Lydia Reeder is the author of “Dust Bowl Girls: The Inspiring Story of the Team that Barnstormed Its Way to Basketball Glory,” which was a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award and the Willa Literary Award. Her new book, “The Cure for Women: Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Challenge to Victorian Medicine that Changed Women’s Lives Forever,” is a finalist for the Colorado Book Award for History. She lives in Denver.
SunLit: Tell us this book’s backstory – what’s it about and what inspired you to write it?
Lydia Reeder: My great-grandmother, a midwife in rural Missouri at the turn of the 20th century, inspired me. Delving into the history of midwives during the 19th century, I discovered Mary Putnam Jacobi and the other pioneering women doctors of that time. Their achievements deserved to be celebrated.
UNDERWRITTEN BY
Each week, The Colorado Sun and Colorado Humanities & Center For The Book feature an excerpt from a Colorado book and an interview with the author. Explore the SunLit archives at coloradosun.com/sunlit.
“The Cure for Woman” reveals the 19th-century origin of the pseudoscience that allegedly connects all of a woman’s ills to her uterus. It tells the story of the women doctors and suffragists, led by Dr. Jacobi, who fought back against this attempt to control women’s bodies and lives. “The Cure for Women” brings to light the daring life of the brilliant Dr. Jacobi and how her groundbreaking research on menstruation dismantled these myths about women’s biology.
Mary Putnam Jacobi was the eldest of 11 children and grew up in a bustling mid-19th-century New York City household. Her father, the publishing entrepreneur George Palmer Putnam, printed Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell’s first book, “The Laws of Life,” supporting women’s health. Despite believing that medicine was an unsuitable profession for women, Putnam’s father allowed the 17-year-old Mary to work with Blackwell at her New York Infirmary for Women and Children, sparking Jacobi’s passion for science.
At 21, Jacobi became the first woman in America to earn a pharmacy degree and later graduated from the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1864. Determined to excel, she aimed for the Sorbonne in Paris—the best medical school in the world. To gain admittance, she dyed all of her dresses black, modulated her femininity and, after two years, became the first woman admitted to the Paris Medical School, graduating in 1871.
Returning to New York, she became a professor at Blackwell’s medical school and championed women’s access to medical education. By this time, nearly 2,500 women were practicing medicine in America. However, many elite male physicians resisted, claiming women were unfit for any professional roles other than motherhood. These medical experts published so-called “scientific” papers claiming, without any data, that women were biologically incapable of higher education because their menstrual cycles made them perpetually sick and emotionally unbalanced.
Women’s rights activists understood that if science proved that women were biologically incapable of complex thinking, their pursuit of suffrage for women would be impossible. That’s when Mary Putnam Jacobi joined forces with the vast network of the women’s rights movement to conduct clinical research that would dismantle the myths about women’s biology. For the first time in medical science, using the most current experimental technologies, Jacobi mapped the physiological and chemical signs of menstruation related to the physical changes in women’s bodies. It was revolutionary, a watershed moment in the fight for women’s rights.
SunLit: Place the excerpt you selected in context. How does it fit into the book as a whole and why did you select it?
“The Cure for Women”
Where to find it:
- Prospector: Search the combined catalogs of 23 Colorado libraries
- Libby: E-books and audio books
- NewPages Guide: List of Colorado independent bookstores
- Bookshop.org: Searchable database of bookstores nationwide
SunLit present new excerpts from some of the best Colorado authors that not only spin engaging narratives but also illuminate who we are as a community. Read more.
Reeder: The excerpt I chose is one of my favorite passages. It tells the story of Jacobi’s coming-of-age through her scientific awakening. Initially, she is a precocious and brilliant child with a mild interest in biology. Her beloved grandmother encourages her to join the evangelical Baptist Church, where she searches for God and the meaning of life. She experiences her first love and suffers her first tragic loss—the death of a young pastor whom she had deeply loved. Struggling with the profound meaninglessness of his death, she ultimately leaves religion behind.
Then, at age 17, she looked through a powerful microscope for the first time and discovered the breathtaking beauty of hundreds of interlinked human cells. This experience provided the inspiration she had been seeking. From that moment on, nothing would stop her from becoming a scientist and a doctor.
This scene is also important because it foreshadows Jacobi’s contribution to medical science. She is credited with introducing scientific, research-based medicine to American physicians. The “Lancet” medical journal (2021) described her as “one of the most remarkable minds of 19th-century medicine.” Before her time, medicine was based on pathologies and the doctor’s assessment rather than laboratory research and data.
While attending medical school in Paris, she worked in a state-of-the-art laboratory for Louis-Antoine Ranvier, an assistant to the French physiologist Claude Bernard. Known as one of the most remarkable men of science, Bernard advocated for the direct application of experimental methods—physiology, chemistry, biology, and microscopy—to clinical medicine. Jacobi arrived in Paris just in time to help invent scientific medicine. When she returned to America, she brought Bernard’s science with her.
As one of her male physician friends later wrote, her knowledge of science was so wide and her criticism so “keen, fearless and just that in our discussions we felt it prudent to shun the field of speculation and to walk strictly in the path of demonstrated facts.”
SunLit: What influences and/or experiences informed the project before you sat down to write?
