More Than Medicine: A History of the Feminist Women's Health Movement

by Jennifer Nelson

In 1948, the Constitution of the World Health Organization declared, “Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” Yet this idea was not predominant in the United States immediately after World War II, especially when it came to women’s reproductive health. Both legal and medical institutions—and the male legislators and physicians who populated those institutions—reinforced women’s second class social status and restricted their ability to make their own choices about reproductive health care.

In More Than Medicine, Jennifer Nelson reveals how feminists of the ‘60s and ‘70s applied the lessons of the new left and civil rights movements to generate a women’s health movement. The new movement shifted from the struggle to revolutionize health care to the focus of ending sex discrimination and gender stereotypes perpetuated in mainstream medical contexts. Moving from the campaign for legal abortion to the creation of community clinics and feminist health centers, Nelson illustrates how these activists revolutionized health care by associating it with the changing social landscape in which women had power to control their own life choices.

More Than Medicine poignantly reveals how social justice activists in the United States gradually transformed the meaning of health care, pairing traditional notions of medicine with less conventional ideas of “healthy” social and political environments.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, History, Medicine, Health, Gender and Sexuality, Historical

280 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2015

About the author

As executive producer at Classic FM, Jennifer Nelson works with presenters including Alexander Armstrong and Bill Turnbull. She has produced Classic FM's weekly film music programme since 2014, interviewing many of the directors and composers featured in this book. She has won Gold Sony Radio Academy Awards as producer of music documentaries for BBC 6 Music and Absolute Radio, and was named 'Producer of the Year' at the inaugural Global Awards in 2015. She is currently studying part-time at Birkbeck University for a Creative Industries Management MSc and when she isn't in the radio studio or university library, can often be found in the cinema.

Reviews

[l · Rating 4 out of 5]

I realize that activist history is important but tbh a lot of the time, it’s really boring reading.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

The writing style was quite dry, but the topic matter and historical information on this movement greatly interests me, so I was able to look beyond that.

"Demands to satisfy basic needs cannot be separated from reproductive politics, because a right to reproductive control is hollow without a right to live free of hunger, racism, and violence and without the dignity that facilitates real choices for one's own future community."

"The goals of NHCs (Neighborhood Health Centers) surpassed the simple distribution of medical care commodity form--to be exchanged within a marketplace that at best lowered the cost for the poor. Instead, NHCs
were designed to empower the least powerful members of society and to radically transform a deeply anti-egalitarian culture that had embedded inequalities within institutions such as clinics and hospitals."

[Mills College Library]

613.04244 N4273 2015

[Sarah Mellington-Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the light of the current political atmosphere, this is another worthy read!

[Octavia Cade · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's always such a relief, when coming across an academic book on an interesting subject, to find that the book is readable as well as informative. (Academic prose often has such a soporific effect.) Fortunately, Nelson's language is clear and her argument uncluttered, making this an especially useful text for someone like me, who lacks much background in the topic.

The title, More than Medicine, is a direct reference to a feminist perception of health that is particularly broad-based in approach, and encourages the folding-in of social and economic services in addition to what we typically think of as healthcare. If someone lacks the money to buy food, for instance, then the sensible thing to do, so the argument goes, is not only to treat the malnutrition but to ensure that the individual can access sufficient resources in the future to make sure that malnutrition does not recur. In a practical example from my own country, there's been an increase in rheumatic fever in Auckland because of the poor housing available to low-income families. Yes, the affected kids need treatment, but what's the use of sending them to Starship Hospital for treatment if they have to go straight back to that substandard housing afterwards? Treating the result instead of the cause is merely slapping a Band-Aid on until the problem re-occurs... which seems an eminently sensible perception to me.

Nelson argues that this broad-based approach has, historically, been more often found in feminist health and justice organisations run by women of colour. White feminists, who have tended to be better off economically, have prioritised protecting the abortion rights of women. Which is a necessary thing, but is not the only thing. Women of colour feminists, for instance, have been equally if not more concerned with racially-based sterilisation abuses and the disproportionate rate of HIV/Aids in women of colour. How these various groups work together - or don't - is the subject of much of the book, and the conclusion, that multiple groups representing different cultures working alongside each other are often more effective than one big multicultural group, seems reasonable given the evidence presented.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting history of the feminist women's health movement, from its roots in the civil rights movement to the present day. Although it's pretty repetitive at times, it is good because it gives serious attention to women of color and how their exclusion from mainstream feminist movement organizations shaped their crusade for reproductive justice. It also tells interesting stories about women's health clinics outside the Boston/Chicago/San Francisco areas (the movement in those cities has been well covered by other writers). Another strength of the book is that it covers the women's health movement through the late 80s and 1990s, when the mainstream women's movement was fighting clinic bombings and protests and the increasing restrictions on abortion access in the legal sphere. All in all, a fast read. I'd consider assigning excerpts of it to undergraduates, and would recommend that graduate students skim it.