(Re)Visiting Her-stories: A Study of Kavitha Rao’s Lady Doctors

The quest for powerful women to receive recognition has suffered at the hands of patriarchy since time immemorial. Ambitious women who failed to comply with men could never grow out of the “whore” accusation imbued by society. These powerful women were transgressors who were deliberately shunned by society to set an example, yet they became aspirations for others and demonstrated that women’s geniuses could combat the influence of patriarchy. Kavitha Rao’s Lady Doctors: The Untold Stories of India’s First Women in Medicine (2021) is a compilation of the stories of six powerful yet forgotten women of the past, and this paper intends to explore the social milieu characterizing these women’s lives and their formation of identities. Further, it also scrutinizes the role of men in the lives of the six women and attempts to deconstruct gender biases within the field of medicine.The quest for powerful women to receive recognition has suffered at the hands of patriarchy since time immemorial. Ambitious women who failed to comply with men could never grow out of the “whore” accusation imbued by society. These powerful women were transgressors who were deliberately shunned by society to set an example, yet they became aspirations for others and demonstrated that women’s geniuses could combat the influence of patriarchy. Kavitha Rao’s Lady Doctors: The Untold Stories of India’s First Women in Medicine (2021) is a compilation of the stories of six powerful yet forgotten women of the past, and this paper intends to explore the social milieu characterizing these women’s lives and their formation of identities. Further, it also scrutinizes the role of men in the lives of the six women and attempts to deconstruct gender biases within the field of medicine.