Just today a piece I wrote about the White House Vegetable Garden went live on the Washington Post's website! 

In case you've been missing out on some of the best historical writing out there today, you should be sure to check out Made by History, a column dedicated to bringing history to bear upon current events at the Washington Post. Since August 2017, they've been busy publishing brief takes from brilliant historians on a wide variety of topics. Personal favorites include: 

• "Good Corporate Citizenship Won't End Racism: The NFL Must Do More" by Jessica Levy, 
  
• The dirty (and racist) origins of Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant slur: How the connection between race and waste shapes not only slurs but policy and economics by Carl Zimring,
  
• The Real Scandal at the EPA? It's not keeping us safe by Frederick Rowe Davis.
• Ida B. Wells Offere the Solution to Police Violence More Than 100 Years Ago The By Keisha N. Blain

As the (brilliant and generous) editors Brian Rosenwald and Nicole Hemmer write:  "In order to make history, we first have to understand how history has made us."

Historians write with the hopes that someone will someday read their work – and perhaps even enjoy it. Strong, compelling, and jargon-free writing is crucial to reaching both academics and the wider public. Still, few graduate programs have classes dedicated to the art of writing; most historians teach themselves through trial, error, and isolating hours of self-critique punctuated by feedback from a trusted mentor or friend. At ASEH each year, panel discussions parse arguments, methodology, and interpretation, helping the panelists to write good history.  This session hopes to spark broader conversations among environmental historians about how to write good history well.
 
This session will feature former ASEH President Dr. Steven Pyne, who has taught graduate courses in nonfiction writing and conducted other writing workshops. Through discussion of writing-in-progress, Dr. Pyne will explore and develop the literary dimensions of historical writing. Attendees will be given the chance to participate, asking questions and weighing in on how historical writing can become not just functional text, but readable narrative.
 
The ASEH Graduate Student Caucus is pleased to present a professional development workshop appropriate for both the undergraduate student and the senior professional historian. Three or four short papers will serve as the focal point of discussion; attendees are encouraged to read the papers beforehand. There will be copies at the door, but papers will also be distributed to any interested parties before the meeting; prospective attendees should email anastasiaday@me.com .

Join us on Saturday at 1:30 PM, Room MR-1!
​(Image links to complete conference program PDF)

I cried a lot my first semester of graduate school. Some of my tears were from rewatching emotional episodes of Scrubs, some were from loneliness, some were from imposter syndrome, and some were because I actually was significantly underprepared for certain elements of graduate school. Among the most bitter tears were those that made me question my commitment to history as a discipline, my belief in understanding the past as a way of shaping a better future.

My first semester of graduate school, I took a (wonderful, incredible, amazing) course entitled Cultures of Consumption. Over the semester, I learned in greater depth than ever before how every single purchase I made that enabled me to live, to get to campus, to complete my coursework, to stay warm and fed and clothed, all contributed to deep social, economic, and political inequities. 

I bought organic produce when I thought I could afford it . . . but not always.

​I avoided animal products when I could . . . but eggs were such a cheap, easy, and delicious form of protein.

I still bought avocados from across the globe when they went on sale.

​I still purchased breads and pasta undoubtedly full of GMO monoculture crops harvested with machines bought with the help of government subsidies that help kill family farms and dependent on an underclass of migrant labor. There were better purchasing choices available to me that I did not always take advantage of.

Here I was, a ludicrous exaggeration of the informed citizen. I had a boatload of privileges that enabled me to get to graduate school, to accrue knowledge and think critically, and still I found I could not implement basic changes in my lifestyle based on my historical knowledge. What hope could I have for an America full of people with less privilege, fewer choices, and more constraints? Could it be that education is not enough, that in fact, more knowledge could make *no difference at all* in people's actions? 

I've come a long way.

I'm still not a perfectly ethical consumer.

However, today, in the age of Trump, I have more faith than ever in the power of history. I've come to understand that it's not always the little things we do to get through the day that show history's grip on us, but the bigger arc of our lives, values, and (yes) our votes.

I've spent a lot less time judging myself and others. Relying on small, individual actions to save the world in the vein of 50 Ways To Help the Planet is great for the daily conscience, but more fundamental personal reorientations and systemic solutions are required. Virtue-signaling cannot save the world.

