Redefining Wellness
Reproductive rights, patient empowerment, the history of fitness, and more
February 9, 2022
This week’s issue of Public Seminar is dedicated to questions of physical and mental wellbeing. What does that mental health diagnosis really mean? Where can I find a (surprisingly affordable) room of my own? How do we rally for reproductive justice? When did everyone around here get so fit?
Yasmin Arquiza remembers two years spent in the Webster Apartments, a women-only residence hearkening back to an earlier New York City. “The only clues that these rooms were designed for young working women in the early twentieth century were the huge mirror above a small dressing table and a spacious closet with yet another mirror, full-length this time—three mirrors in all, in a rather narrow space.” (February 8, 2023)
“I grew up in a family where my mother had 10 children and I would hear her openly say that she would not have chosen to have that many children. She had to leave work at age 23, since married women weren’t allowed to work in Ireland at the time.” Camilla Fitzsimons talks to Amalie Thieden about the mass feminist activism that led her to write Repealed: Ireland’s Unfinished Fight for Reproductive Rights (Pluto Books, 2021). (February 6, 2023)
Read an excerpt from Repealed: Ireland’s Unfinished Fight for Reproductive Rights by Camilla Fitzsimons with Sinéad Kennedy, courtesy of Pluto Books. “Abortion became illegal in Ireland in 1861 as part of the United Kingdom and Great Britain’s Offences Against the Person Act. But while abortion might not have been talked about much in the late 1800s and early 1900s, it was happening.” (February 6, 2023)
“First came the diagnoses, then a vexed question: ‘We can’t treat everything at once, so which would you like to start with?’” Josephine Houman looks back on a psychiatric evaluation that rendered her mental health “both crystal-clear and unfathomably muddy.” (February 7, 2023)
Natalia Mehlman Petrzela joins Claire Potter for a conversation about her new book, Fit Nation (University of Chicago Press, 2023), and takes us on a tour of fitness history. “If you really want to go back to the origins of American fitness culture, it doesn’t start in a gym as we know it: it starts in circuses and world’s fairs, where these strong men and women are on stage, flexing their muscles, wearing different costumes.” (February 8, 2023)