Husbands' Hearts and Women's Health
Gender, Age, and Heart Disease in Twentieth-Century America
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 15025442 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Cara Kiernan Fallon (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 93 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 577-609 |
| Publication date | 2019-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Bulletin of the history of medicine (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0007-5140 • E-ISSN: 1086-3176 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/bhm.2019.0073 |
| PMID | 31885017 |
| OpenAlex | W2997594148 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 5 |
The medical community and broader public have historically focused on heart disease as a concern for men, even though it has been the leading cause of death in women for decades. Through an analysis of medical publications, women's health literature, and mainstream media, this article traces the interactions of gender and age on perceptions of heart disease during the twentieth century. I argue that attention to middle-age mortality rates accentuated men's susceptibility to heart disease over women's, even as these differences diminished at older ages, when the majority of deaths occurred. Age and gender biases combined to frame heart disease as a man's disease on one hand, while the women's health movement marginalized older women's health on the other. It was not until the following decades that older women began to attract clinical concern and greater public attention, which ultimately expanded narrow frameworks of both heart disease and women's health
Disease · Heart disease · Mainstream · Pathology · Political science · Public health · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Internal Medicine · Medicine · Sex and Gender in Healthcare · Gerontology
| Citations per year | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2026 - 2026 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |