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Women, the Health Professions, and the State
- Journal of Women's History
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 16, Number 4, Winter 2004
- pp. 215-225
- 10.1353/jowh.2004.0090
- Review
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Journal of Women's History 16.4 (2004) 215-225
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Women, the Health Professions, and the State
Johanna Schoen
As journalist Barbara Seaman was researching her path-breaking 1969 book The Doctor's Case Against the Pill, she was dismayed to discover how many women in the 1960s knew about and suffered from the pill's side effects but were unwilling to give up the contraceptive. One woman confided that when her doctor warned her of the drug's dangers, she responded: "I don't care if you promise me cancer in five years, I'm staying on the pill. At least I'll enjoy the five years I have left" (Tone 245). Such windows into women's own thoughts and experiences with contraceptives permeate Andrea Tone's important new book Devices & Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America. Her book is part of an emerging body of literature revising our understanding of the relationship between women, physicians, and the state.
Historians and feminist scholars turned their attention to the history of women's reproductive health with the rise of the feminist health movement in the 1970s. Early works described male physicians who, in the process of medical professionalization, began to specialize in women's health, pushing aside a world of female healers and midwives. Women's bodies, according to this early interpretation, came under the control of male professionals who used both their medical knowledge and medical and reproductive technology to further reinforce and justify women's subordinate status in society. [End Page 215]
But not all scholars agreed that the history of women's reproductive health was the story of women's victimization nor that all medical intervention was harmful to women. Historians pointed out that alliances between female reformers and the medical profession, for instance, had resulted in the legalization of birth control, ultimately increasing women's reproductive control. Moreover, hoping to improve their health, female patients sought access to both professional medical care and medical technology, negotiating with male physicians over the terms and conditions of such care. Others cautioned that medical technology did not hold only one meaning for all women. Rather, it was the larger social and political context surrounding the technology and the options available to women confronting the technology that determined whether a medical or reproductive technology restricted or enhanced women's control over their health and bodies.
The acknowledgment that medical intervention had multiple meanings and that women's health care was the result of negotiations between women, medical professionals, and the state led to a reconsideration of women's experiences as patients. Historians began to pay closer attention to the ways in which women exerted control over health and reproductive care, pointing to both the extent and the limits of women's agency. All of the books under review here seek to shed new light on these negotiations and revise our understanding of health policy. They do so from multiple perspectives. Some focus on the level of policy implementation and patient experience; others analyze women's contribution to the top policymaking realm. Regardless of approach, all demonstrate that despite the existence of a mature scholarship on women and reproductive health, a serious consideration of women's voices might...