The women's health movement (WHM, also feminist women's health movement) in the United States refers to the aspect of the American feminist movement that works to improve all aspects of women's health and healthcare. It began during the second wave of feminism as a sub-movement of the women's liberation movement. WHM activism involves increasing women's knowledge and control of their own bodies on a variety of subjects, such as fertility control and home remedies, as well as challenging traditional doctor-patient relationships, the medicalization of childbirth, misogyny in the health care system, and ensuring drug safety.
Notable organizations associated with the women's health movement include the Jane Collective, the Boston Women's Health Book Collective, the Feminist Abortion Network, the National Women's Health Network, the Black Women's Health Imperative and the Native American Women's Health Education Resource Center. Other results of WHM activism are the creation of feminist health centers, the Dalkon Shield lawsuit, the DES daughters lawsuit, and the Nelson Pill Hearings, which resulted in the inclusion of medication package inserts to insure informed consent for women taking oral contraceptive pills. Notable books and media resulting from this movement include Women and Madness by Phyllis Chesler, Our Bodies, Ourselves by the Boston Women's Health Book Collective, The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm by Anne Koedt, and La Operación.
The WHM is unique from the abortion-rights movement in that the WHM has a wider scope of issues in relation to women and their health. The health clinics, groups, and activists of the WHM also advocate "nonprofessional caregivers, self-help, emphasis on alternative (nonprescription) remedies when possible, demystification of health information and providers, and clinic administration and control by nonprofessional women."
Historical context The women's health movement has origins in multiple movements within the United States: the popular health movement of the 1830s and 1840s, the struggle for women/midwives to practice medicine or enter medical schools in the late 1800s and early 1900s, black women's clubs that worked to improve access to healthcare, and various social movements in the 1960s.
Helen Marieskind argues that like the popular health movement of the 19th century, the WHM worked to redefine health care, empower women, and support "preventive health concepts, self-awareness... [a] knowledge of bodily processes, and... demystify[ing] medicine." Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, in their work Witches, Midwives, and Nurses (1972), also compare the two movements.
The WHM shares ideology with other New Left movements. The environmental and anti-nuclear movements, like the WHM, oppose militarism, critique corporations and government agencies, express the need to protect humans and the environment from hazards, and stress the importance of Nothing About Us Without Us. Women and gender studies scholar Jennifer Nelson says that neighborhood health centers created by civil rights and other New Left activists were the "intellectual, political, and practical experiential precedents," for feminist health centers, which were one major result of the women's health movement.
The women's health movement grew directly out of the women's liberation movement during the late 1960s.
Women's liberation movement Just as the Women's Suffrage movement grew out of the Abolition Movement, the Women's Liberation Movement grew out of the struggle for civil rights. Though challenging patriarchy and the anti-patriarchal message of the Women's Liberation Movement was considered radical, it was not the only, nor the first, radical movement in the early period of second-wave feminism. Rather than simply desiring legal equality, members believed that the moral and social climate in the United States needed to change. Though most groups operated independently—there was no national umbrella organization—there were unifying philosophies of women participating in the movement. Challenging patriarchy and the hierarchical organization of society which defined women as subordinate, participants in the movement believed that women should be free to define their own individual identity as part of human society. One of the reasons that women who supported the movement chose not to create a single approach to addressing the problem of women being treated as second-class citizens was that they did not want to foster an idea that anyone was an expert or that any one group or idea could address all of the societal problems women faced. They also wanted women, whose voices had been silenced, to be able to express their own views on solutions. Among the issues were the objectification of women, reproductive rights, opportunities for women in the workplace, redefining familial roles. A dilemma faced by movement members was how they could challenge the definition of femininity without compromising the principals of feminism. They were not interested in reforming existing social structures, but instead were focused on changing the perceptions of women's place in society and the family and women's autonomy. Rejecting hierarchical structure, most groups which formed operated as collectives where all women could participate equally. Typically, groups associated with the Women's Liberation Movement held consciousness-raising (CR) meetings where women could voice their concerns and experiences, learning to politicize their issues. To members of the WLM, rejecting sexism was the most important objective in eliminating women's status as second-class citizens.
