IN MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT Shelley’s classic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, Shelley tells the story of a brilliant and gifted scientist-physician who reaches too far in his quest for knowledge, and dares to lay his hands on the power that rightly belongs only to the gods: that of the creation of life.
Oregon history has its own Modern Prometheus. She didn’t create and animate a monster out of corpse-parts, and the product of her overreach didn’t hunt her down with vengeance on its mind. But it has cast a terrible shadow over her legacy.
Her name was Bethenia Owens-Adair; and when she died at age 86, she was one of the brightest stars of Oregon’s intellectual firmament. She was a wonder, worthy to be compared to a Titan like Prometheus; parts of her life story almost read like a frontier “tall tale” like the ones about Paul Bunyan and Casey Jones.
She had been the first female M.D. physician on the West Coast. She had worked closely with Abigail Scott Duniway to win for women the right to vote.
Dr. Bethenia Owens-Adair as she appeared about the time of her retirement in 1905. This image appeared in Joseph Gaston’s Centennial History of Oregon, published in 1912. (Image: OSU Libraries)
But she also had done more than any other person to give the state the power to forcibly sterilize anyone it thought might be genetically unfit.
Writer Catherine Aird once said, “If you can’t be a shining example, you’ll just have to be a horrible warning.”
If nothing else, the story of Dr. Bethenia Owens-Adair proves you don’t have to settle for one or the other. You can be both.
I. The spunky little pioneer girl.
OREGON’S PROMETHEUS WAS born in Missouri in 1840, and at age 2 she crossed the Oregon Trail in the Jesse Applegate wagon train — the same one Marcus Whitman joined on his return from the East Coast in 1843 (here’s a link to Whitman’s story).
Her parents worked hard, and did very well. By 1853, when they moved to Roseburg, they were quite well off. And that was the year a young bachelor named LeGrand Hill came to visit.
Hill, who was in his early 20s, fell hard for Bethenia, still just 14 years old and nowhere near finished growing.
Creepy as it sounds to the modern ear, this age spread raised no eyebrows in 1854, and when Hill asked Bethenia’s father for permission to pop The Question, there were no objections.
The young couple moved onto a 320-acre spread that LeGrand bought on credit just before the wedding. Bethenia’s father supplied a dowry that included her beloved horse Queen, along with several cows and some furniture. There was a rude log cabin on the land, mostly unchinked, with no floor and no chimney. But it was spring; they had all summer to build a proper house.
Except, LeGrand turned out to be ... well, lazy.
“Mr. Hill neither drank or used tobacco,” Bethenia recalled in her memoir, “but, as his aunt said, he simply idled away his time, doing a day's work here and there, but never continuing at anything. Then, too, he had a passion for trading and speculating, always himself coming out a loser.”
He did some work on the house; but he didn’t get much done, and by the time of the rainy season only half of the floor was finished. Then he mashed his left thumb with his hammer and, on that basis, convinced his naïve young wife that he couldn’t do any more work that season, and that they should move back in with her parents till spring.
The next year Hill sold his interest in the land back to the original seller and packed Bethenia up for the gold fields in California. To get up a stake, he sold Bethenia’s cows. But, he seems to have had no luck as a prospector.
Back in Roseburg, Hill, at the start of another summer-long shot at building a cabin on a lot furnished by Bethenia’s father, got sweet-talked into going into a brickmaking venture with a friend. The business went nowhere, and when fall came, it found Bethenia living in a tent. By now the couple had a baby, and mother and baby were soon sick with typhoid fever.
Bethenia’s parents came to the rescue again, offering another plot of land to build a house on — but deeding it to Bethenia, so that LeGrand could not sell it as he had everything else for ready money. LeGrand took this personally and dug in his heels, losing half the summer feuding about whether he should get the free land instead of Bethenia; then, spurning the offer entirely, he bought a different lot on credit and started building the house on it. So the rainy season came along and found Bethenia still living in yet another partly-built house, four years and three partly-built houses into her marriage.
