Ebook: The Women's Health Movement

Women's health as a discrete discipline began during the Second Wave of the women's movement, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It emerged simultaneously on both coasts, as a challenge to physicians and the power they wielded over healthy women and their bodies. Women wanted to understand their bodies and believed they could learn to know and examine them as well as or better than (male) doctors could. Sheryl Burt Ruzek's book describes the development of the Women's Health Movement, including these and other related activities.