Women S Health Movements

Recent history has witnessed a revolution in womens health care. Beginning in the late 1960s, women in communities across the United States challenged medical and male control over womens health. Few people today realize the extent to which these grassroots efforts shifted power and responsibility from the medical establishment into womens hands as health care consumers, providers, and advocates. Into Our Own Hands traces the womens health care movement in the United States. Richly documented, this study is based on more than a decade of research, including interviews with leading activists; documentary material from feminist health clinics and advocacy organizations; a survey of womens health movement organizations in the early 1990s; and ethnographic fieldwork. Sandra Morgen focuses on the clinics born from this movement, as well as how the movements encounters with organized medicine, the state, and ascendant neoconservative and neoliberal political forces of the 1970s to the1980s shaped the confrontations and accomplishments in womens health care. The book also explores the impact of political struggles over race and class within the movement organizations.

This book presents an account of the ideas and work of women's health activists. It also identifies the opportunities for health reform that werecreated along the way.

This is an introduction to the women's health movements and what is being accomplished by women organizing to achieve better health care around the world.

In 1948, the Constitution of the World Health Organization declared, “Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” Yet this idea was not predominant in the United States immediately after World War II, especially when it came to women’s reproductive health. Both legal and medical institutions—and the male legislators and physicians who populated those institutions—reinforced women’s second class social status and restricted their ability to make their own choices about reproductive health care. In More Than Medicine, Jennifer Nelson reveals how feminists of the ‘60s and ‘70s applied the lessons of the new left and civil rights movements to generate a women’s health movement. The new movement shifted from the struggle to revolutionize health care to the focus of ending sex discrimination and gender stereotypes perpetuated in mainstream medical contexts. Moving from the campaign for legal abortion to the creation of community clinics and feminist health centers, Nelson illustrates how these activists revolutionized health care by associating it with the changing social landscape in which women had power to control their own life choices. More Than Medicine poignantly reveals how social justice activists in the United States gradually transformed the meaning of health care, pairing traditional notions of medicine with less conventional ideas of “healthy” social and political environments.

Winner of the 2021 Frances Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize from the Western Association of Women Historians (WAWH)​ Revolutionizing Women’s Healthcare is the story of a feminist experiment: the self-help movement. This movement arose out of women’s frustration, anger, and fear for their health. Tired of visiting doctors who saw them as silly little girls, suffering shame when they asked for birth control, seeking abortions in back alleys, and holding little control over their own reproductive lives, women took action. Feminists created “self-help groups” where they examined each other’s bodies and read medical literature. They founded and ran clinics, wrote books, made movies, undertook nationwide tours, and raided and picketed offending medical institutions. Some performed their own abortions. Others swore off pharmaceuticals during menopause. Lesbian women found “at home” ways to get pregnant. Black women used self-help to talk about how systemic racism affected their health. Hannah Dudley-Shotwell engagingly chronicles these stories and more to showcase the creative ways women came together to do for themselves what the mainstream healthcare system refused to do.

The feminist women’s health movement of the 1960s and 1970s is credited with creating significant changes in the healthcare industry and bringing women’s health issues to public attention. Decades later, women’s health issues are more visible than ever before, but that visibility is made possible by a process of depoliticization The Vulnerable Empowered Woman assesses the state of women’s healthcare today by analyzing popular media representations—television, print newspapers, websites, advertisements, blogs, and memoirs—in order to understand the ways in which breast cancer, postpartum depression, and cervical cancer are discussed in American public life. From narratives about prophylactic mastectomies to young girls receiving a vaccine for sexually transmitted disease, the representations of women’s health today form a single restrictive identity: the vulnerable empowered woman. This identity defuses feminist notions of collective empowerment and social change by drawing from both postfeminist and neoliberal ideologies. The woman is vulnerable because of her very femininity and is empowered not to change the world, but to choose from among a limited set of medical treatments. The media’s depiction of the vulnerable empowered woman’s relationship with biomedicine promotes traditional gender roles and affirms women’s unquestioning reliance on medical science for empowerment. The book concludes with a call to repoliticize women’s health through narratives that can help us imagine women—and their relationship to medicine—differently.

This book follows the implications of the changing landscape for women’s health and health care and their sexual and reproductive rights. In the latest national and international health policy developments, we are witnessing the effects of a series of concerted conservative attacks on women. Facing this onslaught, women’s health movements are using the new technologies of the Internet and social media and finding other novel ways to advance their rights and protest against attempts to roll back the gains they made in the last four decades. Detailed country case studies and discussions of topics ranging from violence against women, disability, and birth control, as well as abundant examples of women’s activism from all over the world make this account of women’s health movements a lively, informative, and compelling read.