The War on Postpartum Psychosis: Elizabeth B. Davis, Voluntary Sterilisation, and the Fight Against Poverty in Black Harlem, 1960–1978

This article examines Black psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Elizabeth Bishop Davis and her efforts at Harlem Hospital Center in the 1960s, during the height of the War on Poverty, to reduce postpartum psychosis and unwanted pregnancies among Black Harlem women. As psychiatric and sociopolitical discourses increasingly linked postpartum psychosis to poverty and disorderly families, Davis promoted voluntary sterilisation among Black Harlem women as a solution. This article explores how Davis’s initiative served as both a medical and political response to Black poverty, as well as an unfavourable portrayal of Black motherhood and racialised constructions of postpartum psychoses that were concurrently gaining prominence within the broader anti-poverty movement. It illustrates that while she framed this initiative as liberatory, it also positioned poor, Black women’s psyches as deficient and was fundamentally shaped by the belief that transforming families—and, by extension, Black communities—required conforming to white, middle-class visions of family life.