As an archivist, I gain deep knowledge of people through their personal papers. I come to appreciate their senses of humor or feel moved by their personal tragedies. A decade ago, I became intrigued by a woman whose collection contains signed photographs of 1920s movie stars. Helen Hurd’s journey from Hollywood reporter to Rutgers University professor and dean fascinated me. In her 90s, she self-published an autobiography, Hurdles: My Fifty Years of Working with Men, 1929–1979 (1998). Although focused on her career and experiences in male-dominated workplaces, it also included details of her personal life, including a brief marriage in her early 20s. I admired Hurd’s spirit and humor along with her achievements, but I was disappointed in how little Hollywood there was in the book, not to mention her declaration that she wasn’t a feminist because she “like[d] men too much.”
In 2016, several years after encountering Hurd’s story, I heard an interview with author Adam Cohen on NPR’s Fresh Air. He was discussing his book Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck, about American eugenics and the 1927 Buck v. Bell U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized sterilization. Cohen described medical sterilization by salpingectomy – in which part of the fallopian tube is removed – saying “in many, many cases the women involved were not told what was being done to them. They might be told that they were having an appendectomy.”
That set off a mental ping. I had heard that story somewhere: an appendectomy that was really a sterilization, but couldn’t pin it down. The next day, I heard the program again, feeling that annoying “why do I know this?” sensation. Suddenly I knew – Helen Hurd had written about an appendectomy that wasn’t an appendectomy in her memoir. I knew I needed to go back to Hurdles to confirm my memory, in part because I was shocked this episode hadn’t registered with me when I read it.
Helen Gilchrist Hurd was born in 1903 and grew up in Missouri. Although her marriage to Jim Tureman was initially happy, his mother’s behavior caused problems. She constantly stopped by and openly disapproved of Helen. “Mother T” also suffered from mental illness and harbored an obsession that America was “full of Catholic spies from Rome,” a fear she turned toward Hurd, even though she was a Methodist.
In 1926, Hurd began experiencing health issues:
Sometime early in 1926, I fell apart. Mother T took me to her doctor, where we were told that I needed an appendectomy. I assumed it was urgent, as the doctor got me into a small hospital that afternoon and he and another doctor operated on me that evening. One thing that struck me was that neither doctor wore white uniforms; they were in their shirt sleeves and street clothes for the operation that evening.[3]