Women and Health in America: Historical Readings (review)

Judith Walzer Leavitt, ed. Women and Health in America: Historical Readings. 2d ed. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999. ix + 692 pp. $65.00 (cloth), $27.95 (paperbound).

The historical study of women and health in the United States may be said to have come of age in 1984 with the original publication of Judith Leavitt's anthology. The women's liberation movement of the late sixties and seventies had forced scholars in virtually all subdisciplines of history to acknowledge that something had been missing from their work; and certainly, as regards medical history (or, better, the history of health), a serious approach to women--both in quantity of output and in sophistication of analysis--developed starting around 1970. In her introduction to the 1984 edition Leavitt reviewed the maturation of the field up to that time, describing how polemical and celebratory works had characterized the early seventies, while by the mid-eighties historians were stressing women's agency and the health issues that women have faced in their daily lives.

In this new edition Leavitt claims that recent scholarship has become yet more nuanced, by taking on the problem of differences among women and by recognizing that, while biology is not destiny, the biological substrate of womanhood must be addressed. She fails to note, however, the contrast between "gender studies" and "women's studies" that became a significant theoretical issue in the late eighties. This is interesting because her own work reflects the view of many scholars that gender, class, and race (three axes of social subordination) need to be examined as interrelated analytic categories.

The second edition closely resembles the first. The 1999 introduction is a reworking of the older one, and the new volume is organized in much the same way as the original (except for two chronological sections dealing with the pre-Civil War period). Looked at another way, though, this is almost a completely new anthology: Leavitt retained only six of the original thirty-five articles, substituting a new group of twenty-nine whose first publication was in 1986 or later. One might quibble about why any particular article was omitted or included, but there is no question that Leavitt has performed a significant service in assembling this volume. It should quickly become a standard not only for use in teaching undergraduate courses, but also as a reference for anyone working in the history of American medicine who wants ready access to some of the best scholarship on women, health, and medicine.

Two final points should be made about this book, one practical and one of historiographic concern. The first is that the new articles in the second edition do not generally supersede the ones they replace, so that the two editions might well be seen as supplementing each other; both belong in the working library of any historian of American medicine. The second is that, with one exception, all of the articles written or coauthored by men are holdovers from the original edition. Leavitt makes no mention of this, even though in her first introduction she did note that men were largely responsible for the earliest scholarship on women and health. The imbalance in works before 1970 is not surprising, since the field of medical history had very few women working in it at that time. Nor is it surprising that women would have emerged as the leading scholars shortly after a new wave of feminism brought forth women's studies as an academic discipline. Assuming (as well we should) that Leavitt did not discriminate against male writers in selecting the more recent papers, one may ask why men are now producing a still smaller proportion of first-rate scholarship on the history of women and health. Let's hope that this is simply the temporary result of the continued increase in the number of talented women working in medical history. It would indeed be a pity if...