Between 1845 and 1849, Dr. J. Marion Sims operated on at least twelve enslaved women in a small hospital behind his house in Montgomery. He was attempting to repair vesicovaginal fistulas, a painful complication of childbirth. The women had no choice in the matter -- they were property, loaned to Sims by their enslavers. He performed the surgeries without anesthesia, guided by the false belief that Black people did not experience pain the way white people did. Anarcha endured at least thirty of these operations before Sims succeeded in closing the fistulas in her bladder and rectum. Lucy and Betsey suffered repeated procedures as well. Sims parlayed his techniques into fame, moving to New York City and earning the title "father of gynecology." For more than a century, statues of Sims stood in public squares. The women he cut open were unnamed footnotes.

Montgomery artist Michelle Browder spent years gathering the raw materials for the monument. She put out a public call for discarded metal objects -- old tools, machine parts, scrap iron -- and used them to construct the three figures. The symbolism was deliberate: "to symbolize how Black women have been treated and to demonstrate the beauty in the broken and discarded." Each statue carries specific meaning. Anarcha's figure includes a womb, created by Montgomery artist Deborah Shedrick, discarded at her side and filled with sharp objects representing the pain she endured and the bondage these women suffered. Betsey's statue is pregnant and wears a crown made of speculums -- the gynecological instrument some historians attribute to Sims's experiments. Lucy's hair is styled in Bantu knots made of bicycle chains, symbolizing both her African heritage and her enslavement.

The monument's location is no accident. It stands near the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the nation's memorial to victims of lynching, in a city that was both the first capital of the Confederacy and a cradle of the civil rights movement. For decades, Montgomery maintained a statue of J. Marion Sims. In New York City, a statue of Sims stood in Central Park until it was removed in 2018 after years of protest. The Mothers of Gynecology Monument flips the script. Instead of honoring the doctor, it honors the patients. Instead of celebrating a medical breakthrough, it names the human cost. Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey were teenagers when Sims began operating on them. Their full stories remain largely lost to history -- they were enslaved people whose lives were not considered worth recording in detail. The monument insists on their presence anyway.

The monument was unveiled on September 24, 2021, drawing national attention. The Washington Post, Smithsonian Magazine, and NPR covered the dedication. Browder's vision extends beyond the statues themselves -- she has planned a museum and clinic at the site to continue honoring the women and addressing healthcare disparities in the Black community. The three figures stand on a quiet street in Montgomery, visible against the sky, made from the things people threw away. They are deliberately monumental in scale. Browder chose their heights so that visitors must look up -- a reversal of the power dynamic that defined Anarcha's, Lucy's, and Betsey's lives. In a city thick with history, where Confederate monuments and civil rights landmarks exist in uneasy proximity, these three steel women add another layer to the conversation about who gets remembered, and how.