Deirdre Cooper Owens

Deirdre Cooper Owens is an American historian and reproductive rights activist known for her 2017 book Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology. She is an associate professor at the University of Connecticut. Biography Deirdre Cooper Owens was born to a National Archives and Records Administration employee father and a genealogist mother and raised in Anacostia, a neighborhood in southeastern Washington D.C. Descending from South Carolina Lowcountry Gullahs on both her parents' sides,

As an academic, Cooper Owens specializes in African-American history, particularly history of medicine. In 2017, she published Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology, a book on the exploitation of Black women in 19th-century gynecology; she won the 2018 Darlene Clark Hine Award for said book. In 2024, she was a contributor to the volume Roe v. Wade: Fifty Years After, a volume on the United States abortion-rights movement.

Cooper Owens is an advocate for reproductive justice, having worked with organizations in combating Black maternal mortality in the United States.