Women and Health in America

The historical study of women and health in the United States may be said to have come of age in 1984 with the original publication of Judith Leavitt's anthology. The women's liberation movement of the late sixties and seventies had forced scholars in virtually all subdisciplines of history to acknowledge that something had been missing from their work; and certainly, as regards medical history (or, better, the history of health), a serious approach to women--both in quantity of output and in sophistication of analysis--developed starting around 1970. In her introduction to the 1984 edition Leavitt reviewed the maturation of the field up to that time, describing how polemical and celebratory works had characterized the early seventies, while by the mid-eighties historians were stressing women's agency and the health issues that women have faced in their daily lives

Agency (philosophy) · Field (mathematics) · Political science · Social science · Sociology · Sophistication · Gender Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History