Women, Health, and Nation: Canada and the United States Since 1945

Shelley Z. Reuter is an assistant professor of sociology at Concordia
University in Montreal.

Women, Health, and Nation is a rich compilation of 20 essays on North
American women’s post-war health-care experiences. First and foremost,
this collection reflects women’s complex relationship to medical
science. Some chapters demonstrate how medicine has oppressed women
(Gutierrиz, Landsberg), while others (Ladd-Taylor, McCall, Feldberg)
show how it has also served their interests through subversion or even
its mobilization. McLellan, for example, describes how reframing
alcoholism as a disease liberated women alcoholics from a double
standard. Clow and Li both demonstrate the social history of
pharmaceuticals and the sometimes very different outcomes of women’s
confidence in medical science. Prescott’s analysis of adolescent
gynecology reveals a branch of medicine at once disempowering (of
mothers) and progressive and empowering (of young girls).

A second prominent theme is women’s work, especially childbirthing
and nursing. Charles’s examination of nuns’ work in Quebec hospitals
and Ettinger’s study of nurse-nun-midwives in New Mexico underscore
nuns’ important contribution to health care. Smith and Nickel discuss
the gendered nature of palliative care. In describing the growth of the
“hospice movement,” their essay signals another key aspect of
women’s health work—namely their activism, either through direct
action, as illustrated by Reagan’s history of an American abortion
referral agency, or through feminist writing, as shown in the essays by
Hyers, Conconi, Starr, and Landsberg. Reverby reflects on the need to
understand the history of health activism if women are to achieve
positive change in health policy.

Racial politics constitute a third important theme of the book. Essays
by Gutierrиz on the sterilization of Mexican women, Gamble on her
marginalization as a doctor, and Flynn on Canadian immigration policy
that discriminated against Caribbean and Haitian nurses forcefully
remind readers of the reality of racism in the history of women’s
health. Sadly, some women have helped perpetuate racial politics;
McPherson’s essay on the Indian Health Services and Zelmanovits’s
piece on childbirthing in the North illustrate nurses’ contribution to
our colonial health system.

Women, Health, and Nation makes a fascinating contribution to the
history, geography, anthropology, and sociology of women’s health and
health care that scholars in these fields ought not overlook.