I've spent more time listening. The truth is, history does inform daily lives and actions. 99% of the time, when you listen to pundits, or even everyday people, the arguments they make about society, economics, and politics ARE a historical argument. 

Too often, along both sides of the aisle and many points along many political spectrums, the histories people cling to are fictitious, invented, and purely self-serving. Nonetheless, I take comfort that this betrays a fundamental truth: people find history important and validating. Everyday Americans consider history essential evidence in constructing their self-image and identities, whether they realize it consciously or not.

Even if they are using history for hateful ends.

Even if they aren't engaging with historical facts.

Even when it seems like history is some great game of madlibs where you get to insert your own values to see the story you want to see.

But I see this as an opening--one that I have the privilege to be able to wedge further open, because I present as a non-threatening, educated, middle-class white person (even if I am steamrolled by mansplainers from time to time).
​
History does matter to people. This helps keep me writing, researching, talking about history, and believing that the work I do everyday matters. This is one reason why I am a historian.

Now, I'm not saying I would or could be an award-winning mathematician if it weren't for Mr. Dryer.

I am saying that I am a classic case study in social forces that cause us to have fewer female students in STEM -- and my story is one of the more positive ones! I never experienced sexual harassment or any of the associated discomfort that so often can come with being a female in male-dominated spaces. My supportive and brilliant advisor in Philosophy was male (as were my advisors in the majors I nearly completed in Classics and English). I had examples at every step of the way of brilliant femme friends who were succeeding in math and science. I had parents who encouraged me unconditionally and wanted only the best for me.

But now, even in history, I still experience occasional problems related to my gender. I continue to have "disagreements" with senior male historians who "don't believe" my numerical claims, taken straight from archival research in government sources. While sometimes it is intellectually flattering, it is often distinctly gendered when people are surprised that my 'garden history' touches on 'big' issues of political-economy, capitalism in midcentury America, and doesn't confine itself to social history topics like gender and the home. (I have talked to multiple male historians of gardens who have not shared these experiences.) I have missed out on a significant professional opportunity almost certainly because I declined a date with an influential older male historian. I have suffered from negative student feedback linked to gender.

But I'm not just complaining, I'm working to fix it. As always, I'm proud to be part of the American Society for Environmental History, actively working to tackle gender bias in its ranks, and to serve on the ASEH Committee reviewing the report on this problem (pictured left). I'm also a proud member of the Coordinating Council for Women in History and do my best to support and highlight my brilliant peers of all genders, races, ethnicities, and backgrounds.

All this is to say: screw James Dalmore, the latest New York Times article (that I refuse to link to and give hits), and anyone who claims that we need to seriously consider any arguments for biological differences in STEM aptitude, or aptitude in any human endeavor. We can have those discussions someday on the basis of good science (hopefully produced by female-identifying scientists in equal measure) only once we have removed the social barriers standing in the way of so many brilliant women, minorities, and other underrepresented groups. Prove your specious arguments by making opportunity truly equal and watching what happens. Until then, I really don't want to hear it.

This labor day, I have little time for this blog because I need to get back to my own hard work writing and producing scholarship, but I wanted to take a moment to push everyone to think more expansively this labor day.  Lots of people are celebrating the "8 hours" campaign of the nineteenth century and using it to think not only about the problems of unionized labor today (especially in service industries!) but also work-life balance in the age of smart-phones. (Are we ever truly 'off the clock' when we are attached to our work emails 24/7?)

But I wanted to raise a couple of other contemporary issues to think about this Labor Day. Some of these are rooted in the problematic history of the labor movement itself that we celebrate today; unions often served to protect hierarchies of race, class, and gender in history, even as they claimed to be committed to undermining these inequities. (While my linked examples are from World War II, the history of the American Federation of Labor encapsulates this story well on a longer historical timeline.) Service labor falls clearly within the legacy of labor that is classed, raced, and gendered in ways that have made it often  fall outside the protected interests of nineteenth and twentieth century labor movement. Here are some topics to chew on.

• Undocumented Immigrant Labor. While we should absolutely continue fights to raise the minimum wage to reach above poverty-levels, let us not forget to fight for the %5 of the nation's workforce who are undocumented and cannot expect even minimum wage, basic safety and other workplace rights, and may not feel they can safely file grievances or advocate for themselves. Our economy depends on these workers, most of all in our food systems; their below-poverty wages or even slavery subsidizes the cheap foods that some Americans still cannot afford.

