SOCI 365 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Reproductive Health, Reproductive Rights, Biomedicine
5 May 2018
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Lecture 7 – January 22nd
The History of the Women’s Health Movement
Women’s Health Seen as Key to Women’s Liberation
• Women’s bodies were seen as key sites of their oppression
• Liberation from medical control over women’s bodies most notably their
reproduction) was key
• Medicine = emblematic
o Medical encounters marked intense examples of sexism
o Emblematic of something larger going on – autonomy
• Social movements and health
o Re-conceptualize what had been viewed as medical problems in terms of
political problems
o The personal is the political – feminist slogan dating back to at least 1969
▪ The idea that anything happened to you personally lived in a political
context
▪ Anything that we do, anything that we act has a political outcome
▪ )t’s through the personal that we can act political change
• Sexism in medicine
o Sexist way that research took place – male bodies for research
o Reproductive rights
o The male is the norm
▪ If you just study the norm then we will know everything we need to
know
▪ No need to study the women’s bodies separately
• Women had their own individual experiences in medicine and they began to realize
that other women experienced those same things
Applying the Sociological Imagination to Health and Illness
• C. Wright Mills
o Another way to think about this is that social movements apply the
sociological imagination
• Rethink individuals’ health problems as social and political problems
• Micro example of something and you want to place it in a broader context
o Politically, socially, etc.
The Women’s Health Movement
• 1960s to early 1970s
• Fundamental shift of the traditionally unequal balances of power between (women)
patients and (male) doctors
• Addresses women’s experiences of oppression in biomedicine
o As patients
o As providers, where they were located in the lowest status, lowest paid jobs
• How women might take medicine itself into their own hands – instead of saying that
women need more education
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