Rader and Hurst "Women and Health" Syllabus

NEW STUDENTS Fall 2004 -- Stay Tuned for an update of the web page -- what appears below is an earlier incarnation of the class!

Logistics and Overview

**ENROLLED STUDENTS ONLY: Access this information, and more (sources, etc.) via our class Web Board:
http://juju.slc.edu/~rader-womenandhealth-02**

Karen Rader                                          Marsha Hurst
Science, Technology, and Society           Health Advocacy Program
Sarah Lawrence College                         Sarah Lawrence College
Bronxville, NY 10708                            Bronxville, NY 10708

The 1973 publication "Our Bodies, Ourselves" marked a radical change in the way women constructed knowledge about their bodies, their health and themselves as health providers. But the theme of who creates medical knowledge, how, and to what end it is it used also has permeated the broader social history of health in America. By looking at this history through a gendered frame we will be better able to understand why women's history and women's health are so intertwined. Central to our discussions will be an analysis of the interplay among race, ethnicity, class, and gender in shaping particular health care outcomes. Some questions we seek to answer include: How has gender shaped the construction of medical knowledge and the framing of women's health and illness? How have women participated in health care in both paid and unpaid capacities? What are the political, economic and social factors affecting women as providers and as recipients of health care? What do the lessons of women's history tell us about how contemporary patients and policy-makers can define health and illness, and organize health care as a means of empowerment?

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1. Participating in the seminar, including timely class and (for undergraduates conference attendance) thoughtful contributions to discussions.

2. Written Assignments: Three written assignments of 4-5 pages each (will be described below and posted to the web board)

3. Presentations: Presenting supplemental articles, image analysis or other work to class 2-3 times per semester.

4. Completing final “syllabus project,” which is due in class on December 12^th^.

**Graduate students not doing conference work are expected to complete all other requirements.**

IMPORTANT PROCEDURAL NOTES

Except in cases of emergency or a full 24 hours notice, THERE WILL BE NO RESCHEDULING OF MISSED CONFERENCES.

No one should have any trouble receiving full credit for the course. For undergraduates we reserve the right to deduct credit under any of the following circumstances:

Books ordered from the Sarah Lawrence College bookstore and recommended for purchase (they are also on reserve in the SLC library):

n Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls. Vintage, 1998

n Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper: And Other Stories. Dover Press, 1997.

n Kasper, Anne S. and Susan L., eds. Ferguson Breast Cancer: Society Shapes an Epidemic. Palgrave, 2000

n Leavitt, Judith Walzer, ed. Women and Health in America: Historical Readings. U. of Wisc. Press, 1999

Ordered from the SLC bookstore, optional for purchase (on reserve in SLC library):

n Leavitt, Judith Walzer and Ronald L. Numbers, eds. Sickness and Health in America: Readings in the History of Medicine and Public Health. U of Wisc. Press, 1997

*’d items will be available for purchase as a reading packet (in at least two installments) at Health Advocacy Office in Slonim House (see Crystal Greene). Please e-mail Crystal Greene (cgreene@slc.edu) right away if you want to purchase a packet. We will also place one packet on reserve at HA in Slonim, and one packet on reserve at the SLC library.

Defining Women’s Health

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Assignment One (due in class):
OUR BODIES, OUR SELVES [original and new edition(s)-excerpts]
Read: "Feminists Reclaim Women's Health Care, 1971" pp. 501-504 in Major Problems in the History of American Medicine and Public Health: Documents and Essays ed by Warner and Tighe (Houghton Mifflin 2001)
Compare in two (or more) editions
History of Our Bodies, Ourselves http://www.ourbodiesourselves.org/histobos.htm
Try to obtain a used edition of OB/OS (two are on reserve in library)
Compare two prefaces (1973 & 1998); browse through any two editions noting changes;
Optional background reading: articles on the history of the Boston Women's Health Collective and OB/OS on http://www.ourbodiesourselves.org/histobos.htm web page The Boston Women Health Book Collective and Our Bodies Ourselves: A Brief History and Reflection An article from the Winter 1999 edition of Journal of the American Medical Women's Association; How a Group of Friends Transformed Women's Health A commentary by BWHBC cofounder Jane Pincus; Building a new Bodies An article from the Boston Phoenix about the 1998 update of Our Bodies, Ourselves.