​

• Child Labor. Nope, not a thing of the past even here in the U.S., as the Human Rights Watch is documenting. Written into the very Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 -- and uncorrected since then -- is a MAJOR loophole. Functionally, the Act only sets strict limits on the "non-agricultural" labor of children and provides no oversight mechanisms for youth labor on farms. Check out this particularly heart-breaking example from World War II:

• Environmental risks to labor -- in agriculture and elsewhere. The data is adding up, although people (and the environment!) have been experiencing the deleterious effects of industrial, chemical-intensive agriculture for years. We need to not only be worried about the pesticides in the food we *eat,* but also about the workers who are exposed to those pesticides much more directly in the fields, day in and day out. Let's move beyond the consumer-centric-mindset when we think about reforming our food systems and we may just wind up with agriculture that is good for everyone: producers, workers, consumers, and the planet.

This image captures the intersection of these three themes perfectly; I snapped a pic of this photo while doing research at the National Agricultural Library, so forgive the quality. The back is captioned: "Asst. Home demonstration agent giving insect control to 4-H club members composed of Mexican girls, Wharton County, Texas. (1939). Too often, well-intentioned efforts to 'uplift' and 'improve' the lives of labor have been coming from the top-down, with all the blind spots and flaws that includes, whether in the USDA or in a union. 

In short, just because agricultural jobs are shrinking in number doesn't mean that agricultural labor doesn't matter. Whenever you eat food, you are implicated in these broken systems. Because the problems are so endemic, I don't think it will be as clear-cut as a boycott of a single company or product; although these can be effective stages of a larger resistance, as demonstrated by Cesar Chavez with his Grapes of Wrath boycott. 

​Let's think beyond the consumer-centric mindset to also include workers and producers when we try to reform our foodways. If we include those who grow and harvest our food in our calculus of what makes for a sustainable food systems -- and equitable labor systems -- then we just might end up with a society that is better for everyone, and for the environment too. Next labor day, I want to see more complex representations of labor than my google image search from this morning. Let's get to work.

Emotional Labor is something we should all be working to recognize as such -- real, actual work. The burden of this labor falls disproportionately on women, both in the workplace and outside it. If you haven't clicked through to any of my helpful links yet, you can just look to this photo from the archives for a succinct definition of what emotional labor is (and why it is such a problem when we don't compensate it accordingly):

I kicked off very busy and exciting June this year with a trip to Bologna, Italy where I had the fantastic opportunity to feel like the least interesting, least brilliant person in the room for discussions of some of my favorite historical topics. If there's a better way to start a summer, I don't know of it! 
​
This May 30 and 31, I was lucky enough to be one of twelve invited participants at a workshop sponsored by the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society entitled "Household Consumption and Environmental Change in the Twentieth Century." 

Over the course of two days, the twelve participants engaged in panel presentations, lively discussion, and great eating, guided by the two workshop conveners: Giacomo Parrinello of the Paris Institute for Political Studies and Paolo Capuzzo of our host institution, the University of Bologna. The conversations they sparked began with some of the most pressing questions for historians and modern-day policy writers alike. To quote the conference webpage: 

While you can find complete program here, Giacomo recently wrote up a report of the proceedings:

While every single facet of this conference was incredible, here are a few of the things that left the biggest impact on me and my thinking.
​First, the panel I presented on was incredible. I found myself of being in the curious position of talking about trash compactors while other panelists talked about gardens! 

Michelle Mart's probing exploration of local food in the American late twentieth century included an examination the historical legacy of Victory Gardens and their impact on contemporary valuations of 'local food,' much to my delight -- I cannot wait to read the book that comes out of her research.

​Elisa Tizzoni, on the other hand, traced ideas of sustainability through women's food magazines in Italian history -- a lens that rounds out more mainstream gender, labor, and domesticity analyses of women's popular periodicals!

Daniel Philippon, with his meditation on "Kitchens of the Great Anthropocene" also used tools of literary analysis to pose questions about sustainability, but centering on the kitchen and the act of preparing food. This paper reminded me anew that good analysis is made breathtaking when paired with thoughtful, literary writing -- not hidden by it!

