Women's Health Movement Research Articles

Book Review: Looking through the Speculum-examining the Women's Health movement by Houck, Judith A.

Book Review: <i>Looking through the Speculum-examining the Women's Health movement</i> by Houck, Judith A.

Women's Reproductive Rights: a Way to Gender Justice

For generations, women have been battling for reproductive rights. Because of moral, ethical, and religious reasons, these rights have always been a contentious issue. Do reproductive rights simply imply the ability to reproduce? Is the issue, on the other hand, intrinsically tied to the myriad questions surrounding women's reproductive freedom? The ability to reproduce appears to be what distinguishes women from men. Do women, however, have control over their own reproduction? Do women have the right to decide whether, when, and how many children they want? Do women have access to safe methods of birth control? Do women have the right to an abortion that is safe? Is it possible to separate sexuality from reproduction? A resounding 'NO' in response to many similar inquiries sparked the birth of the women's health movement in several regions of the world in the early 1970s. It began with modest 'consciousness raising' groups that disseminated knowledge among women about the functioning of their bodies and gradually expanded into multi-faceted campaigns that have profoundly influenced health policies in many nations. Human Rights are those rights that should be available to every individual without any form of discrimination. The foundation of freedom is recognition of the inherent dignity and equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family. The most essential human right is the right to life. It is the highest human right, from which no exceptions are authorised. It cannot be taken away. The arbitrary deprivation of life is prohibited by Article 6(1) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. However, there are several contentious concerns surrounding this greatest privilege. One such issue is the matter of abortion rights. Among other women's rights, it is thought that every mother has a universal right to abortion. But the rights of the mother are to be balanced with the rights of the unborn. Previously, abortion was not permitted and was vehemently opposed by society. Terminating a pregnancy was considered a murder of the foetus. However, because to changes in time and technology, most governments now recognise this right, following the historic Roe v. Wade decision by the US Supreme Court. However, opponents remain, and many individuals believe that it should be made illegal.

Contesting ‘Global Sisterhood’: The Global Women's Health Movement, the United Nations and the Different Meanings of Reproductive Rights (1970s–80s)

AbstractThe article contributes to a genealogy of the global articulation of reproductive rights principles, as established at the 1994 United Nations (UN) Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo and the UN Women's Conference held in Beijing the following year. It highlights the key role played by an emerging global women's health movement in the 1970s–80s, in shaping UN debates on family planning, women's rights in procreative choice and women's roles in socio‐economic development. The article focuses on the International Campaign for Abortion, Sterilisation and Contraception (est. London 1978) and the Women's Global Network for Reproductive Rights (Amsterdam and Manila 1984; ECOSOC consultative status in 1992). Adopting an intersectional perspective, the paper highlights the local embeddedness of feminist positions, the shortcomings of Western feminism and the ways in which conflicts between women's organisations allowed for an original and evolving concept of reproductive rights to emerge. It is based on UN papers and the archives of the above organisations and family planning movements.

Gender norms and the mental health of boys and young men

Over the last half-century, the women's health movement has been a powerful driver in health policy linking gender norms to sex differences in health and wellbeing. Even though gender norms also affect males,1 there has been little emphasis on gender in health policies for males, especially in relation to the mental health of boys and young men.2 Gender norms around masculinity commonly confer power and status to boys and young men, which might in part explain why norms around masculinity are difficult to shift.

Breast cancer photography and the turn-of-the-century studium. Two case studies to illustrate a paradigm shift

ABSTRACT In 1993, The New York Times Magazine published a story entitled ‘The anguished politics of breast cancer.’ The image on the cover was a self-portrait of artist and model Matuschka showing the physical consequences of a radical mastectomy. The picture elicited heated reactions, and the protagonist became an icon of the Women's Health Movement. Twelve years later, another model and photographer, Lynn Kohlman, published Front to back, which included portraits of her body after treatments for breast and brain cancer. Although free of the marks of pink ribbon culture, Kohlman's work was framed within the dominant discourse of breast cancer in the twenty-first century, characterized by individualism, positive thinking, and the idea of consumer's choice. This paper discusses Matuschka's and Kohlman's cancer photography within a comparative diachronic framework, focusing on the turn-of-the-century politics of representation. We argue that, despite their common traits, their respective productions are signs of a radical shift in the cultural paradigm of breast cancer. Through an analysis of the studium of their photographs and the preferred meaning that they suggest, we conclude that Matuschka's project feeds into the feminist battle for equity in health initiated by the early Breast Cancer Movement, whereas Kohlman's strengthens the postfeminist stance that is prevalent in the current panorama of neoliberal capitalism.

