![]() ![]() ![]() By 1914, nurse and activist Margaret Sanger was distributing a newspaper for women suggesting home remedies and recipes to prevent unwanted pregnancy, and she soon opened a Brooklyn clinic. Political and social changes, though slow to materialize, were coming. ![]() In the 1850s, both White and Black women joined nascent campaigns for equal rights and the vote. In every era, from the teachings of the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates to the past century’s debates over women’s access to family-planning methods and abortion, Cleghorn traces common societal and economic assumptions: that women are inferior to men that their chief purpose is to be married and bear children that too much education is bad for them that women, by nature, are vulnerable to “mysterious” illnesses, physical and mental and that female sexuality is dangerous if not kept in check - dangerous enough, during some periods, to justify the removal of women’s sex organs, the prescription of addictive tranquilizers, even brain surgery. ![]() As a doctor and medical journalist, I was already familiar with many of the ways medicine has neglected women’s illnesses or failed to investigate their causes, but “ Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World” makes connections between the role of physicians and society’s interest in controlling women’s bodies that I had never fully appreciated. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |