Books
Bodies in Doubt
An American History of Intersex
This renowned history of intersex in America has been comprehensively updated to reflect recent shifts in attitudes, bioethics, and medical and legal practices.
In Bodies in Doubt, Elizabeth Reis traces the changing definitions, perceptions, and medical management of intersex (atypical sex development) in America from the colonial period to the present. Arguing that medical practice must be understood within its broader cultural context, Reis demonstrates how deeply physicians have been influenced by social anxieties about marriage, heterosexuality, and same-sex desire throughout American history
In this second edition, Reis adds two new chapters, a new preface, and a revised introduction to assess recent dramatic shifts in attitudes, bioethics, and medical and legal practices. Human rights organizations have declared early genital surgeries a form of torture and abuse, but doctors continue to offer surgical "repair," and parents continue to seek it for their children. While many are hearing the human rights call, controversies persist, and Reis explains why best practices in this field remain fiercely contested.
Damned Women
Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England
In her analysis of the cultural construction of gender in early America, Elizabeth Reis explores the intersection of Puritan theology, Puritan evaluations of womanhood, and the Salem witchcraft episodes.
She finds in those intersections the basis for understanding why women were accused of witchcraft more often than men, why they confessed more often, and why they frequently accused other women of being witches. In negotiating their beliefs about the devil's powers, both women and men embedded womanhood in the discourse of depravity. Puritan ministers insisted that women and men were equal in the sight of God, with both sexes equally capable of cleaving to Christ or to the devil.
Nevertheless, Reis explains, womanhood and evil were inextricably linked in the minds and hearts of seventeenth-century New England Puritans. Women and men feared hell equally but Puritan culture encouraged women to believe it was their vile natures that would take them there rather than the particular sins they might have committed. Following the Salem witchcraft trials, Reis argues, Puritans' understanding of sin and the devil changed. Ministers and laity conceived of a Satan who tempted sinners and presided physically over hell, rather than one who possessed souls in the living world. Women and men became increasingly confident of their redemption, although women more than men continued to imagine themselves as essentially corrupt, even after the Great Awakening.
Spellbound
Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England
Edited by Elizabeth Reis
Spellbound: Women and Witchcraft in America is a collection of twelve articles that explore crucial events in the history of witchcraft and spiritual feminism in this country. Beginning with the “witches” of colonial America, Spellbound extends its focus through the nineteenth century to explore women's involvement with alternative spiritualities, and culminates with examinations of the contemporary feminist neopagan and Goddess movements.
Spellbound addresses the important role played by race in both witchcraft practice and witchcraft accusation. Although an accusation of witchcraft can be devastating or even deadly, many groups of women—African-American Spiritualists, Native Americans, and contemporary followers of Wicca—have pursued divination, spirit possession, and other forms of magical practice. Spellbound explores some of their rituals and beliefs and the reactions of society.
A valuable source for those interested in women’s history, women’s studies, and religious history, Spellbound is also a crucial addition to the bookshelf of anyone tracing the evolution of spiritualism in America.
Dear Lizzie
Memoir of a Jewish Immigrant Woman
With an Introduction by Elizabeth Reis
Leona Tamarkin (Elizabeth Reis’s grandmother) recounts her ordeal as a Jewish refugee during the First World War and her life as a young immigrant in America after 1920. Tamarkin's narrative rings with determination, will to live, and boldness, even within confining circumstances.
First conveyed as a letter from a grandmother to her then fifteen-year-old granddaughter, Lizzie, the memoir offers a story too painful to say out loud but too important to be left unsaid. More than simply a family story, Tamarkin's written words bring immediacy and humanity to distant historical events.
The second edition of American Sexual Histories features an updated collection of sixteen articles by prominent historians and their corresponding primary sources that investigate issues related to human sexuality in America from the colonial era to the present day. Reflecting the myriad ways historians interpret and analyze sexuality and sexual trends, the essays offer in-depth exploration of topics such as contraception, prostitution, interracial relationships, same-sex desire, reproductive politics, and miscegenation, transgender history. Taken as a whole, the essays richly illustrate how the evolution of sexuality in America is a product of an ongoing negotiation of moral values and shifting political and economic circumstances.
The chapters are arranged chronologically and include introductions by editor Elizabeth Reis that lend clarity and add historical context to the major articles and the supporting documents that follow. The carefully selected couplings of essays and primary sources allow readers to evaluate historical documents for themselves, test the interpretations of historians, and draw independent conclusions. Both scholarly and highly accessible, American Sexual Histories offers illuminating insights into the complex evolution of sex and sexuality in America.
American Sexual Histories
Edited by Elizabeth Reis
The Nursing Clio Reader
Histories of Sex, Reproduction, and Justice
On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturned Roe v. Wade, stripping federal protection for abortion rights and placing control in the hands of individual states. This monumental shift in policy underscores the need for deeper historical perspectives on reproductive rights.
The Nursing Clio Reader answers that call, bringing together essays that examine reproductive health through historical research and personal experience. Featuring both new and classic pieces from the Nursing Clio blog, leading historians of reproductive health provide insights that connect past struggles with today’s ongoing battles over bodies, reproductive rights, and health care. This collection offers intimate, urgent scholarship that speaks to the present moment.
A powerful resource for classrooms and individual readers alike, The Nursing Clio Reader invites reflection on how the past informs current debates, urging us to engage deeply with the history of reproductive justice in a time of unprecedented change, underscoring that indeed "the personal is historical."
ed. The Nursing Clio Editorial Collective (Elizabeth Reis is a member of the collective)