Write: 2p thought piece on the changes you find. These are some questions you might address in your thought piece:
¨ How is women's health defined? How does it change in the two editions? Give examples.
¨ Who is the book written for and why?
¨ What kinds of knowledge are included and what excluded?
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Discussion Questions: What does ‘women’s health’ mean to in the 20^th century – where and to whom to these meanings apply? What should it mean?

READING: Two or more editions of Boston Women’s Health Collective, Our Bodies, Ourselves

ON Reserve at the library are 1976, 1982, 1984, 1998. Others (including the original 1973 edition) are available for use in Slonim only.

September 19^th

Historical Framing of Women’s Diseases (19^th Century as Formative Period)

Smith-Rosenberg, Carol and Charles Rosenberg, “The Female Animal: Medical and Biological Views of Woman and Her Role in 19^th-century America” LEAVITT, chapter 6

*Wailoo, Keith. “Chlorosis: Disease and the Moral Management of American Women” in Drawing Blood: Technology and Disease Identity in 20^th Century America. Johns Hopkins, 1997.

Bert Hansen, “American Physicians’ Discovery of Homosexuals, 1880-1900: A New Diagnosis in a Changing Society” (LEAVITT AND NUMBERS, Chapter 1)

Dreger, Alice. “Doubtful Sex: The Fate of Hermaphrodites in Victorian Medicine,” Victorian Studies, Spring 1995, Vol. 38, Issue 3, p. 335+ (web board)

Historical Framing of Women’s Diseases (19^th Century as Formative Period) – Part Two

*--Chapter 8, “Hysteria” in The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender and Power in America. (Princeton UP, 1994, p. 209-228)

-- “A New Generation of Women:” Progressive Psychiatrists and the Hypersexual Female” (LEAVITT, Chapter 12)

*Acocella, Joan. “The Politics of Hysteria.” The New Yorker, April 6, 1998.

Talbot, Margaret. “Hysteria, Hysteria: The Post-9/11 Mystery Rash.” New York Times Magazine, July 2, 2002. (Web board)

Fausto-Sterling, Anne, “Gender, Race, and Nation: The Comparative Anatomy of “Hottentot” Women in Europe, 1815-1817.” In Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla, eds. Deviant Bodies (Indiana UP, 1995): 19-48.

October 3rd

Womanhood as disease -- Part One

*Clarke, Edward H. Part II, “Chiefly Physiological,” Sex in Education; or, A fair chance for the girls. 1873 (Arno Press, 1972).

Brumberg, Joan Jacob. The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls. Vintage 1998.

Steinem, Gloria, “If Men Could Menstruate: Ms. October 1978,” Ms., Vol. 12, no. Spring 2002.

*Martin, Emily. “Premenstrual Syndrome, Work Discipline, and Anger,” in The Woman and the Body (Boston, Beacon Press, 1987), p. 113-38.

NOTE: All students, unless they have a class conflict, are required to attend the following lecture:

Joan Jacobs Brumberg on "From Corsets to Body Piercing: An Historical Perspective on Female Adolescence"
October 22 1:30 p.m., Titsworth Lecture Hall

Leavitt, Judith. “Under the Shadow of Maternity: American Women’s Responses to Death and Debility Fears in 19^th-Century Childbirth,” LEAVITT, Chapter 17

*Rima D. Apple, “Constructing Mothers: Scientific Motherhood in the 19^th and 20^th Centuries,” Social History of Medicine 8 (1995): 161-178.

*Rich, Adrienne. Chapter VII, “Alienated Labor” in Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. Norton 1976.

n --(with Thelma Wilson) “The Fate of Non-treated Post-Menopausal Woman: A Plea for the Maintenance of Adequate Estrogen from Puberty to the Grave,” Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, vol. 11 (1963): 347-361.

n Feminine Forever (NY: Evans, 1966), chapters 1 (“A Woman’s Right to be Feminine”) and 2 (“Must Women Tolerate Castration”) (pages 24-54, inclusive)

Lock, Margaret, “Contested Meanings of the Menopause,” Lancet, 1991, vol. 337, no. 8752, pp. 1270-2. (web board)

n “Medicalization of Women’s Third Age,” Journal of Psychosomatic Obstetrics and Gynaecology (sic), 1997, 18 (2): 81-86.

n “Menopause, Local Biologies, and Cultures of Aging,” American Journal of Human Biology, 2001 Jul-Aug; Vol. 13 (4), pp. 494-504.

*Lock, Margaret, “Menopause: Lessons from Anthropology,” Psychosomatic Medicine, 1998, vol. 60, p. 410-19.

