Sophiologist

“Throughout U.S. history, many advances in women’s health have been led by women. As reviewed by Carol Weisman,¹⁰ past women’s health movements initiated and sustained by women include (1) the Popular Health Movement in the early to mid-1800s (which included advocating corsetless clothing), (2) the post-Civil War women’s medical movement, in which the first generation of female physicians were prominent participants advocating women’s inherent health and vitality in opposition to the prevailing medical view of women as sickly and frail, (3) the Progressive Era in the early 1900s, during which the first birth control clinic was opened in Brooklyn by public health nurse and social activist Margaret Sanger, government-funded maternal and child health services were developed, and the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Act of 1921 was passed (emblematic of the new political influence of women who gained the right to vote in 1920), and (4) the women’s health movement of the 1960s and 1970s, a grassroots effort in which women’s reproductive rights were viewed as essential to full gender equity, the prevailing assumptions and practices of mainstream medicine (controlled almost exclusively by male physicians) were challenged, and women’s restricted admission to medical schools was effectively eliminated by enactment of Title IX of the Civil Rights Act in 1972. This set the stage for the most recent women’s health movement occurring between approximately 1985 and 2000. (Before women were allowed entry into male-only medical schools, there were 16 women-only medical schools founded and run by women physicians. By 1910, all but 3 of these had closed or merged with traditional schools which led to a reduction in the number of women medical students from 6% in 1900 to 4% in 1930.¹¹)
Once admission restrictions were removed, the number of women enrolled in U.S. allopathic medical schools rose from about 10% in 1970 to approximately 50% today.^11,12 By the early 1980s, when the proportion of women medical students reached 30%, women physicians—who have consistently entered academic medicine in greater proportion than their male counterparts¹³—began to reach a critical mass in academic medicine. These women, many of whom came of age during the women’s health movement of the 1960s and 1970s, realized that medical education, healthcare, and biomedical research excluded women’s social and biological experiences, even pathologizing normal female life events, and that this androcentric approach was not only detrimental to the health of women but also socially unjust.^14–20

—Read on for more fascinating women’s health history. It still amazes me to think of what women my mother’s age—the same Baby Boomer age of the women who are my doctors now—had to go through.