The following is testimony presented on behalf of the National Women's Health Network, at the March 8, 1978, Hearings on Contraceptive Research before the Select Committee on Population of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Tag - women’s health
One of America's first physicians could not convince his patients that they should pay for his services. They thought it appropriate to pay for the drugs that he supplied, but not for his attention and time. It seemed natural for one person to care about another, not to charge for it. This incident, related in Barbara...
If women are to understand power, on both the macropolitical level and the micropolitical one which underlies and maintains it, we must learn more about nonverbal communication. For every major decision in Washington or on Wall Street that determines whether and how much sugar and oil we have and what information we...
It sounds like a 21st Century melodrama, but for Norma James, a 34-year-old divorced mother of four, it's all too real. James made history of sorts last year when she had herself sterilized so she could keep her job at a General Motors battery plant near Toronto.
This short article appeared in a packet put together by the Political Economy Program Center of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington. We are reprinting it here as a way of opening up this important area, and stimulating related articles for future issues. The bibliography section is not meant to be...
This is an adaptation of an article which originally appeared in Mountain Life and Work—a publication of the Council of the Southern Mountains. It was expanded and modified for use here by a member of our editorial collective with the permission and cooperation of the authors.
As the birth control clinic movement mushroomed around the country, conflict raged about how and by whom the clinics should be controlled. Margaret Sanger still resisted relinquishing personal control of her New York clinic to the medical profession. No doubt part of her resistance came from a desire to control things...
A feminist perspective would not hail new technological developments as "liberating" because it would realize that the oppression of women is not the result of biology but of the social constructs around it. In this respect, it is paradoxical that the excesses of an impersonal technology developed by males in a sexist...
The authors focus separately on women of the upper and upper-middle class, and on working-class women. And they are clearer about the effects of the medical system as it applied to affluent women [probably because wealthy women were more directly affected by the medical system]. In addition, Ehrenreich and English...
Birth control can have three major social purposes: to increase the individual freedom of women; to control overall population trends; and to improve and protect health. When the modern birth control movement began in the early 20th century, the first was its dominant motive. Organizations demanding the legalization...