Psychedelic Birth: Bodies, Boundaries and the Perception of Pain in the 1970s

Psychedelic Birth: Bodies, Boundaries and the Perception of Pain in the 1970s

Pharmaceutical Ethics and Grassroots Activism in the United States: A Social History Perspective.

Women's health activists laid the groundwork for passage of the law that created the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1906. The pharmaceutical and food industries fought regulatory reforms then and continue to do so now. We examine public health activism in the Progressive Era, the postwar era and the present day. The women's health movement began in the 1960s, and criticized both the pharmaceutical industry and the medical establishment. In the 1990s, patient advocacy groups began accepting industry funds; thousands of commercially-funded groups now dominate the advocacy landscape. As pharma funding became normalized, concerns arose regarding a) the lack of transparency and public accountability regarding funding, b) the distortion of groups' agendas, and c) the ability of pharma-funded groups to dominate the discourse and override less well-resourced patient and health advocacy groups. Although industry-funded groups argue that funding allows them to provide useful services, the trade-off in health risks, exorbitant prices and distorted information is far too high. Sincerity is beside the point; patients and the industry have differing interests when it comes to drug safety and efficacy, drug information and drug prices. A growing resistance movement is asserting the values of its activist predecessors and opposing the prevailing culture of pharma-funded advocacy.

Muckraking Wonders: Jewish Journalist-Activists of the US Women's Health Movement, 1969–1990

Muckraking Wonders:Jewish Journalist-Activists of the US Women's Health Movement, 1969–1990 Jillian M. Hinderliter (bio) "Girlcott your gynecologist and save your uterus," women's health activist and journalist Barbara Seaman advised readers in 1972, "and if he tells you not to worry your pretty little head about something, pick up your pantyhose and RUN—to a doctor who'll take you seriously."1 Behind Seaman's humor was a key tenet of the women's health movement: the days of patient passivity were over. As the movement grew out of second-wave feminism in the late 1960s, American women demanded to be respected as health care consumers and critics of male-dominated medicine. Feminists challenged doctors' "political influence, their economic power, and their cultural authority," while calling on women to take an active role in demystifying their own bodies.2 In 1975, journalist Rose Kushner recounted her experience desperately seeking information after discovering a lump in her breast. "With appointments scheduled, a glimmer of plans made, books to read, at least I had my forefinger in my own destiny," she wrote in Breast Cancer: A Personal History and an Investigative Report. "I would be no slab of silly-putty to be manipulated helplessly by a pack of doctors."3 Kushner's pursuit of bodily autonomy was built on a foundation of proactive patienthood advanced in part by Seaman's work. As journalists-turned-activists, both Seaman and Kushner used the power of their writing and accessible platforms like newspapers and magazines to inform American patients about the tenets of the women's health movement. Their method and messaging had a long-term impact on the productivity and legacy of the health feminism. American Jewish women like Seaman and Kushner shaped health feminism in tone as well as in strategy as they used investigative journalism [End Page 371] to shape health care and national health policy. Their work helped build the rhetorical and political strategies of the cause throughout the 1970s and make inroads for health feminists with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and National Institutes of Health. By the 1980s, they helped the movement mature and address new women's health concerns and treatments. Gloria Steinem later characterized Seaman as the "first prophet of the women's health movement."4 Kushner redefined the role of the patient expert through her breast cancer activism and her activist techniques influenced generations of activists, including those working on HIV/AIDS.5 Polls from the 1970s suggest that Americans felt "a complicated mix of admiration for and resentment of the medical profession."6 This mix often played out in the press as activists, patients, and physicians voiced their perspectives on reforming American medicine. Directly engaging with Seaman and Kushner's Jewishness, despite their relatively secular lives, can enrich the history of the women's health movement. Inclusive and flexible, Jewishness as an analytical category allows historians to include a range of Jewish meaning, practice, and self-understanding. This essay argues that studying Seaman and Kushner's careers parallel to their life histories as American Jewish women offers an opportunity to interpret Jewish health activists both as feminists and as Jews. The women's health movement did not have to be a "Jewish" movement to be shaped by Jewish women's work and, by extension, Jewish women's personal frameworks of social justice. By the late 1970s, activists who applied feminist reform politics and critiques to medicine and health care began to identify as "health feminists." Avenues for reform included reframing the patient-practitioner relationship, promoting access to quality medical information, ensuring safe medical products and pharmaceuticals, and supporting women's increased access to medical schools.7 Jewish women embraced roles as self-help authors, journalists, scholar-activists, underground abortion providers, and clinic organizers. They were well-represented in the leadership [End Page 372] of national women's health organizations and in community-level initiatives. Eight of the twelve founders of the Boston Women's Health Book Collective, authors of groundbreaking health manual Our Bodies, Ourselves, were Jewish, as were four of the five founders of the National Women's Health Network, an advocacy organization cofounded by Seaman.8 Selecting Barbara...