“The kitchen was so open that the skunks, which were very numerous in that region at that time, came under the floor nights,” Bethenia wrote, “and up into the kitchen, where they rattled around among the pots and pans, even jumping on the table, and devouring the food, if I did not keep everything securely covered, while I often lay and listened to their nocturnal antics, not daring to get up to drive them out, as the dire consequences of disturbing them suddenly were well known, and dreaded.”
About this time Bethenia came to her parents and told them she didn’t think she could stand it much longer. LeGrand was getting increasingly abusive and seemed to think spanking the baby was the best way to get him to stop crying, and she had been sleeping rough for four years by this time and it was having a bad effect on her health.
Finally Bethenia took George and moved out.
She was 18 years old, physically sick, with a 2-year-old baby, and would soon be carrying the stigma of divorce. Plus, she was barely even literate. What could she do with the rest of her life?
If you’d asked her that, she probably would have shot back, “What can’t I do?” And if she knew you well enough, she probably would have told you her plan. Bethenia always had a plan, and she never stopped working it.
After her health returned to her as a result of a balanced diet and decent living conditions, she set about remedying the deficits that her four-year matrimonial adventure had left her. She started leaving George in the care of brothers or sisters while she went to school for remedial studies.
Her studies went well enough that a few years later, she was actually teaching a class of 16 students — two of whom were more advanced than she (“I took their books home with me, and with the help of my brother-in-law, I managed to prepare the lessons beforehand, and they never suspected my incompetence,” she wrote later).
To keep from becoming a burden on her family, she took on piecework jobs as well — sewing, laundry work, nursing, anything that would earn her a paycheck.
But her goal wasn’t a teacher’s desk. Teaching, like the piecework, was a means to an end for Bethenia. By working hard and being very thrifty, she saved up enough money to launch a millinery business (that is, a hat shop) in Roseburg.
This business became very successful, and generated enough money for her to send George to the University of California at Berkeley when he was just 14.
Once he was off to college, so was she. One of the skills she’d picked up in her life was medical — nursing was, in that age, grueling and unappreciated work, easy to get and hard to do, precisely the kind of work a driven person like Bethenia would take to fill an unexpected gap in her schedule of piecework jobs. Along the way, she discovered she liked it a lot.
But she well knew there was no future for her in nursing; to make a career of medicine, she would need her own medical practice.
So in 1870, the same year she sent George off to college, she started looking at options for obtaining a medical degree.
Her friend Dr. Hamilton, when he heard the way her thoughts were trending, was enthusiastic and supportive. He sent her home with copies of his medical textbooks to study and wished her the best.
But her initial inquiries were not encouraging. She was unable to find a mainstream medical college that would admit a woman. She would have to choose the least sketchy among the many non-mainstream medical colleges that were around in the 1800s — the ones that taught homeopathy, hydropathy, Thompsonian medicine, Hygienic medicine, Eclectic medicine, etc.
She settled on a medical school in Philadelphia which taught in the “eclectic” tradition — emphasizing botanical remedies and physical therapy. She spent a little time grooming her sister to take over the millinery business — she had to be discreet about this, because she had no support at home. Her whole family thought the idea of a woman being a doctor was close to sacrilegious.
Finally, in 1871, she traveled back east and enrolled in the Eclectic Medical College of Pennsylvania. She returned roughly two years later (medical school, in the 1870s, was somewhat less lengthy than it is today — although not necessarily less arduous, as we’ll see later!) and opened a medical practice in Roseburg while working to finalize the handoff of the millinery business.
It was a real inflection point in Bethenia Owens’ life. She had left Roseburg as Mrs. Owens, a spunky young businesswoman who’d demonstrated a willingness to work harder than any three ordinary mortals. She returned as Dr. Owens, a credentialed professional and a bit of a social lightning rod.
What hadn’t changed — what never would — was her self-confidence and the firm conviction that she was in the right, and was smart and decisive enough to carry through what she’d decided was the right thing to do.
That decisiveness was her superpower. It would lead her to the highest peaks of her profession — and then, at her very moment of triumph, stain her legacy for the next half century.
II. The Pioneer “Lady Doctor.”
THE OLD MAN had died penniless, and had left behind no relatives who could claim his corpse and give it proper burial.
