Revolutionizing Women's Healthcare: The Feminist Self-Help Movement in America

Winner of the 2021 Frances Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize from the Western Association of Women Historians (WAWH)​

Revolutionizing Women’s Healthcare is the story of a feminist experiment: the self-help movement. This movement arose out of women’s frustration, anger, and fear for their health. Tired of visiting doctors who saw them as silly little girls, suffering shame when they asked for birth control, seeking abortions in back alleys, and holding little control over their own reproductive lives, women took action. Feminists created “self-help groups” where they examined each other’s bodies and read medical literature. They founded and ran clinics, wrote books, made movies, undertook nationwide tours, and raided and picketed offending medical institutions. Some performed their own abortions. Others swore off pharmaceuticals during menopause. Lesbian women found “at home” ways to get pregnant. Black women used self-help to talk about how systemic racism affected their health. Hannah Dudley-Shotwell engagingly chronicles these stories and more to showcase the creative ways women came together to do for themselves what the mainstream healthcare system refused to do.

“By bringing self-help to the center of a historical analysis of the women’s health movement, Revolutionizing Women’s Healthcare crucially expands our understandings of theoretical and political debates within the feminist movement around issues such as racism and “intersectional” marginalization, a narrow focus on reproductive health versus “holistic” approaches, and debates around the values of “infiltration” of mainstream medical care versus “radical” independent feminist healthcare delivery.” -- Jennifer Nelson ― author of More Than Medicine: A History of the Feminist Women's Health Movement

“Revolutionizing Women’s Healthcare provides an important exploration of how women’s health feminists in the late twentieth-century seized upon the larger cultural turn toward self-help and adapted it for liberatory ends. Dudley-Shotwell shows how women’s health activists adopted and transformed ideas of self-help to better understand their bodies, protest medicine as usual, and address the holistic health needs of women of color and indigenous women.”
  -- Judith A. Houck ― author of Hot and Bothered: Women, Medicine, and Menopause in the United States

"This approach brings a new and unique perspective to a well-studied topic and provides a companion resource to complement previously published texts. Recommended."  ― Choice

Hannah Dudley-Shotwell interview with 'With Good Reason' podcast from Virginia Humanities ― With Good Reason podcast

"[An] important study...[a] welcome in the classroom and among historians of medicine, feminism, and social movements as well as other interested general readers." ― American Historical Review

"Revolutionizing Women's Healthcare does its best work examining the divisions within the self-help movement [and] offers...a way of understanding some of the divisions, conflicts, and persistence activists encountered in their efforts to empower women. The book also reveals an ongoing dilemma that many of the women only slowly came to realize—that their efforts at self-help were necessary because society, and women themselves, put their needs last." ― Journal of American History

HANNAH DUDLEY-SHOTWELL is Faculty Scholar in the Cormier Honors College at Longwood University, Virginia. She lives in Farmville, Virginia.