Looking Through the Speculum: Examining the Women’s Health Movement

Houck (history and gender and women’s studies, Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison; Hot and Bothered) begins her compelling study of the women’s health movement with a description of the emotions—humbling, traumatic, enraging, infantilizing, and more—that pelvic exams evoked in women in the 1970s and beyond. She investigates how medical care for women more broadly operates today but with those same shame-based, stigmatizing aspects still at play. Her book discusses the lack of information, the absence of suitable medical studies, and the substandard (sometimes deadly) care that women have been conditioned to expect and accept. She demonstrates how the intersections of race and gender significantly affect patients’ risks. Her research and theories are groundbreaking, and she expertly explores every angle of these issues by incorporating her findings from clinical case studies.