I contributed to the conversation by sharing an object biography of what I present as a technological failure: the residential trash compactor. While the reasons for its failure are myriad (issues of repair, energy use, smell, creation of heavier trips taking garbage out to the sidewalk, etc.), more interesting to me are the reasons for its invention and early popularity. I think that the life of the trash compactor reveals a complicated story about American's relationship to their own generation of household waste -- and the various ways they grappled with guilt about the act of disposal.

Other highlights included revelations about how municipal water supply systems and the consumers they served co-created modern standards of hygiene and bathing practices, in a paper from Nina Lokowski. In short, Sunday bathing-days originally stemmed from efficiency of effort in heating water over the kitchen stove; with the advent of municipal hot water systems under different energy regimes, there grew an incentive to change bathing patterns to be more evenly distributed across the week to keep the supply constant. 

Finally, two papers made novel uses of unusual sources for telling their histories, affecting my thoughts about methodology and ways of telling stories about the past. First, Rebecca Wright opened my eyes to the amazing environment/consumption history research possibilities -- and problems! -- within the Mass Observation Archive. The archive was generated by sociological observations of British life starting in 1937 and truly, you should read read more about this massively strange and wonderful phenomenon.

On the other hand, Nina Möllers from the Deutsches Museum of Munich, Germany, presented an analysis of museum exhibits that made meaning out of the silences therein; she argued the environment was an 'invisible issue' in exhibits on energy and the home. I love critical examinations of museum practices as a growing genre of historical writing and this paper gave me a new way to think about how I might be able to use such evidence in innovative ways.

This workshop had at its very center the issue of scale -- how can we view the global environment through the lens of a single household's consumption? This question of scale is, I think, central to the entire environmentalist movement, and not just us historians. How *is* the individual or the household connected to the whole? How can historians help us clarify these complex connections across scales? How can environmentalists make people see global warming in action every time they turn on the car in their driveway -- and also when they cast their vote in national elections?  

I think this workshop drew attention to the tensions between individual, structural, institutional, and natural agency in ways that would enrich the work of any historian -- or any policy-maker in our twenty-first century halls of government. These conversations will surely inform my own work for years to come.

I must end on a note of gratitude to the Rachel Carson Center for sponsoring this wonderful workshop, to Giacomo and Paulo for organizing it, and to all my fellow participants for sharing their wonderful work, explaining an aperol spritz to me, and giving me fantastic feedback for how to move my project forward. Let's do it again sometime!

In 1944, Betty Peek from Macon County, North Carolina was the high-school division champion of the national "Green Thumb" contest, sponsored by the National Victory Garden Institute.

​Only 15 years old, Betty worked a garden 50 by 100 feet. She received a silver medal for winning the state contest and then a $500 war bond for her national championship. When asked what advice she would give other victory gardeners, she responded:

"​Plan your garden, work to those plans, have the determination to carry your plans to completion, and conserve what you grow."
["High- and Grade-School Garden Champion Reports," Education for Victory, April 20, 1945.]

I should have listened to Betty last garden season: while I began with a plan, the plan never took into account my household's food needs, succession plantings, even distribution of labor over the summer, or the labor of conserving and cooking the food after harvest. 

This year, I was determined to do better.
I was going to plan early, plan well, and plan hard.
I was going to plan for everything, just like Betty told me to.

Of course, before planning my garden, I needed to plan my work and writing. I was lucky enough to be the recipient of a Smithsonian Institution Fellowship earlier this spring. I thought to myself that perhaps I could schedule my research around the garden season -- or perhaps be a 'weekend gardener,' dashing up to Delaware to oversee my plants in between weekdays in the archives.

Much to my delight I then received another fellowship offer (also four months long) at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in downtown Philadelphia! I couldn't be more excited to join the amazing community there of museum professionals,  scholars, and #twitterstorians.  While in residence, I'll be researching how industrial agricultural chemicals developed and then entered the domestic space of the garden in World War II as well as using their amazing archives to flesh out other aspects of my dissertation already in progress.

Between my two residency commitments - and a June that involves three conferences for me! - I just didn't see how the garden was going to come together for me, or how my experiment could continue for the 2017 season.

