Examines the real world of women's health status and health-care delivery in different countries, and the assumptions behind the dominant medical model of solving problems without regard to social conditions. This book asks what feminist health-care ethics looks like if we start with women's experiences and concerns.
In the face of the long domination of medical care by men, Women and Health explores from a variety of perspectives the twin issues of women in health care, and the health care of women. Specific sections address the women's health movement, birth control and childbirth, women in the health labor force, and the influence of women's employment on their health. Already acclaimed by scholars and health policy-makers alike, Women and Health is sure to become a standard sourcebook on an important and neglected subject.
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.
In Reproductive Justice, sociologist Barbara Gurr provides the first book examining Native American women's reproductive healthcare. Drawing on interviews and focus group data, archival research, and discussions with healthcare professionals, Gurr paints an insightful portrait of the Indian Health Service (IHS)--the federal agency tasked with providing healthcare to Native Americans--shedding much-needed light on Native American efforts to obtain prenatal care, childbirth care, access to contraception and abortion services.
This book 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.
What makes women sick? To an Ecuadorean woman, it's nervios from constant worry about her children's illnesses. To a woman working in a New Mexico electronics factory, it's the solvents that leave her with a form of dementia. To a Ugandan woman, it's HIV from her husband's sleeping with the widow of an AIDS patient. To a Bangladeshi woman, it's a fatal infection following an IUD insertion. What they all share is a recognition that their sickness is somehow caused by situations they face every day at home and at work. In this clearly written and compelling book, Lesley Doyal investigates the effects of social, economic, and cultural conditions on women's health. The "fault line" of gender that continues to divide all societies has, Doyal demonstrates, profound and pervasive consequences for the health of women throughout the world. Her broad synthesis highlights variations between men and women in patterns of health and illness, and it identifies inequalities in medical care that separate groups of women from each other. Doyal's wide-ranging arguments, her wealth of data, her use of women's voices from many cultures--and her examples of women mobilizing to find their own solutions--make this book required reading for everyone concerned with women's health.
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.