Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of SicknessFrom prescribing the "rest cure" to diagnosing hysteria, the medical profession has consistently treated women as weak and pathological. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English's concise history of the sexual politics of medical practices shows how this biomedical rationale was used to justify sex discrimination throughout the culture, and how its vestiges are evident in abortion policy and other reproductive rights struggles today. |
Contents
Title Page | |
A Perspective on the Social Role of Medicine | |
Women and Medicine in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth | |
The Sick Women of the Upper Classes | |
The Sickening Women of the Working Class | |
Notes on the Situation Today 1973 | |
Concluding Thoughts | |
Other editions - View all
Complaints & Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness Barbara Ehrenreich,Deirdre English Limited preview - 2011 |
Common terms and phrases
abortion affluent women Barbara Ehrenreich biological class birth control birth control movement blamed bodies Charlotte Perkins Gilman childbirth Complaints and Disorders consumption contagion contraception cult of female cure danger defective Deirdre English disease doctors domination early twentieth centuries Ehrenreich and English Emma Goldman epidemic fear female invalidism feminist germs gynecology husband hypersexuality hysteria hysterical illness labor late nineteenth leisure low-income women male Mallon Margaret Sanger Mary Mallon Mary Putnam Jacobi medical profession medical sexism medical system medical theories medicine menstruation mental middle middle-class women moral needs nineteenth and early nineteenth century oppression organs ovaries ovariotomy patient physicians poor women potentially sickening pregnancy problem prostitutes public health race and class reproductive sanitation scientific servants sexist ideology sexual sick slums social roles society surgery Typhoid Mary upper upper-class women upper-middle-class women urban uterus Victorian woman women’s health movement workers working-class women wrote York