Women's History, Women's Health

Women's History, Women's Health Audra Jennings (bio) Deirdre Cooper Owens. Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017. xiv + 165 pp.; ISBN 978-0-8203-5135-3 (cl); 978-0-8203-5475-0 (pb). Tanya Hart. Health in the City: Race, Poverty, and the Negotiation of Women's Health in New York City, 1915–1930. New York: New York University Press, 2015. xi + 329 pp.; ISBN 978-1-4798-6799-8 (cl). Jennifer Nelson. More Than Medicine: A History of the Feminist Women's Health Movement. New York: New York University Press, 2015. xi + 265 pp.; ISBN 978-0-8147-6277-6 (cl); 978-0-8147-7066-5 (pb). In response to the untimely death of Representative Elijah Cummings (D-MD), the historian Ibram X. Kendi wrote, "There may be no more consequential white privilege than life itself. The privilege of being on the living end of racism." Kendi noted that black men have the lowest life expectancy in the United States. Black women also die years sooner than white women and are far more likely than white women to die during pregnancy.1 Bodies, particularly the bodies of people of color and women, stand at the center of politics in the age of Trump. Death, fear, and the loss of freedom, agency, and bodily autonomy shape the political present as people of color continue to die at the hands of police at disproportionate rates; a staggering number of Americans—including children—die in mass shootings; allegations of sexual assault create no barrier to public office; a growing number of states pass restrictions on abortion, which in some states have narrowed access to legal abortion to have effectively banned safe, legal access to the procedure; and mass incarceration and detention at the border disproportionately ensnare people of color living in poverty in a system where private corporations profit from their suffering. The scholars Deirdre Cooper Owens, Tanya Hart, and Jennifer Nelson bring a painful past into focus. They show that racism, nativism, and misogyny have shaped the development of American medicine, access to care, or lack thereof, and the quality of care as well as the context and tone of its delivery—a system that linked white privilege to "life itself." [End Page 164] In Medical Bondage, Cooper Owens situates the growth of modern American gynecology in the context of chattel slavery and mass immigration, two systems that provided physicians access to women who endured the experimental surgeries that gave rise to modern gynecology. She aims to move beyond the illnesses that initially drew physicians' attention and the pain and exploitation of enduring (often repeated) experimental procedures while, in the case of slave women, also being forced to work as surgical assistants in addition to other forms of labor. Cooper Owens instead elucidates the skilled nursing labor that these women provided, centers the importance of this labor and these women's lives and bodies in the development of gynecology, and works to give nuance to the lives and experiences of women who appear in the historical record often only as subjects of the men who experimented on them and exploited their labor. Cooper Owens examines the contradictions inherent in slavery and the science of race and the ways these contradictions shaped the development of American gynecology. She notes that "slavery created an environment in which black women performed more rigorous labor than white women and some white men" (3). This brutal reality influenced physicians' perceptions of enslaved patients. White physicians operated on black women's bodies to maintain or restore their reproductive capacity and find cures for white women's gynecological ailments. That physicians sought these cures by experimenting on black women's bodies underscores their understanding that there were no differences in how white and black women's bodies functioned. Yet physicians went about their work believing in and furthering prevailing ideas about race that "erased gender distinction" when considering black women's health and physical strength, perceiving them to be "stronger medical 'specimens'" (3). Cooper Owens demonstrates that through the system of slavery, southern physicians gained power, influence, and subjects from whom they painfully extracted new knowledge. She...

Husbands' Hearts and Women's Health: Gender, Age, and Heart Disease in Twentieth-Century America.

The medical community and broader public have historically focused on heart disease as a concern for men, even though it has been the leading cause of death in women for decades. Through an analysis of medical publications, women's health literature, and mainstream media, this article traces the interactions of gender and age on perceptions of heart disease during the twentieth century. I argue that attention to middle-age mortality rates accentuated men's susceptibility to heart disease over women's, even as these differences diminished at older ages, when the majority of deaths occurred. Age and gender biases combined to frame heart disease as a man's disease on one hand, while the women's health movement marginalized older women's health on the other. It was not until the following decades that older women began to attract clinical concern and greater public attention, which ultimately expanded narrow frameworks of both heart disease and women's health.