All my plans to plan my garden were in disarray. I didn't know how to schedule garden success while facing a year of amazing research opportunities far afield from my backyard patch.

Luckily, and to my great delight, I can still garden even if I couldn't go 'all out for victory.' In fact, my husband expressed a desire to plan the garden himself! Therefore, while I struggled to make up for work-time lost to illness this winter, Tim planned, fenced, and began planting the garden. It turns out he had a lot of opinions about vegetables I didn't take into account last year:

• To compensate for a year with no brussels sprouts (the few I planted in an odd corner were eaten by rodents!), Tim has planned almost 20 feet of them.  
• Apparently the late-season discovery that all of the corn I planted was POPCORN was not a pleasant one for Tim. This year, he is planning on an abundance of sweet corn to eat fresh out of the garden. (I don't understand how any other version of corn could be preferable to popcorn, but that's a rant for another time...)
• Green beans took more effort harvesting than Tim derived enjoyment out of eating, so I am signing on to support him in a garden with NO GREEN BEANS planned. (!)

I still aim to work the garden, but more in the role of children shipped from their urban schools out to the countryside to help with labor shortages than in the role of garden manager, as in last year. I have big plans for the Victory Garden of 2018, but this season's priority is to grow the chapters of my dissertation.

... And, of course, spend lots of time getting lost in the Smithsonian & Chemical Heritage Foundation collections!

Starting this summer, Anastasia Day will spend four months in residence in D.C. as a Smithsonian Institution Fellow at the National Museum of American History. Anastasia is currently Hagley Scholar and doctoral student in history at the University of Delaware working with department chair Arwen Mohun. This Fellowship will allow her to continue researching and writing her dissertation project, entitled  “Productive Plots: Nature, Nation, and Industry in the Victory Gardens of the U.S. World War II Home Front.”

​ Anastasia’s project is an analysis of World War II home front victory gardens in light of developments in agriculture, industry, and society. In 1943, over 21 million of these small vegetable plots produced over 40% of Americans’ fresh produce. Up to two-thirds of citizens participated, making victory gardening the most successful local food movement in U.S. history. Popular memory cites victory gardens as inspiration for sustainable, grassroots food activism today, but her scholarship focuses on factory metaphors of industrial production within this movement.  While at the Smithsonian, she plans to consult such archival collections as the Warshaw Collection of Business Ephemera, the records of the War Production Board, The Princeton University Poster Collection, the Pete Claussen Collection of American Flag Magazine Covers, and also the Smithsonian’s own history of interpreting victory gardens in the longstanding “Within These Walls” exhibit on the U.S. World War II home front experience.

In the long run, Anastasia seeks to publish this project as a book aimed at both public and academic audiences. Examining World War II victory gardens, the most successful local food movement in American history, can provide valuable lessons for the future, she argues – and not only for growing sustainable food systems, but thinking about the relationship between state and society, between government and business, and between food and the environment in American culture.
​
​The Smithsonian Institution is the world’s largest museum and research complex, with 19 museums and galleries and the National Zoological Park. On July 1, 1836, Congress accepted the legacy bequeathed to the nation by James Smithson and pledged the faith of the United States to the charitable trust. The total number of objects, works of art and specimens at the Smithsonian is estimated at nearly 138 million, including more than 127 million specimens and artifacts at the National Museum of Natural History. Smithsonian Institution Fellows are key to the Smithsonian’s aspiration to discover, create, innovate and diversify. The Smithsonian’s vast collections, numerous facilities, and staff expertise provide an incredible range of opportunities for independent research. Smithsonian Institution Fellows receive stipends from the central fund and can be found in all areas of the Smithsonian exploring, probing and charting new directions. 

If you would like more information about this Smithsonian Internships, Fellowships, and Research Associates, please contact the Office of Fellowships and Internships at 202-633-7070 or check out their website smithsonianofi.com

Back in the fall, with thanks to funding for research from the Hagley Program at the University of Delaware, I was lucky enough to travel to Detroit to conduct some dissertation research.

“Detroit?,” you say, “But I thought you studied garden history!”
​

Perhaps surprisingly, the origins of American urban gardening are smack dab in the Mayor’s office of Motor City. While I was there primarily for World War II records, part of Detroit's importance in my project comes from a much earlier story :

In short, Mayor Hazen S. Pingree of Detroit began modern urban gardening projects with a radical municipal initiative in 1893.

