Anna North's Outlawed is a strong and much needed dose of fun in a time when gender reification and legislation grow ever more threatening. North, a senior reporter at Vox, writes regularly about reproductive health and politics, as well as the state's shifting position to the family. Her novel is set in the US West in 1894, but its landscape is not a familiar one. To tell this story of communal and individual freedom, North departs from factual reporting in more than one way; bending the Western to her purposes, she creates an alternative history in which a bygone plague becomes a powerful point of departure. In lieu of the American Civil War, slavery collapses for the simple fact that the plague decimates the population and destroys the already crumbling system. Descendants of this generation have re-narrated the plague as a divine judgment, so that now all sicknesses are suspected to have a contagious, immoral cause—especially where reproduction is concerned.
In this reimagined time and space, North creates a new origin story for gynecology and reproductive care, a reinvention that posits both gendered entrapment and radical resistance as transhistorical phenomena. This alternate path leaves the inner workings of the body in shadow, allowing the protagonist, Ada, to step into a gap in medical knowledge. Ada is a young, white midwife-in-training. The midwife's daughter and de facto assistant, Ada is privy to a world of female terror, power, and material gore that few in her society care to see. After marrying early in the novel, Ada discovers that she can't get pregnant—and barrenness, in a society obsessed with pregnancy, marks her out for suspicion. Attempting to find her place in a world that despises her, Ada wields her small medical knowledge to great effect—to the benefit of both the reader and the characters in the novel. [End Page 177]
Rather than accept the cloistered life of a nun that should be her only recourse, Ada chooses a search for knowledge. She strikes out to find a reclusive midwife who is studying barrenness illegally. To reach her goal, Ada will need the help of a unique, utopian collective: the Hole-in-the-Wall gang, a talented crew of other barren women and gender nonconforming people. It is through the gang, and a self-reflexive use of Western tropes, that North crafts a narrative which feels both innovative and wholly classic. Out in a harsh landscape, the gang battles the cold, hunger, and the incursion of local law enforcement, who seek to either forcibly return the women to their communities and proper places or to use them for exemplary, violent discipline. Ada is the tenderfoot, who overcomes trials to earn her place among the more experienced members. From the (gender) outlaws Ada learns how to cross-dress, to walk and talk like a man, to subvert masculine power, and to question received narratives about her place in society.
Throughout the novel, Ada is set up in opposition to a more accurate and disturbing history of American gynecology—specifically, the history of J. Marion Sims, who experimented on Black enslaved women in the mid-1800s. Juxtaposed with a fictionalized version, the popular but racist Dr. Lively, Ada repeatedly uses her real-world experience to reject teachings about the dangers of interracial marriage and reproduction. Forcing us to view the horror of an era without the benefit of gynecological knowledge, North interrogates the difference between treatment based on personal compassion and equal distribution, and the mastery model that created and informs our current medical practice. The novel explores multiple angles at once, working as both a serious treatment of reproductive issues and a self-aware, generic romp. In a moment when reproductive legislation is rapidly changing, North's reimagined Western allows the reader the double pleasure of escaping into another world and of imagining ways to better our own. [End Page 178]
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