In this blog, Commissioning Editor Michael Stockwell reviews a new edited collection about the feminist academic blog, Nursing Clio, edited by the Nursing Clio Editorial Collective.
The Nursing Clio Reader: Histories of Sex, Reproduction, and Justice is a bold anthology, deeply attuned to the global political challenges of the present moment. The edited collection brings together a curated mix of past and present posts from the Nursing Clio blog, each one reading like a short essay. Collectively, these blogs explore the complex histories of sexuality, reproduction, and justice from a wide range of perspectives. Drawing on historical research and personal testimony, these essays offer nuanced insights into reproductive health.
Published in 2025 as part of Rutgers University Press’s “Critical Issues in Health and Medicine” series, this book stems from Nursing Clio, an online platform well known for connecting historical scholarship with contemporary debates.
At its core, the book is grounded in the principle that “the personal is historical.” The editorial team uses this idea to link historical research with present-day issues, extending the feminist assertion that “the personal is political” by showing its historical roots. It does so by weaving together personal narratives, historical research, and social critique. As a result, readers can see how past struggles over bodies, sexuality, and reproductive autonomy continue to shape contemporary political and lived realities today. By grounding present-day debates in historical analysis, the collection exposes how struggles over sex and reproduction have long been shaped by power, inequality, and state control.
Within the current socio-political climate (2025–26) we face a global order that is rolling back reproductive rights and LGBTQ+ protections. Furthermore moral panics around gender and sexuality are being used with increasing regularity for political gain, as well as to advance racist and ethno-nationalist agendas. It is in this context that Histories of Sex, Reproduction, and Justice offers critical and much needed historical perspective. The book claims this space by shining light on how similar arguments – about morality, social order, and “natural” roles – have been used throughout history to justify coercive policies and social exclusion. By doing so, this compilation challenges any claims that today’s conflicts are unprecedented or inevitable, instead revealing them as part of recurring patterns of resistance and repression.
The edited collection is organised into thematic sections – including sex, contraception, pregnancy, abortion, loss, childbirth, violence, and justice – each introduced by specialists from the Nursing Clio Editorial Collective who provide context and position the essays in broader historical dialogues. This structure moves readers from more expansive political and cultural frameworks into intimate, human stories that illuminate how power, medicine, race, gender, and law have intersected across history.
One this book’s standout features is its diversity of voices – both in subject matter and the backgrounds of authors. Contributors range from seasoned historians to emerging voices, and essays address a wide spectrum of topics from sex education and contraceptive technologies to colonial reproductive politics, maternal loss, and obstetric violence. This breadth provides readers with opportunities to grow their understanding of these topics in a scholastic soil rich in both well-studied and overlooked historical moments in reproductive history in the United States and further abroad.
As a contributing editor for VIDA: Blog of the Australian Women’s History Network, I was especially drawn to how the book tackles difficult and confronting histories. Essays candidly addressed challenging topics such as forced sterilisation or the racialisation of postpartum mental illness. From my perspective, the authors seemed determined not to sanitise their narratives. They openly exposed the injustices that have shaped access to bodily autonomy in all their sordid and objectionable detail. This commitment to the truth is congruent with our approach here at VIDA, and I applaud Nursing Clio for being uncompromising in their position.
One essay I found particularly interesting was “Sister Mariana’s Spyglass: The Unreliable Ghost of Female Desire in a Convent Archive” by Anna Weerasinghe. It examines the case of Sister Mariana de Jesus, a young nun in colonial Goa, accused in archbishop’s records of spying on monks. Authorities also recorded that she exchanged notes, which they interpreted as evidence of female sexual desire. Instead of just telling a scandalous story, the essay looks at how historians read biased archives to understand women’s experiences. It highlights both what’s missing and the small traces of their voices in convent records.
Another blog I found compelling was “On Mothers Who Kill and the Racialization of Postpartum Mental Illness” by Udodiri R. Okwandu. The essay explores how postpartum mental illness and maternal violence have been interpreted through race in United States history. It shows how psychiatric ideas treated white, middle-class motherhood as the norm, while labeling mothers of colour as abnormal or deviant. By examining cases where mothers killed, or were accused of killing, their children, Okwandu shows how medical and legal systems reinforced racial ideas about “good” and “bad” mothers. These ideas shaped how maternal mental illness was understood and treated.
As an academic blog editor I also appreciated how accessible the book makes scholarly writing. While the book’s perspective might be unfamiliar to many readers, the Nursing Clio Editorial Collective presents it in a way that will resonate with academics, students and the curious layperson interested in how this genre of history informs current debates around reproductives rights and justice more broadly. This approach reflects the very purpose of an academic blog and, captures this moment in time where academic blogging holds a recognised and valued place in broader scholarly discourse.
What I take from this book is the simple and powerful truth that history matters – profoundly so. As George Santayana famously observed, “those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it”. This warning feels especially relevant in 2025–26, when hard-won advances in sexual and reproductive rights are increasingly at risk of being recast from sites of collective victory into convenient scapegoats for resurgent, long-standing prejudices and bigotry.
Michael Stockwell is a PhD candidate with the Centre for Heritage and Culture, and the School of Law and Justice at the University of Southern Queensland. He has a background in hospitality, classical music, education and law and works in the law and IAS departments at the University of Southern Queensland. His doctoral research investigates the prosecution, persecution and vilification of homosexual men in Queensland during the Bjelke-Petersen era and how the experiences in their formative years affect their willingness to engage with legal and administrative systems later in life. After initially beginning his tenure at the Australian Women’s History Network as an intern in 2024, he has since become a Commissioning Editor working under Managing Editors Dr Paige Donaghy and Dr Ana Stevenson.
Copyright remains with individual authors who grant VIDA holding a perpetual, world-wide, royalty free and non-exclusive license to use, distribute, reproduce and promote content. For permission to re-publish any VIDA blog post, in whole or in part, please contact the managing editors at auswhn@gmail.com.au