Posted by Meredith on Friday, Jun 3, 2016
The Iowa City Public Library is pleased to host a traveling exhibit from the National Library of Medicine: Confronting Violence, Improving Women’s Lives.
Activists and reformers in the United States have long recognized the harm of domestic violence and sought to improve the lives of women who were victimized, but there was a time this was not so. Until the late 1970s, medicine as a whole had largely dismissed or failed to acknowledge domestic violence as a significant health issue.
Nurses took up the call for change, standing in the frontline as they pushed the larger medical community to identify victims, adequately respond to their needs, and work towards the prevention of domestic violence. With passion and persistence, they developed best practices for care based on research and their professional experience and took part in activism to put domestic violence on the map as a national public health concern.
Confronting Violence, Improving Women’s Lives tells their story.
The six-banner traveling exhibit will be at the Library June 6 through July 16. It includes images, manuscripts and records that tell the stories of the nurses who witnessed the effects of domestic violence and campaigned for change.
Confronting Violence, Improving Women’s Lives began traveling around the United States in October 2015 and will be on display in all 50 states over the next four years. For more information, visit www.nlm.nih.gov/confrontingviolence.