Women's History Month

Health Equity: A Solutions-Focused Approach is a comprehensive textbook that illustrates existing conditions of health disparities across a range of populations in the United States, positions those disparities within the broader sociopolitical framework that leads to their existence, and most importantly presents specific ways in which health equity solutions can be designed and implemented.

In Beyond Mothering Earth, Sherilyn MacGregor argues that celebrations of “earthcare” as women’s unique contribution to the search for sustainability often neglect to consider the importance of politics and citizenship in women’s lives.

Cultivating Health, an interdisciplinary chronicle, details women's impact on remaking health policy, despite the absence of government support. Combining primary source and municipal archival research with comfortable prose, Jennifer Lisa Koslow explores community nursing, housing reform, milk sanitation, childbirth, and the campaign against venereal disease in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Los Angeles.

This critical assessment of the division of labour in medicine sets current practice in its historical context. The book demonstrates the centrality of gender divisions both between and within the individual medical and health professions--doctors, nurses, midwives and others. While the proportion of female doctors is rising, the continued constraints on women attaining full equality are explored.

Witches, Midwives and Nurses is an essential work on the corruption of the medical establishment and its historic roots in witch hunts. In this new edition, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English build on their classic expose of the demonization of women healers and the political and economic monopolization of medicine, bringing it up to date with today's changing attitudes to these issues.

This collection examines enduring and topical questions in sexual and reproductive health in a range of contemporary Asian cultures. Beliefs and practices surrounding conception, pregnancy, birth, and confinement are studies in culturally specific contexts in Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Indonesia. Important and widely applicable health issues are also addressed, including the perception and management of HIV/AIDS, experiences of menopause and the interaction of cosmopolitan ("western'') medicine with traditional healthcare.

In the late nineteenth century, Japan's modernizing quest for empire transformed midwifery into a new woman's profession. With the rise of Japanese immigration to the United States, Japanese midwives (sanba) served as cultural brokers as well as birth attendants for Issei women. By setting the history of Japanese American midwives in this larger context, Smith reveals little-known ethnic, racial, and regional aspects of women's history and the history of medicine.

A consideration of the role of the midwife in childbirth, which currently stands at the point of divergence between two differing philosophies of childbearing. In one, pregnancy and birth belong to the medical profession, in the other it is a part of the experience of ordinary life.

A Vital Force: Women in American Homeopathy offers a new interpretation of women's roles in modern medicine. Linked to social reform movements in the nineteenth century, anti-modernism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth, and countercultural ideals of the 1960s and 1970s, women's advocacy of homeopathy has been intertwined with broad social and cultural issues in American society.

In Bringing Zen Home, the first study of the ritual lives of Zen laywomen, Arai applies a cutting-edge ethnographic method to reveal a thriving domain of religious practice. Her work represents an important contribution on a number of fronts—to Zen studies, ritual studies, scholarship on women and religion, and the cross-cultural study of healing.

Your Healing is Killing Me is a performance manifesto based on lessons learned in San Antonio free health clinics and New York acupuncture schools; from the treatments and consejos of curanderas, abortion doctors, Marxist artists, community health workers, and bourgie dermatologists. One artist's reflections on living with post-traumatic stress disorder, ansia, and eczema in the new age of trigger warnings, the master cleanse, and crowd-funded self-care.

In this solo show constructed from verbatim interview transcripts, Anna Deavere Smith examines the miracle of human resilience through the lens of the national debate on health care. It renders laughter and tears--a work of emotional brilliance and political substance from one of the treasures of the American theater.

Through an examination of the poetry of Anne Sexton, Audre Lorde, and Gloria Anzaldúa, We Heal From Memory paints a vivid picture of how our culture carries a history of traumatic violence - child sexual abuse, the ownership and enforcement of women's sexuality under slavery, the transmission of violence through generations, and the destruction of non-white cultures and their histories through colonization.

Women Healing/Healing Women uses historical and cultural evidence to re-read gospel texts and discover women healers. The author uses a socio-rhetorical methodology to draw on tools from medical anthropology. The turning of the multi-dimensional lens and these tools on the gospels, informed by the context constructed in the first part of the study, enables new interpretations of the stories of women healing to emerge.

In Healing Narratives, Gay Wilentz explores the relationship between culture and health, tracing the narrative and structural similarities of a main character moving form a state of mental or physical disease toward wellness through reconnection with her cultural traditions. Wilentz's cross-cultural approach-African American, Jamaican, Native American, Maori, and Jewish stories-offers a rich context from which the basis of cultural illness can be examined.