Into our own hands: the women's health movement in the United States, 1969-1990

Abstract

In Into Our Own Hands, Sandra Morgen shows us, not just how the women's health movement started, but how it weathered adversity. book is important reading for everyone who cares about the future of women's health as defined by women themselves. --Cynthia A. Pearson, executive director, National Women's Health Network This is an analytically sophisticated and engaging contribution to our understanding of the feminist health movement.--Karen Brodkin, professor of anthropology and women's studies, UCLA Recent history has witnessed a revolution in women's health care. Beginning in the late 1960s, women in communities across the United States challenged medical and male control over women's health. Few people today realize the extent to which these grassroots efforts shifted power and responsibility from the medical establishment into women's own hands as health care consumers, providers, and advocates. Into Our Own Hands traces the women's 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 women's 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 movement's encounters with organized medicine, the state, and ascendant neoconservative and neoliberal political forces in the 1970s to the 1980s shaped the confrontations and accomplishments in women's health care. The book also explores the impact of political struggles over race and class within the movement organizations.