By attending CR groups, women around the United States participated in "a process in which the sharing of personal stories led to a "click"--a sudden recognition that sexism lay at the root of their struggles." This process included sharing their healthcare experiences with each other. They discussed topics such as illegal abortions, rape, negative experiences with doctors during childbirth and gynecologist visits, sexuality, birth control, and other aspects of women's health. This led them to "campaign to change how doctors, the government, the media, and the medical field treat...women and their bodies."
Issues and ideology WHM activism covers topics such as access to reproductive technology and birth control, sterilization abuse, advocating against unnecessary medical intervention during childbirth, increasing access to healthcare through the creation of feminist health centers and self-help clinics, teaching women about their bodies, discovering the history of women in medicine, critiquing the misogyny in the healthcare system, and creating health advocacy groups for women. Due to the political and collective nature of the WHM, Helen Marieskind calls the ideology of the movement Feminist-Socialism.
They view the relationship between women and their doctors (especially male gynecologists) as similar to women's second-class status in society. WHM activists argue that the institution of medicine is "embedded in, and an embodiment of," patriarchal society and is an institution of social control. Nearly all of the early literature from the WHM argued that medicine and doctors work to subordinate women, people of color, and the poor; doctors are too powerful; healthcare costs too much; and that conventional healthcare leaves patients with little to no dignity, right to health information, or ability to choose their treatment.
1969–1973 The women's liberation movement, and consequently the WHM, were grassroots, so there were many different groups of women organizing around women's health issues in the United States at the beginning of the second wave of feminism. Anthropologist Sandra Morgen argues that there are four founding events of the WHM: the workshop and research that led to the writing of Our Bodies, Ourselves in Boston, the founding of the underground abortion service by the Jane Collective in Chicago, Carol Downer and Lorraine Rothman's self-help gynecology in Los Angeles, and Barbara Seaman's (New York) and Belita Cowan's (Ann Arbor) work to expose the health risks of the oral contraceptive pill and diethylstilbestrol. Ninia Baehr includes the activism of Patricia Maginnis and the Army of Three–even though their activism around abortion began in 1959–because they were the first to frame abortion around women's rights and the idea that women, not doctors or lawmakers, should be the ones to make decisions around abortion.
Society for Human Abortion and the Army of Three Patricia Maginnis founded the Citizens Committee for Humane Abortion Laws (CCHAL) in 1962, while she attended San Jose State University. In 1963, she moved the organization to San Francisco and Rowena Gurner joined CCHAL. In 1964, Gurner and Maginnis changed the organization's name to The Society for Humane Abortion (SHA) and in 1965 it was incorporated as a non-profit organization in California. SHA advocated for "elective abortion," that all women had the right to safe and legal abortion free of harassment, and that "[the] termination of pregnancy is a decision which the person or family involved should be free to make as their own religious beliefs, values, emotions, and circumstances may dictate." The SHA believed in the repeal of all abortion laws, including the 1963 Humane Abortion Act, which made abortion legal in cases of rape or incest. While still heading the Society for Humane Abortion, Maginnis set-up another organization in 1966 to carry on an underground feminist health referral system. The main mission of this organization, Association to Repeal Abortion Laws (ARAL), was to connect pregnant women with abortion providers in neighboring countries. Their list of abortion specialists was well-researched and depended on members' information and the feedback of the women they referred.
Together, the Army of Three (Maginnis, Gurner, and Lana Phelan) planned and executed civil disobedience actions in the late 1960s in order to overturn abortion laws in California. In 1968, after multiple bouts of handing out pamphlets with information about contraception and sexually transmitted infections (which was illegal under San Francisco's Municipal Ordinance 188), Maginnis was arrested. The outcome of her case overturned this local ordinance, but the Army of Three wanted to challenge the state law. To do this, they created abortion 'classes,' which Maginnis was eventually arrest for in San Mateo county. The case wasn't settled until after Roe v. Wade liberalized abortion laws in the United States, but they did succeed in overturning California's abortion law. DES