Article Summary by Matty Hemming

This essay offers an analysis of Nella Larsen’s Harlem Renaissance novel, Quicksand, within the context of Larsen’s career as a nurse. I consider what thinking about the author’s experience of public health nursing and nurse training in the early twentieth-century does to our understanding of her novel’s portrayal of reproductive healthcare and motherhood. I suggest that Larsen’s depiction of Black motherhood rejects racist and classist ideas about “good” or “bad” motherhood and pushes against many of the professional norms of early twentieth-century nursing and social work.

Read the article on the Medical Humanities journal website.

Matty Hemming holds a PhD in English and Gender and Sexuality Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. Her first book project examines how transatlantic writers intervened in reproductive politics by detailing how racism and classism affected minoritized people’s access to reproductive healthcare across the twentieth century. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the James Baldwin Review, QED: A Journal of Queer Worldmaking, Criticism, and the Routledge Companion to Queer Literary Studies. As of fall 2024, Matty will be the Janice G. Doty Lecturer in the Medical Humanities at Rice University.