Judith Houck

Claiming Our Bodies, Demanding Our Liberation: The Women’s Health Movement, 1969-1993

This project seeks to examine historically the emergence, development, travails, and successes of the women’s health movement in the United States between 1969 and 1993. This movement concentrated its efforts on three overlapping areas. As health educators, feminists published books and articles, gathered and analyzed information, sponsored workshops, designed and taught courses, and supported “consciousness raising” (CR) groups. As lobbyists, health feminists challenged the safety of devices and medications, urged the acceptance of more women into medical school, and demanded more money for research into conditions that disproportionately affected women. As providers of direct services, health activists performed abortions, taught self-help gynecology, and, with MD in hand, opened their own health clinics. 

Despite general agreement about the need for medical reform, feminists did not share a common vision of women’s health care. Although serious tensions and contradictions challenged health activists, two ideas seemed to undergird most organizing. Activists urged women to retain control of their bodies by refusing to see all bodily occurrences as medical events and by participating actively in the doctor-patient relationship. These themes became central to the feminist discussions of women’s health. 

This project will focus on three significant issues. First, it will examine how feminists envisioned the relationship between social liberation and bodily control. Second, it will survey the contrary impulses of the movement to both create separate women’s institutions while simultaneously demanding a place for women at institutions dominated by men. Third, an examination of women’s health activism will illuminate one particular incarnation of the longer struggle between equality feminists and difference feminists. Finally, this project will show how differences among women, be they economic, sexual, or ethnic, created distinctive bodily needs and experiences that were sometimes ignored in the effort to secure “women’s” health. In the end, these fissures revealed the myth of the universal “woman”.