October 17^th (e-classroom)

Defining Women’s Bodies: The Breast as Medical and Cultural Icon

Londa Schiebinger, “Why Mammals are called Mammals,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 98, No. 2. (Apr., 1993), pp. 382-411. (web board)

*Susan Miller, “My Left Breast,” and Nora Ephron, “A Few Words About Breasts” from The Breast: An Anthology, Susan Thames and Marin Gazzaniga, eds. (Global City Press, 1995).

Anne Kasper and Susan Ferguson, Breast Cancer: Society Shapes an Epidemic (Palgrave, 2000) [Intro, 1, 4, (6 or 9), (10 or 11) ]

Barbara Ehrenreich, "Welcome to Cancerland: A mammogram leads to a cult of pink kitsch," Harper's Magazine, November 2001. (web board) [also reread for 11/21]

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Presentation assignment: Choose a topic of interest to you in women’s health (e.g., breast cancer, PMS, nursing shortage) and examine three sources of information, each of which is produced for a different audience:

¨ Provider sponsored information sources (e.g., hospital or medical school newsletters)

Health information deconstruction: where it comes from—evaluation of different types of information sources, e.g.,

Women in Caring Roles: Theory and Practice – Part One

Discussion: What is the value of caring in society and how is that related to gender and gender roles? Are women caregivers inherently more empathetic than men?

*Reverby, Susan. “Introduction,” Ordered to Care: the dilemma of American nursing, 1850-1945. Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 1- 21

Morantz-Sanchez, Regina. “The Gendering of Empathetic Experience: How Women Physicians Became More Empathic than Men,” LEAVITT, Chapter 28

Abel, Emily. “A ‘Terrible and Exhausting’ Struggle: Family Caregiving During the Transformation of Medicine,” LEAVITT, Chapter 30.

*Rothman, Sheila. “The Female Invalid: The Narrative of Deborah Vinal Fiske, 1806-44” in Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History. Basic Books, 1994

*Carol Levine, Always on Call: When Illness Turns Families Into Caregivers (United Hospital Fund, 2000). Chapters 2, 6, and 7

*Hilary Rose, “Thinking from Caring: Feminist Construction of a Responsible Rationality” from Love, Power and Knowledge, 1994.

Susan Reverby, “Rethinking the Tuskegee Syphilis Study: Nurse Rivers’ Silence and the Meaning of Treatment,” (p. 365-385) and Darlene Clarke Hine, “Reflections on Nurse Rivers” (p. 386-395), both in Reverby, Susan, ed. Tuskegee’s Truths: Rethinking the Tuskegee Syphilis Study (university of North Carolina, 2000) [handouts]

MOVIES: See one of the following Miss Evers Boys (on reserve in library) and Sentimental Women Need Not Apply (Slonim—a viewing before class will be arranged)

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Assignment Two: Caring Narrative (Due October 31)
"The illness narrative," explains physician and anthropologist Arthur Kleinman, "is a story that the patient tells, and significant others retell, to give coherence to the distinctive events and long-term course of suffering." The illness narrative does not merely reflect the experience of illness, but contributes to the experience. Telling stories about illness puts the experience in personal and social contexts, reflecting the individual's symbolic cultural interpretation of events. Illness narratives become particularly powerful ways for individuals whose experiences were previously defined outside of themselves to reclaim their own experiences by telling their own stories.

1. Write an "illness narrative" that incorporates caring
a. Choice #1: Write from the perspective of yourself as the caregiver or yourself as the person being cared for. This needs to be based on your own experience.
b. Choice #2: Write a caring narrative from the perspective of Nurse Rivers of the Tuskegee study.
2. Use the other readings assigned around the caring theme to inform and deepen your own narrative.
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Women's health and empowerment

Eileen Boris, “On Grassroots Organizing, Poor Women's Movements, And The Intellectual As Activist,” Journal of Women's History, Summer 2002, Vol. 14 Issue 2, p1, 3p (web board)

Women in Caring Roles: Theory and Practice – Part Two

*Nancy Schrom Dye, “Mary Breckenridge, the Frontier Nursing Service and the Introduction of Nurse Midwifery in the United States,” Leavitt, Women & Health in America (1984 edition), Chapter 23

November 14

Part I: Historical roots of women’s public policy advocacy: Sheppard Towner Act, 1921

Skocpol, Theda. “Expanding the Separate Sphere: Women’s Civic Action and Political Reforms in the Early 20^th Century” and “Statebuilding for Mothers and Babies: The Children’s Bureau and the Sheppard-Towner Act,” Chapters 6 and 9 in Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the US (Harvard 1992). (web board)

