Into Our Own Hands: The Women’s Health Movement in the United States, 1969-1990

Recent history has witnessed a revolution in women’s health care. Beginning in the late 1960s, women in communities across the United States challenged medical and male control over women’s health. Few people today realize the extent to which these grassroots efforts shifted power and responsibility from the medical establishment into women’s hands as health care consumers, providers, and advocates. Into Our Own Hands traces this history of women’s health care in the United States. It is based on more than a decade of research, including interviews with more than forty movement activists, including many of its leaders; documentary material from a number of feminist health clinics and advocacy organizations; a survey of women’s health movement organizations in the early 1990s; ethnographic fieldwork; and the scholarship of those who have studied this development. Morgen focuses on the clinics born from this movement, and how encounters between the movement and organized medicine, the state, and ascendant neoconservative and later neoliberal political forces of the 1970s to the 1980s shaped the confrontations and accomplishments in women’s health care. The book also explores the impact of political struggles over race and class within the movement.