"In Into Our Own Hands, Sandra Morgen shows us, not just how the women's health movement started, but how
it weathered adversity. This book is important reading for everyone who cares about the future of women's health
as defined by women themselves."
--Cynthia A. Pearson, executive director, National Women's Health Network
"This is an analytically sophisticated and engaging contribution to our understanding of the feminist health
movement."
--Karen Brodkin, professor of anthropology and women's studies, UCLA
Submitted By Publisher, June, 2003
Summary
Recent history has witnessed a revolution in women's health care. Beginning in the late 1960s, women in communities
across the United States challenged medical and male control over women's health. Few people today realize the
extent to which these grassroots efforts shifted power and responsibility from the medical establishment into women's
hands as health care consumers, providers, and advocates.
Into Our Own Hands traces the women's 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 women's 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 movement's encounters with organized medicine, the state, and ascendant neoconservative and neoliberal political
forces of the 1970s to the1980s shaped the confrontations and accomplishments in women's health care. The book
also explores the impact of political struggles over race and class within the movement organizations.