Reeder: The experience of writing and publishing my first book, “Dust Bowl Girls: The Inspiring Story of the Team That Barnstormed Its Way to Basketball Glory,” laid the foundation for my next project, “The Cure for Women.” “Dust Bowl Girls” tells the story of a team of spirited young women basketball players from the 1930s.
While researching “The Cure for Women,” I realized that the early women doctors needed to support one another unconditionally, much like teammates. They were dedicated to helping each other pursue medical education, addressing the needs of sick women and children, and training qualified young women to become doctors. They had each other’s backs, forged meaningful connections, and secured funding for education. These women were true pioneers in American medicine.
Additionally, I worked for many years in the health care industry, creating online continuing education courses for nurses. My experience collaborating with nurse educators to develop content equipped me with a strong foundation in medical writing.
SunLit: What did the process of writing this book add to your knowledge and understanding of your craft and/or the subject matter?
Reeder: Every book is different. My first book was based on personal interviews, scrapbooks, and diaries. I had the privilege of meeting some of the people I wrote about. The coach was my great-uncle. I had grown up in Oklahoma and understood the setting and culture that permeated the story. It was in many ways very personal.
Writing “The Cure for Women” was very different. What was 19th-century New York and New England like? How might these pioneering women doctors feel about each other and their work? It required complete immersion in the material. I read every biography and book I could find about the pioneering women in medicine and searched various archives for letters, newspapers, and journal articles. I wanted to craft a narrative that allowed readers to form an empathetic connection with these historical figures that I had never known. It was a privilege to learn about real people who changed history.
Also, while writing this book, I realized things change slowly, especially for women in science. They are often underestimated or delegitimized because they are women. The Victorian medical men who opposed women’s higher education felt threatened by the emergence of women doctors. Desperate to discredit their competitors, they resorted to deception and promoting pseudoscience as real science. Their words and actions back then echoed so much of what was happening to women today that, sometimes, by the end of the writing day, I was full of anger. That sort of experience was new for me.
SunLit: What were the biggest challenges you faced in writing this book?
Reeder: One significant challenge I faced was creating the 19th-century world where Mary Putnam Jacobi, her mentors, and fellow activists lived. How did they accomplish so much despite the restrictions they faced? Of course, they eventually pushed those boundaries wide open. Another challenge was keeping track of the resources needed to write the nonfiction story while creating empathetic connections to the characters and historical events. I focused on details. However, the most challenging part was curating the information, discerning what belonged and what didn’t. You can’t include everything.
SunLit: What do you want readers to take from this book?
Reeder: I want readers to be inspired by the woman who overcame enormous barriers to become a pioneer in American medicine. Mary Putnam Jacobi challenged centuries of unfounded beliefs about women’s physiology. Before her study on menstruation, Victorian physicians believed—without any evidence—that women experienced monthly heats or ruts, similar to female dogs.
They thought menstruation was a monthly rupture, akin to being stabbed or injured, leaving a woman’s body in a constant state of infirmity. A woman’s brain was magically connected to her uterus, which shrank if she overused her brain by reading or working more than four hours per day. Jacobi’s research found that women weren’t stunted by their health.
Quite the opposite; menstruation was like any other normal bodily function, such as digestion or hair growth. Jacobi’s study laid the foundation for a paradigm shift for women: that they have a right to be educated and choose their own destinies.
SunLit: The title “The Cure for Women” is provocative. What does it signify in the context of Mary Putnam Jacobi’s work and the medical thinking of the era?
Reeder: Nineteenth-century male doctors, regarded as the medical experts of their time, proclaimed that science proved all women to be perpetually sick and possibly crazy due to their biology. They accepted this without researching or gathering the data necessary to support their claims. It was all hearsay, personal beliefs, and individual experiences.
The culture of the time reflected these beliefs. These so-called experts sustained the “women’s sickness industry” (for example, S. Weir Mitchell’s rest cure for hysterical women described in my book), which significantly enriched these same doctors. They had no interest in “curing” women; in fact, they believed that women could never be cured due to their flawed biology. That’s partly where the title came from.
At the same time, Jacobi and her female colleagues in the medical profession confronted head-on society’s need to keep women bound to the idea that they were inherently sick. They became doctors and scientists during a time when women were barred from those professions. Their very lives proved the notion of an incurable sickness due to women’s biology wrong. Along the way, these women found self-actualization through their meaningful work. They gained the freedom, or self-cure, to participate in a life well-lived.
SunLit: Tell us about your next project.
Reeder: I’m working on a few things, but nothing specific just yet. I may write about my own experiences with chronic illness. It’s in the early stages.
A few more quick items:
Currently on your nightstand for recreational reading: “Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim” David Sedaris
First book you remember really making an impression on you as a kid: “The Secret Garden” Frances Hodgson Burnett
Best writing advice you’ve ever received: Learn to curate the information for narrative nonfiction. It’s how you find narrative voice and create empathy. It’s how you build the story.
Favorite fictional literary character: Sethe, “Beloved,” Toni Morrison
Literary guilty pleasure (title or genre): Mystery and horror
Digital, print or audio – favorite medium to consume literature: Print
One book you’ve read multiple times: “Beloved”
Other than writing utensils, one thing you must have within reach when you write: Taylors of Harrogate Yorkshire Gold black tea
Best antidote for writer’s block: Long walk
Most valuable beta reader: My husband