Research
My research focuses on the history of the body, medicine and women's health. I am currently revising a book manuscript, The Modern Period: A History of Menstruation in Twentieth Century America. In it, I examine the processes by which women and men, educators, physicians, menstrual products companies and employers together constructed a vision of the well-managed, "modern," middle-class body, and strove to realize this vision, over the course of the twentieth century. I demonstrate that while women frequently willingly disciplined their bodies as urged by the various "experts," as they worked to produce middle-class identities for themselves, they also limited the pace and direction of historical change through careful selection of technologies and practices they believed were safe, effective and worthy of the investment of their time and effort.
In my work, I combine a commitment to traditional modes of historical inquiry and argumentation, including extensive archival research and scholarly writing, with a resolve to employ interdisciplinary methods which provide unique insights into the history of the body. Drawing on my background in anthropology, I incorporate extensive material from 75 interviews I performed with women and men of a range of ages from three distinct ethnic and regional groups, to provide otherwise unobtainable insights into historical changes in bodily practice.
Planned future projects include research about the history of early miscarriage, and its relationship to demographic, social, technological and political trends. This history will examine women's experiences in relation to the reduction of fertility rates and rise in age of first-time mothers, the abortion debates (especially in the United States), the availability of home pregnancy and ovulation tests, and increasingly effective contraception. I am also planning to write a history of modern dance in the United States, situated within the broader history of the body in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, proposing modern dance as a realm within which, in Foucault's terms, "disciplined" modern bodies that were not necessarily "docile" were created.