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  • Into Our Own Hands: The Women's Health Movement in the United States, 1969-1990
  • Tanfer Emin-Tunc (bio)
Into Our Own Hands: The Women's Health Movement in the United States, 1969-1990 by Sandra Morgen. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002, 320 pp. $60.00 hardcover, $24.00 paper.

Sandra Morgen's most recent work, Into Our Own Hands, provides scholars with a much-awaited comprehensive history of the modern women's health movement in the United States. Spanning the years 1969-1990, Morgen's study runs the gamut from Carol Downer's self-help gynecology movement and its impact on women's perceptions of their own bodies, to feminists' participation in the health care insurance imbroglio of the 1990s and their impact on public policy. With its attention to detail, and its engrossing accounts of events which have now passed into the realm of second-wave feminist nostalgia, Into Our Own Hands is one of the more serious attempts at filling the void that has existed in the literature since the publication of Sheryl Ruzek's The Women's Health Movement: Feminist Alternatives to Medical Control (1978). [End Page 237]

Morgen begins her analysis by positing the modern women's health movement as an out growth of the radicalism and discontent of the late 1960s. She eloquently illustrates how the movement found its origins in the tenants of the "civil rights movement, [which] along with the women's, antiwar, student, and welfare rights movements, had mobilized hundreds of thousands of women and men whose political visions, while varying, contributed to an evolving critique of racism, sexism, capitalism, and imperialism" (3). As Morgen conveys, one way in which women combated these "isms" was through an active backlash against the patriarchy, which they believed controlled women's bodies both physically, and psychologically. By the time the Boston Women's Health Collective's first edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves was published in 1969,physicians, with their paternalistic treatment of female patients, had became proxies for all forms of male authority, and thus natural targets of the feminist movement.

By building underground abortion referral services in the late 1960s, such as Chicago's Jane, as well as a strong network of feminist health clinics, the women's health movement began to subvert these hegemonic forces both privately and publicly. One of the most public examples of feminist subversion came in the form of self-help gynecology. Its main advocates, Carol Downer and Lorraine Rothman, promoted self-abortion as a powerful way for women to reclaim control over their bodies and the reproductive technologies that had been "hijacked" by the male medical establishment. They also urged women to look at their bodies for the first time through cervical self-examinations, and treat their gynecological ailments with homemade remedies, thus resisting the consumerism and fear that had been forced on women's bodies since the 19th century. Other women, such as Belita Cowan and Barbara Seaman, were actively protesting the so-called "innovations" of modern medical science (such as DES and the birth control pill, respectively), and establishing health care facilities to meet the needs of women, most of which were non-hierarchical (at least initially), and all of which were gyno-centric.

Through her narrative, Morgen successfully conveys the important point that while the women's health care movement did originate in white middle-class circles, it was soon championed by working-class women, lesbians, and women of color, all of whom had been marginalized by mainstream American society, and in particular, the medical profession. Her use of oral history and interviews with prominent members of grassroots organizations, documentary material from feminist health clinics and advocacy organizations, and ethnographic fieldwork (in the form of a survey of women's health movement organizations in the early 1990s), allows Morgen to convey how these women helped "shift power and responsibility away from the medical establishment, and into women's hands as health care consumers, providers, and advocates" (Back [End Page 238] cover). However, Morgen's analysis of this transition is not one-sided: she includes numerous accounts of physicians who opposed, and supported, the women's health movement. One of Morgen...

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