Women and Health in America: Historical Readings

by Leavitt, Judith Walzer

• ISBN13: 9780299159641
• ISBN10: 0299159647
• Edition: 2nd
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-03-01
• Publisher: UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS

Summary

In this thoroughly updated second edition, Judith Walzer Leavitt, a leading authority on the history of women's health issues, has collected thirty-five articles representing important scholarship in this once-neglected field. Timely and fascinating, this volume is organized chronologically and then by topic, covering studies of women and health in the colonial and revolutionary periods and the nineteenth century through the Civil War. The remainder of the book concentrates on the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and addresses such controversial issues as body image and physical fitness, sexuality, fertility, abortion and birth control, childbirth and motherhood, mental illness, women's health care providers (midwives, nurses, physicians), and health reform and public health.

Table of Contents

Introduction to the Second Edition	p. 3
Women and Health in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries	p. 9
Taking the Trade: Abortion and Gender Relations in an Eighteenth-Century New England Village	p. 12
Childbirth Practices Among Native American Women of New England and Canada, 1600-1800	p. 38
"The Living Mother of a Living Child": Midwifery and Mortality in Postrevolutionary New England	p. 48
Women and Health in the Nineteenth Century	p. 65
"This Trial Was Sent in Love and Mercy for My Refinement": A Quaker Woman's Experience of Breast Cancer Surgery in 1814	p. 68
Mother Love and Infant Death, 1750-1920	p. 91
The Female Animal: Medical and Biological Views of Woman and Her Role in Nineteenth-Century America	p. 111
The Invisible (Invalid) Woman: African-American Women, Illness, and Nineteenth-Century Narrative	p. 131
Women and Health in the Late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Issues	p. 147
"Something Happens to Girls": Menarche and the Emergence of the Modern American Hygienic Imperative	p. 150
From Robust Appetites to Calorie Counting: The Emergence of Dieting Among Smith College Students in the 1920s	p. 172
What Ought to Be and What Was: Women's Sexuality in the Nineteenth Century	p. 192
Romantic Friends or a "Different Race of Creatures"? The Representation of Lesbian Pathology in Nineteenth-Century America	p. 213
"A New Generation of Women": Progressive Psychiatrists and the Hypersexual Female	p. 229
Voluntary Motherhood: The Beginnings of Feminist Birth Control Ideas in the United States	p. 253
"About to Meet Her Maker": Women, Doctors, Dying Declarations, and the State's Investigation of Abortion, Chicago, 1867-1940	p. 269
The Black Community and the Birth Control Movement	p. 293
Contraceptive Consumers: Gender and the Political Economy of Birth Control in the 1930s	p. 306
Under the Shadow of Maternity: American Women's Responses to Death and Debility Fears in Nineteenth-Century Childbirth	p. 328
And the Results Showed Promise ... Physicians, Childbirth, and Southern Black Migrant Women, 1916-1930: Pittsburgh as a Case Study	p. 347
Race and "Value": Black and White Illegitimate Babies, in the U.S.A., 1945-1965	p. 371
The Invention of Kleptomania	p. 390
Diagnosing Unnatural Motherhood: Nineteenth-Century Physicians and "Puerperal Insanity"	p. 405
The Training and Practice of Midwives: A Wisconsin Study	p. 425
White Nurses, Black Midwives, and Public Health in Mississippi, 1920-1950	p. 444
"Neither for the Drawing Room nor for the Kitchen": Private Duty Nursing in Boston, 1873-1920	p. 460
"They Shall Mount Up with Wings as Eagles": Historical Images of Black Nurses, 1890-1950	p. 475
Interactions Between Public Health Nurses and Clients on American Indian Reservations During the 1930s	p. 489
Feminist Showplace	p. 509
The Gendering of Empathic Expertise: How Women Physicians Became More Empathic Than Men	p. 526
Uncle Sam's Loyal Nieces: American Medical Women, Citizenship, and War Service in World War I	p. 540
A "Terrible and Exhausting" Struggle: Family Caregiving During the Transformation of Medicine	p. 559
Ministries of Healing: Mary Baker Eddy, Ellen G. White, and the Religion of Health	p. 579
Spreading the Germ Theory: Sanitary Science and Home Economics, 1880-1930	p. 596
Gendered Expectations: Women and Early Twentieth-Century Public Health	p. 612
The Growth of Medical Authority: Technology and Morals in Turn-of-the-Century Obstetrics	p. 636
"A Complete Disaster": Abortion and the Politics of Hospital Abortion Committees, 1950-1970	p. 659
A Guide for Further Reading	p. 681
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.