A former union soldier and escapee from a confederate prisoner camp in the Civil War, Pingree was a cobbler by trade. These humble origins lent credence to his self styling as a citizen-reformer committed to fighting municipal corruption when first elected Mayor in 1890. 

All was going more of less well for Pingree and Detroit in the battle against bribery, when suddenly for obscure reasons linked to the gold standard, investment in Argentinian banks, and a widespread lack of calm heads, the Panic of 1893 sent the United States into a severe and rapid depression. Unemployment in Michigan leapt up to 43%, and Detroit was particularly hard-hit, as a regional center for industry and banking. Pingree was apparently destraught to see so much suffering among the unemployed, and people cried out for the municipal government to do something about it already!

[Anecdotally, protestors literally stood outside city hall chanting "Bread or Blood!"]

Luckily, Pingree had a novel solution. It was cheap, it was easy to implement. Finally, the vast majority of labor was provided by the recipients of the program, which served the double purpose of:

1. 1) Saving municipal salary dollars AND
2. 2) Teaching the unemployed about moral value of hard work, of course.
3. The program was patronizingly refered to as "Relief by Work" and prospective donors to the program were assured it was only the "worthy poor" would participate and benefit.

The answer? (you guessed it): urban gardens.

Across the city, vacant lots and unused acres of land were plowed up and divided into plots. By applying to the Mayor's office, unemployed males could secure a plot for their own use, to grow food in for their families. For many Detroiters who participated in the program, it meant the diference between their children going hungry or not. This was especially true since anyone recieving aid from the city's Poor Commission would become ineligible for said aid if they did not also sign up for and cultivate a garden plot: if you were going to get handouts, you had better do some work growing your own food to earn it.

Despite the early-Progressive-Era condescension and coercion wrapped into the program, it was a huge success in every possible sense. the first season, Pingree was able to secure 430 acres of land within city limits, which provided plots for 945 families. The citizens of Detroit who benefited from the program wrote letters to City Hall expressing their thanks (most imperfectly or illegibly, since many of them had little education). Most of the unemployed were recent German and Polish immigrants, grateful to this new Mayor and this new program. Beyond the proverbial potatoes, they grew all sorts of vegetables: beans, corn, squash, cabbage, carrots, pumpkins, beets, cucumbers, and more. The city's street sweepings were used as fertilizer, combining the garden program with city sanitation efforts. Newspapers far and wide praised "the Detroit Experiment."

The success of the potato patches played no small role in Pingree’s election as governor of Michigan, serving from 1896 to 1901. Although he did great things as governor, it was the people of Detroit that he helped feed with potatoes that immediately petitioned for a statue of him in Detroit after his death in 1901; three years and 5,000 individual contributions later (most under a dollar), the statue was unveiled in May of 1904, acclaiming him
                                        “THE IDOL OF THE PEOPLE.”

Although the 'potato patch' program was discontinued as the economy recovered, Detroit would again turn to its legacy in future times of crisis. During the Great Depression, cities across the country copied Detroit's early example in starting up what were then called 'Thrift Gardens';  in World War II, as Americans fought to protect liberty at home and abroad, Detroiters again had robust urban gardens. Not only did the city support gardens, in fact, but many war plants within and outside the booming industrial city offered garden plots on their factory campuses for workers and their families. Today, the Michigan Urban Farming Initiative again is walking in Pingree's footsteps, promoting urban gardening as a way for Detroiters to combat the ills of post-industrialization.

Far from becoming irrelevant as the years role by, and as Detroiters reading this may well know, Potato Patch Pingree’s legend persists into the twenty-first century; he was called “the greatest mayor in Detroit history” in the Detroit Free Press as recently as 2015. ​​

In addition to my research in the archives and the websites linked that provided the pictures, there are few scholarly works addressing Pingree's Patches. For this brief post I largely relied on a recent unpublished dissertation: ​Joseph Stanhope Cialdella, “Gardens in the Machine: Cultural and Environmental Change in Detroit, 1879-2010” (Doctor of Philosophy (American Culture), University of Michigan, 2015).