J. Stanley Lemmons. The Woman Citizen: Social Feminism in the 1920’s. (Univ Press of VA, 1990), Chapter 6, “The Sheppard Towner Act: Progressivism in the 1920’s.” (web board)

Costin, Lela B., “Women and Physicians: The 1930 White House Conference On Children,” Social Work, 00378046, Mar/Apr83, Vol. 28, Issue 2 (web board)

Women's health and public policy, Part 2

Michael Hout, “Abortion politics in the United States, 1972-1994: From single issue to ideology,” Gender Issues; Spring 1999

Jean Peterman, “Abortion Wars: A Half Century of Struggle, 1950-2000 / Abortion Politics: Public Policy in Cross-Cultural Perspective,” Gender & Society; Feb 1999

Part III: Legislative analysis assignment presentations

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Assignment Three: Women’s Health and Wellness Act (NYS) (due November 21)

1. Track down this act. What is the current status? What are the political forces pro and con? What is its legislative history?

2. Note the basic provisions of the act. Choose another state and find out whether there is a similar act that has (a) been passed in that state or (b) been proposed in that state. Find out the legislative history of that act. If there has been no such act, find a women’s health advocacy organization and learn whether there has been an effort to pass such an act. If so, what happened; if not, why not.

Technology, Constructing Knowledge and Women's Health

Abby Lippman, “Prenatal Genetic Testing and Screening: Constructing Needs and Reinforcing Inequities,” American Journal of Law & Medicine, 1991, Vol. 17 Issue 1/2, p15, 36p [Ebsco accessed 10/4/02]

*Ruth Faden, “Reproductive Genetic Testing, Prevention, and the Ethics of Mothering,” pp. 88-97 in Women and Prenatal Testing: Facing the Challenges of Genetic Technology ed. by Karen H. Rothenberg and Elizabeth J. Thomson (Ohio State U, 1994).

*R. Alta Charo and Karen H. Rotherberg, “’The Good Mother’: The Limits of Reproductive Accountability and Genetic Choice,” pp. 105-130 in Rothenberg and Thomson.

*Rayna Rapp, “Women’s Responses to Prenatal Diagnosis: A Sociocultural Perspective on Diversity,” pp. 219-233 in Rothenberg and Thomson.

*Barbara Katz Rothman, “The Tentative Pregnancy,” pp. 260-270 in Rothenberg and Thomson.

Daniel Winkler and Norma J. Wikler, “Turkey-baster Babies: The Demedicalization of Artificial Insemination, Milbank Quarterly V. 69, No. 1, 1991: 5-50 [Ebsco accessed 10/4/02]

December 12

Global Women’s Health

Go back to our thinking and discussion in the first class of the semester where we explored how women in OBOS defined important areas of women’s health, redefined expectations about who had knowledge, who should have knowledge, and what were valid sources of knowledge.

What does ‘women’s health’ mean to in the 20^th century – where and to whom to these meanings apply?

Are there “voices” we do not hear that might or do define women’s health issues differently? If so, how do you know?

Use two of these sites to address any or all of the questions posed above. You will want to compare and contrast your chosen sites. Post your analysis in a 1-2 page (250-500 words) web board posting.

December 19

Undergraduate conference presentations

Imagine that you can teach a class on anything on the subject matter included in the "Women and Health" class. This gives you a huge amount of scope, but if you have any doubts about the appropriateness of your chosen focus, please ask/email us to check.

Assume you have ten sessions to plan. Your assignment is to construct the syllabus that would guide someone through this course. Most syllabi have introductory sections-course descriptions-that are a brief overview of and guide to the course. It should also include readings (citations of books and articles, and/or electronic links to academic articles). It could also include films, web sites, field trips, group projects and anything else that you think would be pedagogically appropriate. For your syllabus to be "successful," you will need to think about the order in which to present the materials, the topical categories in which to place them, and assignments that will both enhance and develop the course themes.

You will be evaluated on how well your syllabus demonstrates that you have defined and thought about important themes in "women and health," how well you have connected these themes to the subject area(s) you choose to teach, and your choice and use of appropriate sources. If you feel that you need to explain how certain sources would be used, you may annotate these parts of the syllabus accordingly, making it clear that the annotation would not really be included in a syllabus. For example, a commercial web site might be used less for scientific content than for analysis of the social or political context of the message.

Note: Do not post on the web board. Please submit this both in hard copy and as an attachment to an email (to both of us).