But the Roseburg medical community was happy to help.
It was the early 1870s, and although the practice of medicine was making great strides, things were still relatively primitive. Dr. Robert Koch would not discover pathogenic germs for another decade. And most of the breakthroughs in the medical field came from dissecting cadavers.
Freshly bereaved family members did not care for the idea of a room full of frock-coated medical ghouls slicing up the mortal remains of their loved ones. They very seldom granted permission. So when an unclaimed body appeared, it was not an opportunity to be let slip.
There were six M.D. doctors in Roseburg at that time, and all of them had at one time or another had the old man for a patient. Now they all got together and scheduled an autopsy and dissection.
As they got ready to start, one of their number, a stiff elderly doctor by the name of Dr. Palmer, suggested that they send an invitation to “the new lady doctor” to attend.
A round of chuckles greeted this; the docs all thought it was a great idea — as a joke, of course.
The motion was promptly seconded and unanimously approved. A messenger was dispatched to the “lady doctor” with the invitation.
“I knew this meant no honor for me,” Dr. Owens recalled in her memoir, years later; “but I said : ‘Give the doctors my compliments, and say that I will be there in a few minutes.’ ”
She knew the invitation had been intended as a humiliating reminder that, as a member of “the fair sex,” her feminine sensitivity would prevent her from doing actual doctor work. The old man would, of course, be naked at the autopsy. The dissection would include elements of the male reproductive system that ladies were expected to be loath to lay hands upon or even look at.
It was, in other words, a bluff. And she intended to call it.
The messenger darted off to deliver the message, and Bethenia discreetly followed as close behind him as she could.
He ran into the building where the body lay, and she stepped up to the door as he went in.
“I heard him say, in excited tones: ‘She said to give you her compliments, and that she'd be here in a minute,’ ” Dr. Owens recounted in her memoir. “Then came a roar of laughter, after which I quietly opened the door and walked in, went forward, and shook hands with Dr. Hoover.”
“Do you know that the autopsy is on the genital organs?” Dr. Hoover asked her diffidently.
“No,” said Dr. Owens, “but one part of the human body should be as sacred to the physician as another.”
Faced now with the undeniable backfiring of what he’d anticipated would be a delicious little prank, Dr. Palmer drew himself up.
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Bethenia Owens as she appeared in her late 20s, when she was a successful hat-shop entrepreneur in Roseburg, in the late 1860s. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)
“I object to a woman’s being present at a male autopsy,” he thundered. “If she is allowed to remain, I shall retire!”
For the other doctors, though, this was going a bit too far — it had, after all, been his idea to invite her. Also, they all knew he and Dr. Owens didn’t like each other. Prior to her stint in medical school, when Bethenia had been working as a nurse, they’d had a little clash of wills at a patient’s bedside, for which he bore her a lasting grudge.
So not only was she allowed to remain, they let her lead the dissection — doubtless hoping she’d make some sort of mistake that they could point to as evidence of a woman’s inadequacy to the task of practicing medicine.
When she didn’t supply them with one, they were all somewhat ungracious in their disappointment. But the people of Roseburg thought it was hilarious.
Dr. Bethenia Owens as she appeared shortly after earning her first medical degree, from an eclectic-medicine college in Philadelphia, circa 1877. (Image: OHSU)
“When I had at last finished the dissection, the audience (not the doctors) gave me three cheers,” Dr. Owens wrote. “As I passed out and down on my way home, the street was lined on both sides with men, women and children, all anxious to get a look at ‘the woman who dared,’ to see what sort of a strange, anomalous being she was.”
It was a remarkable start to an even more remarkable career — the more so as Bethenia was over 30 years old when she launched it. It was also not a “second act” career, but a fourth — she’d been a wife, then a teacher, then a hat-shop entrepreneur, and now a physician. She had seen much of the world, and conquered more than most.
ROSEBURG WAS TOO small a pond for a fish as big as Dr. Owens hoped to become; so as soon as her affairs there were properly in order, she moved to Portland.
