Women's Health Activism

Women's health activism—advocacy for and a commitment to nondiscrimination and informed consent in women's health—exists because women have not and do not always have the power to control and make decisions about their own bodies. The women's health movement is associated with the second wave of the women's rights movement in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. A woman's right to choose and be informed of her health and options has become more or less secure throughout time, depending on the medical establishment's assumptions about women, legal prescription, cultural norms, and governmental involvement. Women have historically come together on their own, often in private, for the purposes of health activism and specifically to spread knowledge and to pass methods, cures, and information on to younger generations. There are many issues that make up the broad topic of women's health: to name a few, reproductive and sexual health, childbirth and maternity, aging and menopause, women's disproportionate susceptibility to HIV/AIDS, psychological health, breast and ovarian cancer, osteoporosis, diet, safety from domestic violence and rape, the environmental effect on women's bodies, and many others. While these issues may wax and wane in the public consciousness and in academia, women's health activism is linked at its core to women's self-determination and has therefore always been a central motivating and organizing doctrine.

Women have always been healers and remain the world's primary caregivers. There is evidence of female surgeons, often in the role of the midwife, in ancient Egypt from 3500 BC. Women were often care-givers of the poor in the Middle Ages, before there were hospitals or even established medical science. Women were shamans and “wise women” who possessed cures and were respected in many societies, where they were depended upon to possess the knowledge of healing for whole societies from generation to generation. Today, many women are practitioners, professionally, voluntarily, or in the role of mother, daughter, sister, friend, or wife. Some of these roles are institutionally and societally valued, but many are not, and women as healers have a history of contention with medical and state authorities. Witch healers in medieval Europe were sometimes specifically accused of possessing medical and obstetrical skills—a crime for which many were burned at the stake. Exceptions abound, but the societal oppression and underrepresentation of women in positions of power throughout history have left women out of many established institutions, especially the medical profession. This legacy affects women today all over the globe.

The rise of the medical profession in the predominantly Christian West systematically excluded women in its early history. From the 13th century in Europe, doctors attended universities that were specifically male. As medicine became a profession requiring these credentials, women were thus legally excluded from practicing. While women were not allowed to attend the institutions to learn the required curricula, they were also often barred from practicing with their own generational or empirical knowledge. Jacoba Felicie, for example, was brought to trial in 1322 in France and charged with curing her patients as a nonprofessional. In America, the popular health movement of the 1830s and 1840s was a [Page 1483]revival of popular, nonprofessional healing methods, and many women were involved as both recipients and practitioners. This movement prescribed overall healthy lifestyles that included diet, exercise, sexual abstinence to limit family size, and the elimination of such harmful fashions as the corset. Meanwhile, however, the medical establishment was solidifying, and, by the early 20th century, with the help of the Flexner report, medicine was established as a totally white, male, and upper-class profession.

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