Helen Dickens and Black Women’s Health Work

• In Event: Writing in/is Progress: Black Women's Biographical Studies from Start to Finish

Description for Program

Dr. Helen Dickens’s life as a physician, mother, and wife presents a fragmented array of source material that is made visible by framing black women’s health work as space for activism from 1952-1965. Dickens did not keep a diary, also the intensity of running a hospital department, private practice, and raising a family left Dickens little time for writing. Yet by 1952, Dickens had a national reputation as an activist physician that centered black women’s health work and was featured in black newspapers/periodicals, black clubwomen’s prescriptive literature, and black medical journals. This paper highlights Dickens establishment of community health clinics that were based on previous infectious disease models and moved to working with family planning to demonstrate her framing of black women’s health work as a form of activism. This connection locates the gendering of activism within larger and longer civil rights movement struggles for health equity. Here I employ the concept of embodiment to demonstrate Dickens evolution in the creation of black women’s health work through three examples in post-war Philadelphia: “Save a Life Project,” Mercy Douglass Cancer Prevention Clinic, and Planned Parenthood Mobile Clinic. As such, I recast biography from a popular genre to being grounded in a longer tradition of African American women’s historiography.

Author

• Ameenah Shakir