More Than Medicine

A study of how the feminist movement transformed women’s healthcare in the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

“Nelson has written another terrific book! . . . Absolutely indispensable and profoundly important.” —Rickie Solinger, author of Reproductive Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know

In More Than Medicine, Jennifer Nelson reveals how feminists of the 1960s and ‘70s applied the lessons of the New Left and civil rights movements to generate a women’s health movement. The new movement shifted from the struggle to revolutionize health care to the focus of ending sex discrimination and gender stereotypes perpetuated in mainstream medical contexts. Moving from the campaign for legal abortion to the creation of community clinics and feminist health centers, Nelson illustrates how these activists revolutionized health care by associating it with the changing social landscape in which women had power to control their own life choices.

More Than Medicine poignantly reveals how social justice activists in the United States gradually transformed the meaning of health care, pairing traditional notions of medicine with less conventional ideas of “healthy” social and political environments.

“With a deft eye for detail, Nelson grounds her analysis in local stories that take use from Mississippi to Seattle to Atlanta and offer rich stories about women’s understanding of reproductive and sexual rights. . . . A must read for anyone who wants to understand the history of the women’s health movement in a nuanced way, taking full account of the ways race and class shaped feminist organizing and affect women’s experiences of reproduction and sexuality.” —Johanna Schoen, Rutgers University