Women's History Month

The 2011 edition focuses on what Our Bodies, Ourselves does best: provide information on women's reproductive health and sexuality; practical information on how find and access health information; and resources, stories, and information to educate women about health care injustices and inspire them to work collectively to address them.

Trans Bodies, Trans Selves is a revolutionary resource-a comprehensive, reader-friendly guide for transgender people, with each chapter written by transgender or genderqueer authors. Inspired by Our Bodies, Ourselves, the classic and powerful compendium written for and by women, Trans Bodies, Trans Selves is widely accessible to the transgender population, providing authoritative information in an inclusive and respectful way and representing the collective knowledge base of dozens of influential experts.

This study tells the story of the first two decades of the pioneering best-seller--a collectively produced guide to women's health. Wells undertakes a rhetorical and sociological analysis of "Our Bodies, Ourselves" and of the work of the Boston Women's Health Book Collective that produced it. Extensive archival research and interviews with the members of the authorial collective shed light on a grassroots undertaking that revolutionized the writing of health books and forever changed the relationship between health experts and ordinary women.

At a time when studies suggest the average American woman spends seventeen years caring for children and eighteen years caring for aging parents, Julia T. Wood examines how culture creates and sustains our definitions of caring, determines who cares along gender lines, and assigns the diminished value that caring has in our society.

In Caring, Peta Bowden extends and challenges recent debates on feminist ethics. She takes issue with accounts of the ethics of care that focus on alleged principles of caring rather than analyzing caring in practice. Caring recognizes that ethical practices constantly outrun the theories that attempt to explain them, and Bowden's unique approach provides major new insights into the nature of care without resorting to indiscriminate unitary models.

Carefair has its roots in the rise of "duty" discourses - in neoliberalism, communitarianism, the third way, social conservatism, and feminism - that advocate renewed appreciation for obligations in civil society. This book provides a detailed blueprint for more public investment in work-family balance, and recommends amendments to Canadian parental leave, child care, and employment standards that would collectively form a caregiving framework analogous to workfare.

This book gives a broad look at the problems that African American women face both mentally and physically as related to health care. It also describes ways that practitioners, researchers, and the society as a whole can aid in alleviating the issues that African American women face on a daily basis. The book proposes several ways in which to achieve this goal.

Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired moves beyond the depiction of African Americans as mere recipients of aid or as victims of neglect and highlights the ways black health activists created public health programs and influenced public policy at every opportunity. Smith also sheds new light on the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment by situating it within the context of black public health activity, reminding us that public health work had oppressive as well as progressive consequences.

Taking Medicine presents colonial medicine and nursing as a gendered phenomenon that had particular meanings for Aboriginal and settler women who dealt with one another over bodily matters. By bringing to light women's contributions to the development of health care in southern Alberta between 1880 and 1930, this book challenges traditional understandings of colonial medicine and nursing in the contact zone.

Humans are a varied and divergent bunch with all manner of beliefs, morals, and bodies. Systems of oppression thrive off our inability to make peace with difference and injure the relationship we have with our own bodies. The Body Is Not an Apology offers radical self-love as the balm to heal the wounds inflicted by these violent systems.

Curanderas - traditional healers in Mexican culture - bridge the gaps between multiple planes of existence - spiritual and material, modern and pre-modern - dispensing medicinal herbs, prayers, and instruction. Scholars and readers of anthropology, sociology, Chicana and Chicano studies, and women's studies will savor the many layers of meaning and application in ""They All Want Magic"".

In this extraordinary book Josephine Peters, a respected northern California Indian elder and Native healer, shares her vast, lifelong cultural and plant knowledge. At a time of the commercialization of traditional ecological knowledge, Peters presents her rich tradition on her own terms, and according to her spiritual convictions about how her knowledge should be shared.

A spellbinding journey between two worlds, this remarkable book describes surgeon Lori Arviso Alvord's struggles to bring modern medicine to the Navajo reservation in Gallup, New Mexico--and to bring the values of her people to a medical care system in danger of losing its heart.

"Red Medicine" explores Indigenous medicine across North America, with a special emphasis on how Indigenous knowledge has endured and persisted among peoples with a legacy to Mexico. Gonzales links pre-Columbian thought to contemporary healing practices by examining ancient symbols and their relation to current curative knowledges among Indigenous peoples. Red Medicine suggests that Indigenous healing systems can usefully point contemporary people back to ancestral teachings and help them reconnect to the dynamics of the natural world.