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

Into Our Own Hands: The Women's Health Movement in the United States, 1969-990 by Sandra Morgen. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002, 320 pp. $60.00 hardcover, $24.00 paper.

Sandra Morgen's most recent work, Into Our Own Hands, provides scholars with a much-awaited comprehensive history of the modern women's health movement in the United States. Spanning the years 1969-1990, Morgen's study runs the gamut from Carol Downer's self-help gynecology movement and its impact on women's perceptions of their own bodies, to feminists' participation in the health care insurance imbroglio of the 1990s and their impact on public policy. With its attention to detail, and its engrossing accounts of events which have now passed into the realm of second-wave feminist nostalgia, Into Our Own Hands is one of the more serious attempts at filling the void that has existed in the literature since the publication of Sheryl Ruzek's The Women's Health Movement: Feminist Alternatives to Medical Control (1978).

Morgen begins her analysis by positing the modern women's health movement as an out growth of the radicalism and discontent of the late 1960s. She eloquently illustrates how the movement found its origins in the tenants of the "civil rights movement, [which] along with the women's, antiwar, student, and welfare rights movements, had mobilized hundreds of thousands of women and men whose political visions, while varying, contributed to an evolving critique of racism, sexism, capitalism, and imperialism" (3). As Morgen conveys, one way in which women combated these "isms" was through an active backlash against...