Anastazia Schmid

I am an activist and an artist, a spoken word poet and a writer, a graduate independent scholar, and a mentor and peer facilitator inside a maximum security prison on a housing unit designated as a “behavior modification program.” (2017)

Scholarship

Anastazia’s contributions to the Prison History Project were pivotal in at least three respects:

First, Anastazia exposed Dr. Theophilus Parvin, the prison’s doctor for the first ten years, as the cruel, exploitative, misogynistic, racist, sexually-perverted man that he was, rather than the saintly practitioner historians had previously presented him as being.

Only two and a half years after the Prison History Project had begun, Anastazia presented her paper, Sexual Conquest in 19th century institutions: Dr. Theophilus Parvin’s Captive Patients and His Connections in Medical Science, to the American Historical Association.  You can view her presentation here as she speaks from the Indiana Women’s Prison.

Below are question-and-answer sessions that well-known historians Alex Lichtenstein and Elizabeth Hinton conducted with Anastazia, Kim Baldwin, and Michelle Daniel Jones before the AHA convention that are also very worth watching.

Second, Anastazia’s work has forced a rewriting of the history of gynecology in the US.  Theophilus Parvin wasn’t just any doctor. He was president of the AMA while he was at the prison and would go on to be the most celebrated OBGYN of the late 19th century in the US.  Moreover, his mentor was none other than Dr. Marion Sims, known as the “father of gynecology” in the US, who did all of his experimentation on unanesthetized slave women he purchased for that purpose.  Dr. Sims has long been reviled for his inhumane practices; it took  Anastazia’s groundbreaking work for medical historians to understand that Sims’ protege was equally cruel and exploitative and that their legacies still impact marginalized women today. As Anastazia told her audience:

It is imperative to acknowledge the specific bodies that Sims, Parvin, and [Parvin’s nephew, Amos Butler] used to develop science and medical practice and how that legacy has been and continues to be used to manipulate and control women…. [Gynecology and obstetrics] could not have advanced without the vulnerable bodies of slaves, poor immigrants, and institutionalized people. Vulnerable bodies are the first candidates for medical experimentation, and the last candidates for medical treatment.

A third major contribution was her intuitive understanding from the beginning of the Women’s Prison History Project of “epistemic violence” against incarcerated people and her practical and theoretical claims of “epistemic privilege” for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated scholars in understanding the histories and conditions of the caged and oppressed. See her brilliant analysis of epistemic violence, especially when perpetrated by journalists, “Can the“Convict Race” Speak?: Epistemic Injustice; Silence as a Form of Violence in Institutions of Incarceration.”

Here she is presenting “Gender Disparities in Crime and Punishment: The Epistemic Violence of Silencing Incarcerated Women” to the national conference of the American Studies Association.

In recognition of her outstanding work as an independent scholar on women’s issues, Anastazia was awarded the 2016 Gloria Anzaldua prize by the American Studies Association.

Playwright

Anastazia does not consider herself an historian.  Instead, she sees herself as a chronicler, someone who gives voice to women who have been silenced both in the past and in the present.  Rather than write dry academic papers about them, she would rather bring these women alive, especially through theater. 

From the moment she heard about the Duchess of Stringtown, Indianapolis’ leading madam in the 1870s, Anastazia wanted to tell her story. And she did—initially to a formal gathering of the Indiana Bicentennial Conference: Hoosier Women at Work in April 2016 where she presented Dark Ladies vs. Fair Ladies: Feminist Moral Reformers’ Subjugation of Prostitutes in Nineteenth Century Indiana.

Anastazia at the real Duchess’ gravesite

Playbill for the 2017 production of The Duchess of Stringtown at the Indiana Women’s Prison

But the Duchess’ story deserved a wider and less academic audience.  Over the next year, Anastazia and Michelle Daniel Jones spent as much time at the prison as possible collaborating on a full-length play, The Duchess of Stringtown, which was initially performed at the prison in 2017 and later at theaters in Indianapolis and New York.

From left: Lisa Hochstettler, Lara Campbell, Michelle Daniel Jones, Irene Price, Cindy White, Heather Shaw, Natalie Medley, Michelle Williams, Shirwanda Boone, Nan Luckhart, Jeneth Hughes, Danielle Green, Connie Bumgardner.

We eagerly await Anastazia’s next historical play, this one on Mary Jane Schweitzer and her tormentor, none other than Dr. Theophilus Parvin.

Prison Education and PTPD

Long before the Women’s Prison History Project existed, Anastazia was an intellectual leader, teacher, and mentor at the Indiana Women’s Prison.  She is a fierce advocate for education, though that does not necessarily or even primarily mean formal education provided by academic institutions in collaboration with the prison system.  

In October 2023, the MLA (Modern Language Association) will publish Teaching Literature and Writing in Prisons, which includes a chapter by Anastazia, “The Sacred Writing Circle: Pedagogical Challenges of Creative Writing and Teaching among Incarcerated Women.”  In it, Anastazia describes the unofficial writing circles she created in prison and why they served the women’s needs better than most formal education programs. She writes:

I am an advocate of education in all circumstances, particularly for people who are marginalized and oppressed, because both low-level and higher education provide limited opportunity and choice, which is  a better alternative than what incarcerated people are usually entitled to: no opportunity or choice.

However, she warns:

Education in prison is often promoted as a means of achieving “rehabilitation” and as an effective way to decrease recidivism…..Even dazzling success in these educational programs may work against students. The education received while a person is incarcerated is given full credit for a person’s “rehabilitation,” thereby both proving that the system works and assuming credit for whatever admirable or redemptive qualities can be gleaned from that person — as if there were no knowledge, skills, talents, or any admirable or redemptive qualities within that person or inherent to that person before the saving grace of the prison and the educational opportunities provided to them while they were there.  

Indeed, we warn our readers against viewing the women in the Women’s History Project as exceptional or unique.  Our opportunities may have been exceptional and unique, but we have no doubt that there are equally talented and motivated women and men in every prison and jail in this nation.

Anastazia presenting at a conference after her release

In 2020, Anastazia and a dozen other women at the prison authored a hard-hitting report, Barriers to Higher Education for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Students, on how colleges with programs in prisons can be exploitative of their students inside.  It includes a chapter by Anastazia on “Post Traumatic Prison Disorder (PTPD),” a widespread, largely hidden, and very disruptive phenomenon for post-incarcerated people on which she is a leading expert, both personally and academically.

Anastazia with Elizabeth Nelson at IUPUI, about to start graduate classes just 2 hours after being released from 20 years of confinement.

(For those who are interested in these topics, see the transcripts at the end of the Barriers report of interviews conducted by Anastazia, Christina Kovats, and Kristina Byers with numerous women and men who have left prison hoping to continue their education yet met, at times, insurmountable barriers to doing so. Some of these are also available as podcasts on KiteLineRadio.org.)

Artist

Quilt by Anastazia Schmid; made at the Indiana Women’s Prison; completed 2017

Art by Anastazia Schmid