Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Women's History
Episode: Kim E. Nielsen, "Money, Marriage, and Madness: The Life of Anna Ott" (U Illinois Press, 2020)
Description: Anna Ott died in the Wisconsin State Hospital for the Insane in 1893. She had enjoyed status and financial success first as a physician's wife and then as the only female doctor in Madison. Throughout her first marriage, attempts to divorce her abusive second husband, and twenty years of institutionalization, Ott determinedly shaped her own life.Kim E. Nielsen explores a life at once irregular and unexceptional. Historical and institutional structures, like her whiteness and laws that liberalized divorce and women's ability to control their property, opened up uncommon possibilities for Ott. Other structures, from domestic violence in...