Women’s Health Across the Life Span: Contributions From Nursing Science

Abstract

The demystification of women’s bodies was the cornerstone of the popular women’s health movement of the 1960s in the United States. Yet, despite early efforts to respond to this call for action, such as the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective’s publication of Our Bodies Ourselves (1973), the scientific community was slow to respond to women’s need for information about their unique physiology. The National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Office of Research on Women’s Health (ORWH), for example, was not established until 1990. Nursing science was an exception to the scientific community’s early lack of attention to women’s health: By the time the OWHR published its first NIH Women’s Health Research Agenda (ORWH, 1991), women’s health research within nursing science was well established, reflecting an integrative view of women’s bodies coupled with a feminist critique of the sociopolitical milieu in which women experience health. Nursing’s contribution to women’s health science has continued to develop over the past 40 years, leading the way to a redefinition of women’s health that transcends merely reproductive health. A reconceptualization of women’s health services has evolved, often in collaboration with women, prompting the development of women’s health curricula for advanced practice nurses and significant contributions in nursing research to women’s health science across the life span (Taylor and Woods, 2001). Although often constrained by both the small amount of funding available and the limited interest of funders in topics related to women’s health, scholars in nursing have pushed knowledge of women’s health forward. In 1989, the National Institute of Nursing Research promoted women’s health research through funding the Center for Women’s Health Research. This center launched a number of interdisciplinary collaborations in areas important to symptom management and self-care (Heitkemper et al., 2008). Nursing scientists’ early acknowledgment of gender disparities in health has gone relatively unnoticed by policymakers in the United States. By contrast, the Canadian government has responded to such concerns with a robust policy on gender and health research that is supportive of a socially relevant study of embodied health (Morrow, Hankivsky, & Varcoe, 2007). Because of a lack of similar support, nurse researchers’ contribution to women’s health science might appear anemic in the United States, in contrast to its potential. There are, however, good reasons to remain positive about nursing scientists’ contributions. Our progress can, in fact, be seen in the pages of this very journal. In April 2004, we published a special issue of BRN entitled ‘‘Sex: Does It Matter to Biological Nursing Research?’’ We received 10 12 submissions in response to our call for papers for that issue and published 8 of them. For this current special issue, ‘‘Women’s Health Across the Life Span,’’ the call for papers attracted nearly 40 submissions, resulting in publication of 16 articles over two issues of the journal (12:1 and 12:2). The content of this double special issue provides evidence that biological nursing research makes unique contributions to the science of women’s health on topics spanning the life span, from birth to old age. A number of authors for this special issue present data and analysis that help support our understanding of how sociopolitical factors shape women’s experiences with disease and pregnancy as well as their infants’ survival chances. Melkus et al. report that diabetes self-management training improved metabolic control, quality of life, and perceptions of provider care among African American women with type 2 diabetes, whereas the addition of coping skills training may have assisted in sustaining long-term improvements in health outcomes (12:1). Kuo et al. report data that show a relationship between both stress and human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) and nausea and vomiting in pregnancy (12:1). Two of the articles address preterm birth, a socially significant problem in the United States, costly whether the calculus is in human life or dollars. Maloni challenges long-held assumptions about the value of