Dr. Owens-Adair: Some of Her Life Experiences.
[Health issues.] Owens-Adair, Dr. Dr. Owens-Adair: Some of Her Life Experiences. (Portland, OR): Printed by Mann & Beach, [1906].
8vo.; illustrated; olive green cloth, pictorially stamped in black; spine darkened; extremities lightly worn.
Together with:
Owens Adair, Dr. B. Human Sterilization. (Np, circa 1909).
12mo.; pencil underlining to several pages; printed pictorial wrappers, rear cover lacking; spine worn.
First edition of Owens-Adair’s autobiography, together with a pamphlet published in the year in which Washington State passed an eugenic sterilization law: Underneath the portrait photo of Owens-Adair on the cover of Human Sterilization the following legend is emblazoned:: “Dr. B. Owens-Adair, Author of The Famous ‘Human Sterilization’ Bill of Oregon.” Our example of Human Sterilization is a presentation copy, inscribed on the cover: “To The New York Public Library from The Author.”
In 1880 Bethenia Angelin Owens-Adair (1840-1926) became one of the first early female doctors in the Pacific Northwest. Uneducated until her teens, she rapidly covered a good deal of academic territory after divorcing her first husband. In 1873, after six years of running a successful dressmaking and millinery shop, she traveled East, where she enrolled in the Philadelphia’s Eclectic Medical College. Though she received her degree, the dean of the College was soon after convicted of selling illegitimate medical degrees, and the school was shut down. After Owens-Adair recommenced her medical education, having first put her son through Williamette Medical College in Salem, Oregon, she received her formal M.D. in 1880 from the University of Michigan Medical School, and opened a successful practice specializing in the eye and ear maladies of women and children. As her practice thrived, her interests broadened, and her published essays addressed topics not just of medical interest, but of political interest, as well. Always an active, if not prominent, temperance and suffrage worker, and subscription agent for and regular contributor to Abigail Scott-Duniway’s New Northwest, late in life she aggressively took up the cause of eugenical human sterilization. Edwin R. Bingham writes,
In 1907, the year Indiana adopted the first sterilization law, Dr. Owens-Adair, with the endorsement of a number of physicians, proposed to both the Oregon and Washington legislatures a bill to require that “criminals, epileptics, insane, and all feeble-minded persons committed to any State institution… shall be sterilized, except such as in the judgment of a legally appointed board of examiners… are exempted.” The reaction was sharp and largely hostile. In 1909, however, the State of Washington adopted a sterilization law, and a similar bill was passed by the Oregon legislature but vetoed by the governor. She continued for a time in active leadership of the fight in Oregon and had the satisfaction of seeing the desired statute finally adopted in 1925. (NAW)
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