Into Our Own Hands: The Women's Health Movement in the United States, 1969-1990 (review)

It all started with the cervix. And the automatic mastectomy. And the therapeutic abortion where you had to threaten suicide and also have your husband play golf with someone on the attending staff. And getting your tubes tied if you were black and poor was a “Mississippi appendectomy” but Mission Impossible if you were white and middle-class.

This engaging study of the American feminist health movement starts in 1969 with what Sandra Morgen calls the movement’s “foundational stories.” There is the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective formed by eight white women who met at a 1969 feminist conference and, turning “radical thought into radical text” (21), created Our Bodies Ourselves which found a commercial publisher in 1973. There was the moment Carol Downer realized “how beautiful and simple and accessible a cervix was” (p.7), showed women at a feminist bookstore how to use a speculum, and in 1972 set up the Los Angeles Feminist Women’s Health Center. Journalist Barbara Seaman’s The Doctors’ Case Against the Pill (New York, P.H. Wyden, 1969) led to mandated patient package inserts, despite defenders of patient ignorance who claimed that, in the words of one women doctor, “if you tell them the symptoms they’ll have them by the next day” (p. 27).

By 1976 there were fifty feminist health clinics in the United Sates, amid hundreds of other feminist health groups. Activists sought to create a feminist medicine, restructuring relations between provider and patient, wresting back from doctors control of women’s sexual, mental and physical health. Feminist clinics in Iowa, Florida, California, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, Morgen shows, struggled to maintain a feminist workplace as they taught women self-exams, rejected drapery and other techniques for shielding the body from her owner, made sure doctors were addressed by their first names, and tried to bring feminism to their neighbors. But the feminist critique of professionalism lost its edge as Medicaid and private insurance companies demanded good relations with local social service agencies and health professionals, and clinics began to be run less like collectives and more like small businesses.

California feminists, Morgen notes, collaborated with the Medical Committee for Human Rights to write A People’s Guide to Hospitals, and a group broke away from the Berkeley Free Clinic to form the Berkeley Women’s Health Collective. But we hear frustratingly little about the clinics’ relations with the Health Left or with the medical establishment. Yet hospitals and medical schools were constant targets for the 1970s feminist movement. Some clinics tried to alter the sexist dehumanizing education offered by most medical schools by providing feminist gynecology; feminist lawyers of the Women’s Equity Action League threatened medical schools with new anti-discrimination laws and expanded the gender ratio of new classes; one group secretly entered a local hospital with a TV reporter and were arrested after publicizing its “unsafe childbirth practices” (p. 131); and a few instituted lawsuits against local hospitals and medical societies who had threatened clinic-affiliated doctors with denial of professional privileges, winning them on occasion.

Women’s health—although not feminist health— has become a central and profitable part of the American medical marketplace. By 2000 there were around 3600 women’s health centers, most hospital-sponsored. Morgen does not address recent feminist warnings about the “pink ribbboning” of women’s health activism, but she notes that hospitals have integrated only those aspects of the feminist health model most amenable to mainstream medicine. Her study leaves out the history of activism around childbirth, abortion, domestic violence, AIDS, breast cancer and women’s health research as deserving their own separate although interconnected histories. There are a number of stories and...