As everyone  in academia knows, the work never ends. There is always SOMETHING more you can do. Ditto for resistance under the current political regime. Being largely sedentary and unable to attend the marches in the weeks of chaos following the inauguration was frustrating beyond belief.

But this medical mishap made me re-evaluate what I can and cannot handle -- physically, mentally, and emotionally. Burn-out helps no one. Self-care is not optional, but necessary for function. 

To fill the hole left by running and my exercise routine until I am fit again, I have started an eight-week online self-administered Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course. I'm meditating for a half hour (most) days, absorbing the assigned readings and videos, and spending intentional time taking care of myself. I'm saying no to events and tasks that are optional. I'm trying to go on walks a little bit longer or farther each day.

​ I'm trying to listen to myself--mind and body.

I spent my morning in the hospital asserting again and again that no, I've never been a smoker and do not smoke, I have no family history of clotting problems, no recent kidney infections, etc. I was told what this meant in the afternoon: barring the discovery of a latent genetic disorder at my follow-up appointments in March, the only explanation for why a healthy 26 year old woman would have pulmonary emboli was the synthetic estrogen in my birth control. 

At that moment, history became real and present. In my body, I realized I was experiencing the cumulative effects of decades, even centuries, of history.  The long series of political, social, economic, and scientific choices that made women responsible for birth control rather than men, that made it necessary for women to risk their lives to maintain control of their reproduction, that created systems of knowledge and power where I and hundreds of thousands of other women have no idea that our chances of getting a blood clot on birth control is as high as 1 in 1,000 -- and doctors I have seen say their years of practice makes them suspect it could be even higher.  Still, the current FDA labels say the risk for blood clots is 3-12 per 10,000 women years  using the Nuva ring. Three in 10,000 is a vast difference from the latest clinical studies -- and the range is so wide as to discount the upper levels of probability as only those who smoke, have family histories, etc.

I fell down the rabbit-hole of research, trying to understand (and by understanding, regain control?) of what happened to me. Studies clearly show that estrogen in contraceptives is linked to venous thromboemboli, the scientific term for blood-clot events. My specific clotting event was in my lungs and pulmonary system; according to a Surgeon General's report from 2008, "community-based epidemiological studies suggest that roughly one in five individuals die almost immediately from PE (pulmonary emboli), while 40 percent die within 3 months."

​Despite estrogen-based birth control first hitting the market in 1960, a twenty-first century peer-reviewed article that included hormonal birth control as one of their variables notes: 

I thought back to 2011 -- I was smart, savvy. I did my research, read all the fine print of the packaging, asked doctors and read articles when I selected birth control using estrogen. I was assured as long as I wasn't a smoker and didn't have a family history, I shouldn't worry about any risks. I was privileged to have years of top-notch education, access to academic studies otherwise hidden behind paywalls, money and time to spend on a consultation doctor appointment, insurance that would help with the financial burden, and the time to weigh my options. How many women are that lucky?

The FDA pursues investigation after investigation, Merck pharmaceuticals has been sued, and mainstream outlets like NPR have occasionally followed the story over the past few years: see "Birth Control and Blood Clots: Women Still Weighing the Risks".  But I was never one of the women weighing the risks -- I didn't know them. 

This situation didn't arise overnight, and it won't disappear overnight either. As Nancy Langston notes in her book Toxic Bodies: Hormone Disruptors and the Legacy of DES,

The analogy between Langston's endocrine disruptors and birth controls isn't perfect. DES, in addition to being prescribed to mitigate morning sickness in pregnant women, was also fed to livestock within our industrial food system, for starters. Still, one particular line from Toxic Bodies has always stuck in my mind; this line sent me back to the text to process my own experiences:

"Failures of regulation are expressed not just in hearings and in court cases, but also inside our own bodies."

​Through this ordeal, I have been abruptly reminded that I am not merely a mind, but also a body. This body is physically affected by historical forces, just as social and cultural forces shape my thinking. Going forward, I'll be looking to inhabit my body more mindfully.

ADDENDUM:
Bumped from the middle to the top of my to-read list is Gabriela Soto Laveaga's Jungle Laboratories : Mexican Peasants, National Projects, and The Making of the Pill.

Does anyone have further recommendations for histories of hormonal birth control? Comment, email, or tweet!