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Reviewed by:
  • Gender, Health, and Popular Culture: Historical Perspectives
  • Erika Dyck
Cheryl Krasnick Warsh, ed., Gender, Health, and Popular Culture: Historical Perspectives (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press 2011)

Cultural and gender historians in this collection have seized upon health issues as the context for exploring public perceptions and representations of femininity and masculinity. Although [End Page 296] the essays are heavily weighted towards women’s health, the articles convincingly show how gender has influenced various aspects of health experiences, including the flow of information, the availability of services, and displays of healthfulness. Editor Cheryl Krasnick Warsh points out that “viewed through the lens of popular culture,” material, print and celluloid culture help to show how gender and health combine to produce dominant, normative ideologies that reinforce the image of health and perfection among women who are “white, young, slim, prosperous, and free of disabilities.” (vii) The contributing authors build upon this notion with studies aimed at reinforcing this central theme.

This collection contains twelve essays, which are separated into two sections: the transmission of health information and popular representations of the body in sickness and health. The seven articles in the first section centre on advice literature, women’s activism, and programs designed specifically for women’s health. The authors are careful to tease apart the public health discourse from the patterns of behaviour and advice set by women themselves as they encounter different sets of experts claiming to know what is best for women’s bodies. The majority of these articles zero in on issues related to reproduction, from childbirth to motherhood, menstruation to contraception and abortion, to cervical cancer programs. Together these essays reinforce the historical pattern that relegates women’s health to the domain of reproduction, and they show how women’s health and feminism have worked together to create space for women’s programs and services. For example, Christabelle Sethna’s article on abortion tourism explores how the feminist movement coalesced with the decriminalization of abortion and Sethna exposes some of the practical obstacles and impediments to providing ample abortion services for Canadian women. Sethna effectively demonstrates how women, in spite of the rhetoric of choice and even liberation, mobilized to lobby the federal government for service provisions that matched the legal decision to make abortions legal. She explains that in spite of the change in the federal law, women continued to rely on “health tourism,” meaning that they travelled outside of Canada in order to secure medically sanctioned therapeutic abortions, which thus limited the access to women with sufficient means. Pointing out the discrepancy bet ween the law and the practice, Sethna effectively argues that through an examination of popular cultural products such as novels and travel literature, in combination with contemporary legal statutes and the Commission of Inquiry into the Status of Women, it becomes clear that abortion emerged as a contested site for both feminism and the status of women in the 1970s.

Heather Molyneaux’s article complements this argument by drawing attention to the advertisements for the birth control pill and the changing faces of women used to represent and sell contraception. Molyneaux argues that information about the pill arrived hand-in-hand with somewhat more subtle moral undertones directing the advertisements at married, heterosexual women. The prominent placement of wedding rings and staged facial expressions set amidst images of flowers or natural surroundings reinforced a specific set of values associated with pill consumption. Regardless of the commercial opportunities beyond this segment of the population, the moral discourse surrounding contraception constrained advertisers in their depiction of contraception for approximately a decade. By the early 1970s, Molyneaux suggests, those images slowly gave way to a more heterogenous community of pill-consuming women, [End Page 297] who did not readily present a married or even responsible character. Like Sethna, Molyneaux’s article exposes some of the ways consumers influenced the shape of the advertising campaigns.

The second part of the book explores some of the ways in which men and women have been represented through popular culture, beginning, somewhat differently, with an essay from Ric N. Caric on delirium tremens in antebellum Philadelphia. This article provides some content for discussion about masculine health...

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