Gender, Health, and Popular Culture: Historical Perspectives ed. by Cheryl Krasnick Warsh (review)

Gender, Health, and Popular Culture: Historical Perspectives examines the "perception and reception of gendered concepts of health" (p. vii) from a variety of perspectives, spatially and temporally, with an emphasis on North America, viewed through the lens of popular culture. The book is divided into two sections. Part 1 of the collection, "The Transmission of Health Information," focuses on how women as consumers, primarily within their traditional role as mothers and caretakers of the family, navigate "expert" knowledge and advice. The seven essays cover topics such as pregnancy, menstruation, contraception, abortion, and cervical cancer. In exploring the various mechanisms by which health information was transmitted, the authors show how powerful the "experts" were in defining, producing, and reinforcing specific meanings and messages around what constituted healthy behavior for men and women. At the same time, the advice—whether in the form of advertisements, films, or other media—may not be consumed the way the "experts" intended. The "receiver has the choice, or agency to accept, or reject" (p. xv) the information being presented.

Professional advice conveyed to women about pregnancy and about childbirth are the subjects of Lisa Featherstone and Lisa Forman Cody's respective articles. Featherstone asserts that childbirth was constructed differently in popular self-help texts and elite medical journals. The former emphasized the "ordering and preparation of the birthing room" (p. 12), underscoring the naturalness of childbirth. In contrast, elite manuals focused on the "extreme and pathological" (p. 7), underscoring "the pregnant and labouring body as constantly under threat" (p. 17). In a similar vein, Cody examines nutritional advice communicated to expectant mothers by medical professionals and popular authors. While pregnant women had some autonomy over their prenatal care, there was an assumption that nutritionally they were ignorant. Since parturient mothers were ultimately responsible for their child, they were encouraged to eat for one, not two.

Adolescents and teenagers were also subjected to didactic messages about femininity and motherhood. In her examination of menstrual hygiene educational films, Sharra Vostral notes not only how they taught girls about menstruation as normal and natural, but also that the story lines included messages about proper female behavior. Heather Molyneaux articulates a similar argument in her discussion of the birth control pill. She insists that pharmaceutical advertising presented the pill not as a tool for a sexual revolution but as a "natural" means of family planning. Using the image of a white middle-class married woman (sometimes a mother) was a way to assuage "fears that the pill would lead to promiscuity" (p. 65). Attempts to manage and regulate women's reproductive capabilities were most pronounced in Christabell Sentha's discussion on abortion tourism. She exposes how the state and the Canadian medical elite imposed restrictions resulting in privileged women crossing international borders to procure legal abortions. Audience reception to messages promulgated about health is the focus of two articles on cervical cancer in the United States and Canada. Both Gardner and Hadenko examine popular cancer awareness campaigns that stressed early detection and prevention. Overall, the public campaigns did have relative success in reducing incidences of cervical cancer. The authors conclude that for these programs to work efficiently, access has to be universally applied. Hadenko, for example, points out that "cervical cancer screening has had the greatest impact on privileged citizens—white women with health insurance" (p. 121).

Section 2, "Popular Representations of the Body in Sickness and Health," engages how "gendered concepts of health were transmitted through visual representations of the ideal male and female bodies" (p. vii). This section begins with Caric's essay on delirium tremens: a condition whereby heavy drinkers (working-class men) develop hallucinations due to their inability to effectively cope with the "enormous anxieties associated with making a living" during industrialization. Consequently, in their attempt to reestablish their masculinity, laboring men resorted to drinking. While Caric discusses "real" men, Burfoot explores connections among three anatomical displays from...