.740 --> 00:20:08.420 So we get these questions. 299 00:20:08.420 --> 00:20:09.520 And I wrote these very interesting reports. 300 00:20:10.320 --> 00:20:13.440 Now most Amerindians in the Caribbean were free 301 00:20:13.440 --> 00:20:16.400 and did not live the life of slaves. 302 00:20:17.420 --> 00:20:20.580 But Africans in the Caribbean were slaves. 303 00:20:21.260 --> 00:20:25.540 There were 10 approximately, well, historians disagree about the number, 304 00:20:25.660 --> 00:20:30.700 but there were some 10 million Africans brought as slaves to the New World. 305 00:20:30.960 --> 00:20:36.040 And slave women practiced abortion, among other things, 306 00:20:36.060 --> 00:20:37.120 to resist slavery. 307 00:20:38.420 --> 00:20:39.140 And this is what the New World newspaper told us. 308 00:20:39.420 --> 00:20:41.800 Though many women must have miscarried spontaneously 309 00:20:41.800 --> 00:20:46.420 as a result of hard work, poor food, and physical cruelty, 310 00:20:46.840 --> 00:20:52.620 slave women also induced abortion as a deliberate act of resistance to slavery. 311 00:20:53.200 --> 00:20:58.300 In an economy when planters or colonists sought to breed Negroes, 312 00:20:58.300 --> 00:21:00.780 as they were called, like horses and cattle, 313 00:21:01.020 --> 00:21:03.780 refusal to breed became a political act. 314 00:21:04.140 --> 00:21:07.420 Slave women's willingness to undergo the trials of abortion 315 00:21:08.420 --> 00:21:09.980 was to be understood in this context. 316 00:21:10.620 --> 00:21:13.100 Slaves were the property of colonists, 317 00:21:13.240 --> 00:21:17.480 and slave women aborted to hurt the slave owner's property, 318 00:21:17.640 --> 00:21:19.300 to at least not create more. 319 00:21:21.420 --> 00:21:24.240 Abortion also resulted, though, from a sexual economy 320 00:21:24.240 --> 00:21:27.960 wherein slave women were used for European men's pleasures. 321 00:21:29.420 --> 00:21:31.540 Now in addition to his flower fence, 322 00:21:32.120 --> 00:21:35.340 Hans Sloane highlighted a second abortifacient, 323 00:21:35.460 --> 00:21:36.880 Jamaican abortifacient, 324 00:21:36.880 --> 00:21:38.420 which he called the penguins. 325 00:21:39.680 --> 00:21:41.980 And he wrote about this plant, he said, 326 00:21:42.160 --> 00:21:43.840 he wrote in 1707, 327 00:21:44.260 --> 00:21:44.660 quote, 328 00:21:44.780 --> 00:21:45.860 It's very diuretic. 329 00:21:45.940 --> 00:21:48.280 It brings down the menses very powerfully. 330 00:21:48.800 --> 00:21:51.360 It causes abortion in women with child, 331 00:21:51.620 --> 00:21:54.260 of which whores, being not ignorant, 332 00:21:54.340 --> 00:21:56.640 make frequent use to make away with their children. 333 00:21:57.280 --> 00:22:01.600 You get these very strong statements in scientific books in the 18th century. 334 00:22:01.720 --> 00:22:02.800 It's really very interesting. 335 00:22:03.260 --> 00:22:05.780 Now Janet Shaw, who was a Scotswoman, 336 00:22:05.780 --> 00:22:08.160 who traveled with her kinfolk to Antigua, 337 00:22:08.320 --> 00:22:11.240 another island in the Caribbean in the 1770s, 338 00:22:11.780 --> 00:22:13.400 similarly denounced the, quote, 339 00:22:13.440 --> 00:22:16.220 young black winches, who in her words, quote, 340 00:22:16.400 --> 00:22:18.740 lay themselves out for their white lovers, 341 00:22:18.960 --> 00:22:22.780 and who in order to prevent a child from interrupting their pleasures, 342 00:22:22.940 --> 00:22:25.560 had, quote, certain herbs and medicines 343 00:22:25.560 --> 00:22:28.180 that free them from their encumbrances. 344 00:22:28.780 --> 00:22:32.460 And of course the slave women she's talking about 345 00:22:32.460 --> 00:22:34.980 mostly had little choice in the matter. 346 00:22:34.980 --> 00:22:38.340 The Scottish mercenary, John Stedman, 347 00:22:39.460 --> 00:22:41.620 commented extensively, he was a lieutenant, 348 00:22:41.840 --> 00:22:44.160 a Scottish lieutenant who went, 349 00:22:44.240 --> 00:22:46.720 who served as a mercenary in Suriname 350 00:22:46.720 --> 00:22:51.380 and was employed to keep the many, many slaves there in check. 