Teaching Women's Health into the 21st Century

Abstract

SUMMARY In this paper we explore the political background to the Women's Health course at Yale University, its structures and goals and some of its striking successes and failures. The Yale Women's Health course has been shaped by tensions between the generation of (mostly) women who teach the course and the distinctive expectations and interests of the women (and the few men) who are its students. Over the past decade, it has been part of the shifting politics of women's health in the United States. To be able to speculate about the future of undergraduate women's health teaching in this new century means confronting distinctive characteristics of the current generation of women and men. We explore some of these characteristics in this paper and examine how different lecture topics have engaged students.