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Bulletin of the History of Medicine 77.4 (2003) 982-983



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Sandra Morgen. Into Our Own Hands: The Women's Health Movement in the United States, 1969-1990. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002. xv + 285 pp. $60.00 (cloth, 0-8135-3070-9), $24.00 (paperbound, 0-8135-3071-7).

Too often, anthropologist Sandra Morgen reminds us, the experiences of grassroots activists are left out of social-movement histories. In Into Our Own Hands, she seeks to correct this omission by presenting the women's health movement as shaped by tens of thousands of ordinary women. Morgen faces the formidable task of disentangling a "crowded cast of characters" and their myriad efforts to transform gynecological health care (p. 236). The movement, though national in scope, depended upon the local activism of women committed to remaking women's health as a feminist issue—through establishing feminist health clinics, performing lay abortions, promoting gynecological self-help, writing women's health manuals, or engaging in political advocacy.

By highlighting the work of activists at the local level, Morgen intends to draw attention to the grassroots origins of the revolution in women's health care. Her interest in the movement is more than academic: she views her two-year experience working in a feminist health clinic in the 1970s (doing ethnographic fieldwork) as part of her personal and political commitment to women's health; after finishing, she returned home to write her dissertation and to care for her mother, who was undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer.

A quarter of a century later, Morgen views the changes in women's health services and policy as "nothing short of stunning" (p. 232). Yet few recognize the contributions that women activists made in the 1970s and 1980s. Ruth Rosen, in her recent book The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America (2000), argues that the women's health movement was "arguably one of the most important and successful accomplishments of second-wave feminism,"1 yet its history has been largely neglected by scholars. Into Our Own Hands presents [End Page 982] the first in-depth investigation into the movement, focusing primarily on feminist health clinics. Through interviews with women's health activists, her own fieldwork at a feminist health clinic, and a 1990 survey of fifty women's health organizations, Morgen pieces together a much-needed narrative on the history of women's health.

At the center of her narrative are stories: foundational stories (how Carol Downer discovered cervical self-examination; how a one-day workshop on women's bodies inspired the Boston Women's Health Book Collective), and clinic stories (how to foil attacks by antiabortion groups; how to confront the politics and prejudices of race and class). These stories enliven Morgen's monograph, giving readers a window into the passionate, highly charged, tumultuous world of the feminist health clinic, where anything from selective state funding to a bomb threat to internal strife threatened to crush the political ideals of even the most ardent and optimistic feminist.

Morgen is at her strongest when analyzing the development of feminist health clinics, from their beginnings in the early 1970s through their struggles in the Reagan era. She provides a coherent picture of these clinics, despite their organizational diversity and threatened co-optation by the growth of mainstream women's health centers. Beginning in the late 1970s, feminist clinics competed with hospital and physician-owned women's health centers, which grew to approximately 3,600 by the mid-1990s (p. 147). Morgen stresses that these mainstream centers are "in no sense alternative health care providers" (p. 147). So just what is the relationship between feminist health clinics and mainstream women's health centers? Morgen appears ambivalent: on the one hand, she argues that the growth of these centers illustrates the "dramatic effects of the women's health movement on mainstream medicine" (p. 149); on the other, she suggests that "the major driving force" in the creation of mainstream clinics "was the increasingly...

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