Her practice soon thrived. She was one of the earliest adopters of aseptic medicine — this was still the 1870s, before germ theory had been proven, but there were many reasons a wide-awake doctor might suspect an unseen microscopic disease vector. In fact, Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister had pretty much proven as much. But in spite of this evidence, the medical profession was still full of stubborn old bone-saw jockeys who still regarded their bloodstained frock coats the way Navy guys do their coffee cups — taking pride in the crusted-on filth, going out of their way to get them stiff with dried gore, and performing surgery with bare, unwashed hands.
Dr. Owens also set up her practice with electrical and chemical bath facilities, a therapeutic practice she’d learned in eclectic school, which nobody else in Portland was doing. The electric baths were especially hard to pull off, as they had to be powered by elaborate battery banks — remember, this was a good 20 years before electric grid power became available.
Word spread and soon her practice was booming.
Meanwhile, “baby George” graduated from Berkeley, enrolled in Willamette Medical School, and graduated with his M.D. Bethenia’s younger sister (most likely she who took over the millinery shop) finished her course of study at Mills College in Oakland, in which Bethenia was supporting her. So in 1877, feeling it was her turn, she started looking back east for a suitable mainstream medical college from which to earn an actual M.D. degree.
She initially had hoped to get into Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia; but after meeting with its top professor, she learned that admission was controlled by a board of directors that was 50 years behind the times and dead set against letting women in. He sent her instead to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where her application was, of course, pounced upon at once by the registrar.
COLLEGE LIFE FOR Dr. Owens was very busy. In her memoir, she gives us a glimpse of what life was like for her ... and it’s quite a regimen!
“It was my custom to rise at 4 a.m., take a cold bath, followed by vigorous exercise,” she writes; “then study till breakfast, at 7. (I allowed myself half an hour for each meal.) After supper came ‘Quizzes,’ and then study till 9 p.m., when I retired, to sleep soundly.”
The program was a two-year one, but, as that schedule indicates, it was an intensive two years!
And after it was complete, Dr. Bethenia Owens, M.D., had every credential she would need to take the place she’d earned in the society she had, in a very real sense, conquered.
Already one of Portland’s most well known citizens, Dr. Owens now moved from strength to strength. Not only was she a full-fledged physician, she was a double-doctor, with training and experience in therapeutic techniques from both the mainstream and eclectic medical traditions.
She went on to marry a childhood friend, Colonel John Adair, in 1884, and changed her name to Owens-Adair. He seems to have been a bit of a problem for her, being susceptible to pouring out money on ill-considered and dreamy schemes; but they made it work, and for the next 10 years they lived on a farm near Astoria, where Bethenia practiced as a country doctor. They tried to have another child together, but by now she was in her late 40s; and, after the little tyke died at the age of three days, they apparently decided not to try again.
She retired from regular practice in 1905, at the fairly young age of 65. But her retirement would not be a quiet one. No, Bethenia Owens-Adair intended her retirement to be the commencement of her fifth career, and the one in which she hoped to do the most good in the world of all ... as a political activist. And, of course, this is where it all went horribly wrong.
III. The forced-sterilization advocate.
THE YEARS JUST after the discovery of germ theory were a great time to be a mainstream physician. By understanding, for the first time, the true vectors of disease, doctors suddenly found they were able to make real and undeniable changes in patient outcomes.
But understanding those vectors — microbes — did something else too. It wasn’t much of a leap for an 1890s physician to go from “cure disease” to “prevent disease,” which would of course be done by cleaning things up — hygiene. And hygiene required public participation, which meant doctors more than ever were under pressure to become activists, to use their social standing to advocate for social changes.
No one felt the weight of this change more than prostitutes and sex workers, whose status went from “unfortunate fallen woman” to “filthy disease vector” seemingly overnight. This was the change that would most taint the legacy of another extraordinary Oregon woman, police officer Lola Greene Baldwin. (Here’s a link to her story.)
In Dr. Owens’ case, though, it was the eugenics movement that would become her reputational Nemesis.
The modern understanding of genetics developed over about 50 years, starting with Gregor Mendel’s paper in 1865; so it was also happening at the same time Dr. Owens was practicing. Knowing, now, how genetics worked — and going on the assumption that excellent genes, if mixed only with other excellent genes, would make it possible to literally breed a race of superior human beings — 1890s doctors felt they saw a path forward to a golden future.