Our Doctors, Ourselves: Barbara Seaman and Popular Health Feminism in the 1970s.

This essay examines the career of feminist journalist Barbara Seaman and her contribution to the circulation of health feminist ideas in the 1970s. Seaman, author of the influential exposé The Doctors' Case Against the Pill (1969), became a noted critic of women's health care and of gynecologists in particular. In her next book, Free and Female (1972), and in newspaper articles, interviews, and television appearances, she implored women to "liberate" themselves from their gynecologists and empower themselves in the arena of health care. Seaman's media engagement contributed to the development of a "popular health feminism" that took the ideas of the women's health movement public for mainstream audiences to consume and engage with.

Editorial Note: Women and the Global 1970s

Editorial NoteWomen and the Global 1970s Elisa Camiscioli and Jean H. Quataert What does the 1970s look like through the lens of women's history? The articles in this issue explore key markers of this decade—the expansion of the rights revolution that began in the 1960s, a loosening of previous restrictions on contraception and abortion, the broadening of women's healthcare and family planning organizations, and the growth of the environmentalist movement—to show how these developments touched the lives of women in Egypt, Australia, the United States, and Spain. Whether centered on national and regional studies or such global moments in 1970s women's history as the 1975 International Women's Year Conference in Mexico City, the articles highlight women's empowerment through bodily sovereignty, sexual exploration, state resistance, and traditional forms of high politics. We open with two articles that examine the long 1970s with regard to family planning initiatives. The first, by Alissa Walter, focuses on Egypt under President Jamal 'Abd al-Nasir's modernization project while the second, by Teresa Ortiz-Gómez and Agata Ignaciuk, is located in Spain during late Francoism and the transition to democracy. Family planning centered on contraception became an important postwar social experiment, dovetailing with UN debates about population and resources. By the 1960s, the widespread availability of contraceptive technologies like the Pill and the IUD invigorated these programs, and often their primary objective was women's empowerment through the avoidance of unwanted pregnancies. But this was not necessarily the focus in the developing world where, as Walter shows, family planning reflected postcolonial anxieties about the strain that high birth rates placed on state resources, thereby hindering national development. In Nasir's Egypt, contraception was part of an effort to modernize the lower classes. Walter illustrates rural women's spirited "non-participation" in this program, which was a key reason it failed in the 1960s and 1970s. In her account, ignoring the state constitutes resistance, and ignore the state they did: women declined to use any modern contraceptives at all, they rejected government-issued contraceptives, they used traditional herbal or barrier methods instead, or they adopted contraceptives provided by the government to space births, in the hope of increasing the number of surviving children in their families. This was not about religious objections, or women's refusal to act "rationally" by eschewing small families. As Walter concludes, rural Egyptian women "were not averse to regulating their fertility, they simply wanted to do so on their own terms." [End Page 7] The Spanish family planning movement developed in a different context: the public debates on contraception and abortion that occurred in many Western states from the mid-1960s through the 1970s. By the end of the decade, Britain, France, Italy, West Germany, Canada, and the United States all had witnessed a loosening of legislation on birth control and abortion. As Ortiz-Gómez and Ignaciuk show, such liberalization also occurred in Spain where, under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, contraception was illegal. Birth control activism nonetheless emerged among progressive members of the medical profession in the late 1960s, in the outpatient clinics of public hospitals where doctors and nurses circumvented "hospital directives and contemporary legal norms" to advise in favor of contraception. They were joined by members of the burgeoning feminist movement that had sprung up after Franco's death in 1975. While for Spanish feminists, family planning was part of the "new sexual ethics" promoted by the international women's health movement, for doctors, it was generally a reflection of their support for the ideals of the World Health Organization and the International Planned Parenthood Federation. Ideological differences between feminists and physicians did not deter cooperation, however. This successful grassroots coalition of doctors and feminists helped to bring about the decriminalization of contraception in 1978, during Spain's transition to democracy. Women's healthcare is also central to Flannery Burke and Jennifer Seltz's analysis of "natural birth" in the United States. Their article reminds us that the rise of modern environmentalism—and the emergence of environmental anxieties about pollution—occurred in the decade of the 1970s as well. Burke and Seltz compare the perspectives of feminists and...

Father's Role in Preconception Health.

