Complaints & Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness

Front Cover
The Feminist Press at CUNY, Jul 1, 2011 - Health & Fitness - 112 pages

The classic work on women’s health and how the medical establishment helped to justify sexism, by the authors of Witches, Midwives, and Nurses.

From Barbara Ehrenrich, New York Times-bestselling author of Nickel and Dimed, Bright-Sided, and other titles, and Deirdre English, former editor of Mother Jones, this book delves into the history of how women have been diagnosed, defined, and often dismissed, by doctors, a problem that persists even today.

From claiming scientific proof of female inferiority to prescribing the “rest cure” to labeling patients as “hysterical,” the medical profession treated women as weak and pathological—and here, the authors of the “underground classic” Witches, Midwives, and Nurses (Kirkus Reviews) show how this biomedical rationale was used to justify sex discrimination throughout the culture, as well as how its vestiges are still evident in abortion policy and other reproductive rights struggles.

 

Selected pages

Contents

Title Page
Women and Medicine in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth
The Sick Women of the Upper Classes
The Sickening Women of the Working Class
Notes on the Situation Today 1973
Concluding Thoughts
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness
Barbara Ehrenreich,Deirdre English
Limited preview - 2011

Common terms and phrases

abortion affluent women Barbara Ehrenreich biological class birth control birth control movement blamed bodies Charlotte Perkins Gilman childbirth Complaints and Disorders consumption contagion contraception cult of female cure danger Deirdre English disease doctors domination early twentieth centuries Ehrenreich and English Emma Goldman epidemic fear female invalidism feminist germs gynecological gynecologists husband hypersexuality hysteria hysterical illness labor late nineteenth leisure low-income women male Mallon Margaret Sanger Mary Mallon Mary Putnam Jacobi medical profession medical sexism medical system medical theories medicine menstruation mental middle middle-class women moral needs nineteenth and early nineteenth century oppression organs ovaries ovariotomy patient physicians poor women potentially sickening pregnancy problem prostitutes public health race and class reproductive sanitation scientific servants sexist ideology sexual sick slums social roles society surgery tenement Typhoid Mary upper upper-middle-class women urban uterus Victorian woman women's health women’s health movement workers working-class women wrote York

About the author (2011)

Barbara Ehrenreich is author of the 2002 New York Times bestseller Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. She has written nearly twenty books, and has been a columnist for Time magazine and the New York Times. She has contributed to The Progressive, Harpers, The Atlantic Monthly, Ms., The New Republic, Z Magazine, In These Times, and Salon.com. Deirdre English is the former editor of Mother Jones magazine. She has written for the Nation, New York Times Book Review, San Francisco Magazine, S.F. Chronicle Sunday Magazine, Vogue, and public radio and television. Currently, English is a professor at University of California, Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism.

Bibliographic information

TitleComplaints & Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness
Contemporary Classics
AuthorsBarbara Ehrenreich, Deirdre English
ContributorSusan Faludi
Edition2, illustrated
PublisherThe Feminist Press at CUNY, 2011
ISBN1558616969, 9781558616967
Length112 pages
Subjects › 

Health & Fitness / Women's Health
History / Women
Social Science / Women's Studies
  
Export CitationBiBTeX EndNote RefMan