Frontispiece portrait of Owens-Adair.
Dr. Bethenia Owens-Adair, born in Missouri in 1840, published her life-story in 1906, writing down her experiences of life with pioneering parents and her medical education as one of the first women to aim for a medical degree. She was married as a teenager and left her husband before she was twenty. She began attending school after leaving her husband and received funding from family friends and admirers, allowing her to set herself up as a school teacher and pursue her own further education.
In 1870, Owens-Adair began to entertain the notion of becoming a doctor herself. She travelled east to Philadelphia and enrolled in the Eclectic School of Medicine, receiving a degree in 1874.
According to her biography on The Oregon Encyclopedia, put together by the Portland State University, the Oregon Council of Teachers of English, and the Oregon Historical Society, Owens-Adair also later earned a second degree from the University of Michigan and, later in her life, became a proponent of eugenics, leading campaigns for the sterilization of the “unfit.” In 1923, three years before Owens-Adair’s death, Oregon passed a sterilization law that remained on the books (with amendments) until 1967.
In her memoir, Owens-Adair includes pieces she originally prepared for other reasons, including a speech from the mid-1880s to the Women’s Christian Temperance Union on the importance of heredity, linking crime and “tragedy” in personal life to poor hygiene in terms of hereditary behavior.
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