351 00:22:51.620 --> 00:22:55.880 He commented extensively on the commerce and sex required 352 00:22:55.880 --> 00:22:58.700 of young black and mulatto girls in Suriname. 353 00:22:59.060 --> 00:23:02.740 His diary ringing, perhaps with the vibrato of a young lieutenant, 354 00:23:03.060 --> 00:23:04.960 detailed the number of women, often, 355 00:23:04.980 --> 00:23:05.460 offered to him. 356 00:23:05.620 --> 00:23:09.220 He was hardly off the boat from Amsterdam when, quote, 357 00:23:09.400 --> 00:23:11.900 a negro woman offered me the use of her daughter 358 00:23:11.900 --> 00:23:13.420 while here for a certain sum. 359 00:23:14.040 --> 00:23:17.820 Now this practice of negro women, 360 00:23:17.900 --> 00:23:21.140 mostly it was the masters of the slave women, 361 00:23:21.280 --> 00:23:26.300 offering their slave to a European man 362 00:23:26.300 --> 00:23:28.540 while he was in the colonies, 363 00:23:28.760 --> 00:23:32.000 was raised to a quasi-official institution 364 00:23:32.000 --> 00:23:34.040 known as the Suriname marriage. 365 00:23:34.980 --> 00:23:37.120 This is an arrangement by which a European man 366 00:23:37.120 --> 00:23:40.660 paid an agreed upon price to a slave woman's master 367 00:23:40.660 --> 00:23:44.420 for her services while in residence in the colony. 368 00:23:44.700 --> 00:23:46.480 So she served as his housekeeper, 369 00:23:46.660 --> 00:23:49.040 she would serve as his cook, 370 00:23:49.980 --> 00:23:52.160 and take care of him when he was sick 371 00:23:52.160 --> 00:23:56.320 because she would most likely know about the herbal medicines 372 00:23:56.980 --> 00:24:01.040 of the region, and she also then performed sexual services. 373 00:24:01.980 --> 00:24:02.580 Stedman 374 00:24:04.980 --> 00:24:07.500 was part of one of these Suriname marriages 375 00:24:07.500 --> 00:24:11.700 and he fell in love with the girl that he was with 376 00:24:11.700 --> 00:24:14.820 and planned to take her back with him to Europe 377 00:24:14.820 --> 00:24:16.260 as his Christian wife. 378 00:24:17.440 --> 00:24:18.540 This was... 379 00:24:19.220 --> 00:24:22.340 The Dutch didn't actually allow this, 380 00:24:22.480 --> 00:24:24.400 I think the Scottish did, 381 00:24:24.700 --> 00:24:28.580 but she unfortunately died before he was leaving in any case, 382 00:24:28.620 --> 00:24:30.180 so we don't know what would have happened. 383 00:24:30.640 --> 00:24:33.180 Now Stedman found the male planters, 384 00:24:33.200 --> 00:24:34.960 he had a lot of criticism of the male planters, 385 00:24:34.980 --> 00:24:37.780 the colonists that he worked for in Suriname. 386 00:24:37.960 --> 00:24:40.640 He found the European male planters desolate, 387 00:24:40.840 --> 00:24:44.120 going to bed late and passing the night in the arms 388 00:24:44.120 --> 00:24:46.140 of one another of their slave women. 389 00:24:47.240 --> 00:24:49.580 Whether married to European or not, 390 00:24:49.820 --> 00:24:52.620 the masters often kept slave women for this purpose 391 00:24:52.620 --> 00:24:54.980 and offered them freely to male guests. 392 00:24:55.360 --> 00:24:57.860 And here you see this front figure is a man, 393 00:24:57.920 --> 00:24:59.140 you know, love the hat. 394 00:24:59.880 --> 00:25:03.120 He's a male planter and you see one of his girls 395 00:25:03.120 --> 00:25:04.280 in the background. 396 00:25:05.000 --> 00:25:07.920 Serving him a nice drink in the hot day. 397 00:25:08.240 --> 00:25:11.600 Now it was not uncommon that when you... 398 00:25:11.600 --> 00:25:15.540 So it was hard to move around in the colonies at this time 399 00:25:15.540 --> 00:25:16.780 because you had a horse, 400 00:25:16.920 --> 00:25:19.140 you probably did not take your carriage 401 00:25:19.140 --> 00:25:20.860