Anarcha, Lucy and Betsey, or the mothers, as Montgomery artist Michelle Browder calls them, will finally get some visible recognition on May 9, in the place where they unwittingly became a part of history.
The mothers are three of at least 12 women that historians say 19th century gynecologist J. Marion Sims operated on between 1845 and 1849; developing and perfecting his surgical techniques on an ailment that resulted from complications of severe childbirth.
As enslaved women, they had no freedom to decline these surgeries performed in Sims' backyard clinic on South Perry Street. In absence of anesthesia, the women were held down and forcibly restrained as he carried out painful procedures on them. The medical discoveries and techniques Sims developed by experimenting on the bodies of these Black women would earn him the title, the “father of modern gynecology.”