The great problem, of course, was how to encourage such positive matches, to breed this superior race. The most effective plan would be to directly control who married whom, the way dog breeders do with their litters of puppies; but that didn’t seem compatible with human dignity in any way. (Of course, that wouldn’t stop the most prominent eugenicist of the 20th century from trying it in Nazi Germany decades later; but that’s a story for another time.)
Dr. Owens thought she had a good, humane solution to the problem, one that would neither threaten anyone’s liberty nor attempt to tell them whom they could mate with:
Forcible human sterilization.
“What is (sterilization)?” she wrote, in the introduction to her 1922 book, Human Sterilization. “Simply a remedy for degeneracy. Heredity, to my belief, is the directing force of all life. The purity of this source makes for good, impurity makes for evil. ... Eugenics is the science of the improvement of the human race, of which Heredity is the determining factor.”
“My life’s desire,” she concluded, “is to improve the human race by cutting off the vicious sources of degeneracy by the greatest humane remedy known today — Sterilization.”
Whew. In the immortal words of St. Ron of Burgundy, that did indeed escalate quickly!
Fully aware that a stated desire to surgically mutilate anyone she deemed unworthy to reproduce was probably bad PR for an active medical practitioner, Dr. Owens waited till after her retirement to launch this phase of her career.
Then, having safely exited from the marketplace and made herself safe from the judgment of public opinion, she turned all her considerable talents and energies on this new career, as the Oregon eugenics movement’s most active and effective activist.
She started by writing copious letters to the editors of newspapers, and publishing opinion pieces. Then, starting in 1907, she started lobbying in Salem for legislation that would authorize forcible sterilization of anyone deemed mentally ill or otherwise unfit — of which there was quite a list in the bill: “Habitual criminals, moral degenerates, sexual perverts,” and so on.
That would be bad enough today, but remember, this was the age when Sigmund Freud’s speculative maunderings were still considered solid scientific insights. Mental-illness diagnoses were much easier to come by in 1907, especially for women.
And, for obvious biological and cultural reasons, the weight of this forced-sterilization policy would fall harder on women than men.
Except among physicians, eugenic sterilization was still a very new and somewhat disreputable idea in 1907. The bill Dr. Owens promoted in 1907 didn’t make it out of the Legislature. Undaunted, she tried again, and again, and again — every session until 1913, when the law finally passed.
It was, however, referred to the voters through the efforts of the Anti-Sterilization League, and especially Lora C. Little of the Little School of Health in Portland (here’s a link to that story); and it went down in flames at the ballot box.
“Their chief argument,” historian Robert Johnson writes, “was that under the proposed law the assent of only two persons was needed to authorize surgical mutilation of the most helpless members of society. History demonstrated, the opponents asserted, that people with this kind of power tend to abuse it.”
Undaunted, Dr. Owens tried again, and in 1917 got her law passed.
It was repealed in 1921; but two years later, again with her backing and support, a revised version was back on the books, and it stayed in place as state law until 1983. A total of 2,648 Oregonians were forcibly neutered or spayed over the following half century as a direct result.
AT HER DEATH at age 86, in 1926, Dr. Owens-Adair could and did look back on her long life as a great triumph. She had, she believed, left the world far better than she had found it — raised a son to be a strong and good man, contributed to overthrowing the old prejudices against women, and battled other old prejudices to get the human race on track to stamp out “degeneracy” and breed itself to excellence.
Alas for Bethenia, and for the thousands of Oregonians her legacy left physically mutilated, it turned out that not all old prejudices are equally worthy of being overthrown.
(Sources: Dr. Owens-Adair: Some of Her Life Experiences, a book by Bethenia Owens-Adair published in 1906 by Mann & Beach Printers; “Bethenia Owens-Adair,” an un-by-lined article published in July 2014 on WomenHistoryBlog.com; “The Myth of the Harmonious City,” an article by Robert D. Johnson published in the Fall 1998 issue of Oregon Historical Quarterly)
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