Women's History Month Lecture

The Department of History will hold a roundtable titled “Body, Mind, Spirit: American Women in Journalism and Health” for Women’s History Month featuring three panelists from Baylor University’s Department of History. This event is free and open to the public. 

The Roundtable will be held on March 19, 2026, in Draper 152, 1420 S 7th St, Waco, TX 76706 at 3:30. 

Dr. Elesha Coffman | Professor of History

“Lillian Block, Jewish Journalist”

Lillian Block (1909-1981) joined the staff of Religious News Service during World War II because, she later said, she wanted to do “[s]omething meaningful, so that people are not going around killing each other.” A trained journalist and professor of journalism, she believed that RNS, an interfaith news wire service, could promote peace by “reporting religious news objectively so that each group, without in any way compromising their own commitment, would know of each other and grow in respect and understanding.” Block started as assistant managing editor but became managing editor upon the founder’s sudden death in 1957. She went on to lead the organization until her retirement in 1979. This position made her the most influential religion journalist in the United States, shaping the stories that RNS supplied to religious periodicals, daily newspapers, and radio stations across the country as well as training a generation of reporters on the religion beat. This paper will demonstrate that Block’s Jewish identity both facilitated and complicated her work. Because Block was not a Christian, she and, by extension, RNS were trusted to maintain neutrality among the numerous Christian factions vying for cultural authority in the United States and abroad. However, Block could never blend into the world of clergy councils and congregational dramas that RNS covered. She was constantly translating herself to them and translating them to the reading public.

Savannah Flanagan  | PhD Candidate

“Rebecca Lee Crumpler and Black Maternal Healthcare”

Rebecca Lee Crumpler was the first African-American female doctor of medicine in the United States, graduating from the New England Female Medical College in 1864. The NEFMC was one of the first medical schools for women in the United States and was founded on the premise that women should provide reproductive healthcare for other women; not male physicians. Crumpler sought to specifically address the healthcare needs of African American women and their children. Through her education and personal experience, she provided essential care for communities in need in Virginia and Massachusetts. She was also one of the first female physician authors of the nineteenth century, publishing A Book of Medical Discourses in 1883. Her book, dedicated to nurses and mothers, focused on maternal and pediatric medical care and covered topics such as midwifery and infant care. Her work provides an example of how African American women provided care at a time when Black bodies were being unethically utilized to further science and medicine.

Brooke LeFevre | PhD Candidate

“Having Assumed the Relation of Wife, She Ought Not Decline that of Mother: Abortion and “Over-Civilization” in Late-Nineteenth-Century Obstetrics”

American obstetricians in the nineteenth century were worried that American women were not having enough babies. Well, not just any American women; specifically, they were worried that middle- and upper-class white women were not having enough babies. Immigrants, women of color, and poor women all seemed to be having plenty, but decades before the language of “race suicide” became common among Progressive Era thinkers, American physicians began to decry the lack of fecundity among the “more intelligent and refined of our citizens.” As one obstetrician wrote in 1867, “It is from this class of citizens that we naturally look for the best specimens of our race to spring.” And yet, he reported condemningly, these women “have the effrontery to say boldly, that they have neither the time nor inclination to nurse babies.” During the 1840s and 1850s, as the fields of obstetrics and gynecology were developing, American physicians talked about white women as unfortunate victims of over-civilization, claiming that white women suffered so much in childbirth as “the necessary product of the deterioration of the female constitution in the hot-beds of civilization.” However, during the 1870s and 1880s, as a wave of anti-abortion sentiment swept through American society, American physicians repackaged their earlier rhetoric to claim that over-civilization was not only deteriorating white women’s bodies, but also their morals. One physician, speaking to a graduating class of medical students in 1870, claimed that the primary cause of infant and childhood death, “especially among those we are wont to designate the upper class, is the neglect of maternal duties by fashionable mothers. Fashionable society,” he explained, was now so important to women that they were “abdicat[ing] their first and most important of woman’s duties, the maternal function.” In condemning women—particularly elite white women—who avoided their “maternal duties” either completely or through limiting pregnancies, American physicians used their professional authority to give legitimacy to racial and gendered hierarchies.