Savannah Flanagan

Title of Dissertation:

Women’s Health in Utopia: Religious Communities and the Reimagining of Women’s Healthcare in the United States 1770-1890

Description of Dissertation:

My dissertation explores how religious communities in early America shaped women’s healthcare practices and challenged the growing authority of male-dominated medicine. 

What Faculty Say About the Impact of This Research:

“...Flanagan changes our understanding of the rise of professional women’s healthcare: The standard narrative details how women’s medical treatment was progressively taken out of the hands of female midwives by male doctors over the course of the nineteenth century. Thus, the field of gynecology and obstetrics arose in ways that often ironically disempowered women. Flanagan complicates this narrative by examining how women and men in communitarian religious societies approached women’s health in alternative ways, often involving female healers, influenced by their unique religious beliefs and practices... it raises fascinating questions about the historic associations between theological beliefs and beliefs about and care for women's bodies.”

Andrea L. Turpin, Ph.D.
Associate Professor & Graduate Program Director of History, Affiliated Faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies & Resident Scholar at Institute for Studies of Religion