Into Our Own Hands: The Women's Health Movement in the United States, 1969-1990

2004 Basker Prize from the Society for Medical Anthropology

Recent history has witnessed a revolution in womens health care. Beginning in the late 1960s, women in communities across the United States challenged medical and male control over womens health. Few people today realize the extent to which these grassroots efforts shifted power and responsibility from the medical establishment into womens hands as health care consumers, providers, and advocates.

Into Our Own Hands traces the womens health care movement in the United States. Richly documented, this study is based on more than a decade of research, including interviews with leading activists; documentary material from feminist health clinics and advocacy organizations; a survey of womens health movement organizations in the early 1990s; and ethnographic fieldwork. Sandra Morgen focuses on the clinics born from this movement, as well as how the movements encounters with organized medicine, the state, and ascendant neoconservative and neoliberal political forces of the 1970s to the1980s shaped the confrontations and accomplishments in womens health care. The book also explores the impact of political struggles over race and class within the movement organizations.

Author: Sandra Morgen
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: 06/01/2002
Pages: 304
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.08lbs
Size: 9.02h x 6.12w x 0.73d
ISBN: 9780813530710

Review Citation(s):
Women's Review of Books 09/01/2002 pg. 8
Choice 12/01/2002 pg. 662

About the Author
SANDRA MORGEN was the director of the Center for the Study of Women in Society at the University of Oregon. Her publications include Women and the Politics of Empowerment, Gender and Anthropology: Critical Reviews for Research and Teaching, and Engendering Rationalities.