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

Description

Beginning in the late 1960s, women in communities across the United States challenged medical and male control over women's health. Few people today realize the extent to which these grassroots efforts shifted power and responsibility from the medical establishment into women's hands as health care consumers, providers, and advocates. Into Our Own Hands traces the women's health care movement in the United States. Richly documented, this study is based on more than a decade of research, including interviews with leading activists; documentary material from feminist health clinics and advocacy organizations; a survey of women's health movement organizations in the early 1990s; and ethnographic fieldwork. Sandra Morgen focuses on the clinics born from this movement, as well as how the movements encounters with organized medicine, the state, and ascendant neoconservative and neoliberal political forces of the 1970s to the 1980s shaped the confrontations and accomplishments in women's health care. The book also explores the impact of political struggles over race and class within the movement organizations.