As part of the federal multi-agency conference on Paternal Involvement in Pregnancy Outcomes, the existing Fatherhood paradigm was expanded to include a new focus on Men's Preconception Health. This concept grew out of the women's preconception health movement and the maternal and child health (MCH) life course perspective, as well as pioneering research from the child development, public health data and family planning fields. It encourages a new examination of how men's preconception health impacts both reproductive outcomes and men's own subsequent health and development. This essay introduces the concept of men's preconception health and health care; examines its historical development; notes the challenges of its inclusion into fatherhood and reproductive health programs; and situates it within a longer men's reproductive health life course. We then briefly explore six ways men's preconception health and health care can have positive direct and indirect impacts-planned and wanted pregnancies (family planning); enhanced paternal biologic and genetic contributions; improved reproductive health biology for women; improved reproductive health practices and outcomes for women; improved capacity for parenthood and fatherhood (psychological development); and enhanced male health through access to primary health care. Research on men's preconception health and health care is very limited and siloed. We propose a research agenda to advance this topic in three broad domains: increasing the basic epidemiology and risk factor knowledge base; implementing and evaluating men's preconception health/fatherhood interventions (addressing clinical health care, psychological resiliency/maturation, and social determinants of health); and fostering more fatherhood health policy and advocacy research.

Bringing the pregnancy test home from the hospital.

This paper explores the settlement process of one of the most common home diagnostic tools currently in use, the home pregnancy test. The controversial new device appeared to threaten the jurisdiction of both doctors and Food and Drug Administration regulations, while it aligned with the women's health movement's goals. But this study finds a more nuanced narrative: one of boundaries and positions that at once were blurry, later shifted, and were ultimately aligned without compromising the credibility of doctors or the legal system. To understand this process, the roles of court decisions and regulations are explained by stages of juris-technical accordance. In this case, rather than restricting technological innovation, legal innovation provided pathways for widespread acceptance of the home pregnancy test by various groups. As more tools move from expert users to layperson users, this paper demonstrates the utility of examining existing juris-technical assemblages as we consider the future of self-monitoring and self-diagnosis.

Book Review: More than Medicine: A History of the Feminist Women's Health Movement

Book Review: More than Medicine: A History of the Feminist Women's Health Movement

More Than Medicine: A History of the Feminist Women's Health Movement

Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1. Medicine May Be the Way We Got in the Door: Social Justice and Community Health in the Mid-1960s 15 2. Thank You for Your Help ... Six Children Are Enough: The Abortion Birth Control Referral Service 57 3. Reproductive Control, Sexual Empowerment: The Aradia Women's Health Center and the Early Movement for Feminist Health Reform 91 4. Conserving Feminist Health Care, Confronting Anti-Abortion: The Atlanta Feminist Women's Health Center 123 5. All This That Has Happened to Me Shouldn't Happen to Nobody Else: Loretta Ross and the Women of Color Reproductive Freedom Movement of the 1980s 167 6. Women of Color and the Movement for Reproductive Justice: A Human Rights Agenda 193 Notes 221 Index 253 About the Author 265

Meeting the Challenge of a More Person-centered Future for US Healthcare.

Person-centered care is a burgeoning social movement and a mission statement for modern healthcare. However, it is not a new idea. Often called the father of modern medicine, William Osler said, “The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.”1 Social movements typically begin with common issues brought forward by an affected group whose members share a common interest in a cause. Health-based social movements (HSMs) such as the women's health movement and breast cancer activism have significantly impacted health and social policy.2 The movement toward person-centeredness grew from a number of narrow interest-based activists to a more general movement for healthcare reform from objections to both medicalization and medical paternalism, and the demands for increased autonomy and choice which arose from the cultural and political shifts of the 1960s.3 In addition, the increasing prevalence of long-term chronic conditions has led to the necessity of new mod...

More than medicine: a history of the feminist women's health movement

More than medicine: a history of the feminist women's health movement

The Body in Revolt: The Impact and Legacy of Second Wave Corporeal Embodiment

Tensions between second and third wave understandings of the body and embodiment have led to disagreements about whether to situate the body as corporeal and concrete or theoretical, diverse, and complex. Drawing from key tactics of the second wave women's health movement, including cervical viewing, menstrual extraction, genital diversity work, orgasm training, and self‐defense classes, I first trace the political framing of the body in second wave feminism, followed by a consideration of third wave pedagogies transmitted through teaching the psychology of women. After analyzing the five most popular textbooks and ten syllabi for the psychology of women, I trace the stories about embodiment that have continued across waves and the stories that have shifted over time. I ultimately argue for a renewed consideration of how to merge the priorities of each wave into a new policy‐driven and activist‐centered understanding of corporeal embodiment both within and outside of the university.

Building behavioral health systems from the ground up

Building behavioral health systems from the ground up