Looking through the Speculum: Examining the Women's Health Movement (2024)

Online ISBN:

9780226830858

Print ISBN:

9780226830841

Publisher:

University of Chicago Press

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Judith A. Houck

Judith A. Houck

University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Oxford Academic

Published:

19 January 2024

Print ISBN:

9780226830841

Publisher:

University of Chicago Press

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OXFORD ACADEMIC STYLE

Houck, Judith A., Looking through the Speculum: Examining the Women's Health Movement (Chicago, IL, 2024; online edn, Chicago Scholarship Online, 23 May 2024), https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226830858.001.0001, accessed 25 May 2024.

CHICAGO STYLE

Houck, Judith A.. Looking through the Speculum: Examining the Women's Health Movement. University of Chicago Press, 2024. Chicago Scholarship Online, 2024. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226830858.001.0001.

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Abstract

This book explores the history of the women’s health movement in the United States, highlighting the women who imagined a world where women could control their bodies and the institutions they built to bring their vision to life. It analyzes the movement’s national commitments and its local politics, especially in California. It develops three interlocking arguments. First, the concept of self-help, a central practice for many feminist health activists, proved flexible enough to serve diverse political and embodied needs. Second, the movement shifted from its aspirational focus on serving all women, a goal that left particular groups of women underserved, to a more inclusive outreach to particular groups of women, especially those underserved by medicine. Third, health clinics, the institutional product of the women’s health movement, tested the movement’s political commitments even as they met women’s and other people’s critical health needs. To develop these claims, the book is organized into eight paired chapters. The first chapter in each dyad takes on a project that engaged the women’s health movement, including self-help and cervical self-exam, abortion politics, lesbian health, and the inclusion of women of color, especially Latinas and Black women. The second chapter of each pair examines the same issue as it was taken up by feminist health clinics. The book describes how the movement allowed women to fight for liberation and for woman-centered health care with the same tools.

Keywords: women’s health movement, clinics, feminism, self-help, lesbian, abortion, women of color, Latinas, liberation, Black

Subject

History of Science and Technology

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