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

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.

Table of Contents:
In the beginning. One conceiving history Foundational stories and movement making On their own women of color and the women's health movement Into our own hands : feminist health clinics as feminist practice The politics of change in women's health movement organizations. Against the odds : patterns of organizational change in feminist clinics in the 1970s and 1980s The changer and the changed : the women's health movement, doctors, and organized medicine Neither friend nor foe : the state, the movement, and the changing political landscape The three Rs : Reagan, retrenchment, and operation rescue in the 1980s The politics of race and class : dreams of diversity, dilemmas of difference Afterword: The movement in the 1990s : accomplishmentsand continuing challenges

About the Author :
Sandra Morgen is director of the Center for the Study of Women in Society at the University of Oregon. She is an anthropologist who teaches in the department of sociology. Her publications include Women and the Politics of Empowerment, Gender and Anthropology: Critical Reviews for Research and Teaching, and EnGendering Rationalities.

Review :
This is an analytically sophisticated and engaging contribution to our understanding of the feminist health movement. - Karen Brodkin (professor of anthropology and womenÆs studies, UCLA) In Into Our Own Hands, Sandra Morgen shows us, not just how the womenÆs health movement started, but how it weathered adversity. This book is important reading for everyone who cares about the future of womenÆs health as defined by women themselves.   - Cynthia A. Pearson (executive director, National WomenÆs Health Network) The strength of the book . . . lies in its attention to the organizational politics of the feminist health clinic as workplace, tracing how clinics struggled with very few resources to organize themselves as microcosms of the more equitable society they hoped for. The most important contribution the book makes is in the second half, when it describes the fates of feminist womenÆs health clinics in the 1970s and 1980s. . . . An important first overview for the many students eager to work on this topic. (Isis)