Research

Johanna Schoen's major interests are the history of women and medicine, the history of reproductive rights, and the history of sexuality. Her research traces women’s health and reproductive care through the twentieth century. Her recent book, Choice and Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare, examines the role which birth control, sterilization, and abortion played in public health debates and public welfare policy between the 1920s and the 1970s. Various reproductive technologies offered the state the opportunity to establish some control over motherhood, the family, and the sexual lives of women, especially minority and poor women. At the same time, though, these technologies also offered poor and minority women the chance to control their reproduction.

In 2002, she shared her research on the history of eugenic sterilization in North Carolina with a journalist from the Winston Salem Journal. North Carolina's sterilization program ran from the 1920s to the 1970s and led to the sterilization of more than 8000 people. The paper ran a week-long series of articles on the subject (http://againsttheirwill.journalnow.com/) which ultimately resulted in an official apology by the governor of North Carolina and the appointment of a commission which has since recommended reparations to those sterilized under the program.

Her current work traces the history of abortion and women’s reproductive health care from the late 1960s to the present. She is working with abortion providers around the country, including the Emma Goldman Clinic in Iowa City, the National Women’s Health Organization, and the Crist Clinic for Women in North Carolina. In addition, she is arranging and organizing the papers of Dr. Takey Crist, an OBGYN in North Carolina, who donated his papers to the Duke Women’s Archive. Her work has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Arts and Humanities Initiative, the American Philosophical Society, and the NEH.

She received her PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1996 and holds a joint appointment in the Women's Studies Program.