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Deirdre English

  • Nast Huertahas quoted2 years ago
    Complaints and Disorders was published in 1973, the same year as the Supreme Court’s decision on Roe v. Wade, legalizing abortion. By 1976, Congress had passed the Hyde Amendment, which banned Medicaid funding for abortions for low-income women. Which is to say, within three short years, abortion went from a basic health right for all women to a class privilege. And remained that way.
  • Nast Huertahas quoted2 years ago
    Women are not a “class” ; they are not uniformly oppressed; they do not all experience sexism in the same ways.
  • Nast Huertahas quoted2 years ago
    Women are not a “class” ; they are not uniformly oppressed; they do not all experience sexism in the same ways.
  • Nast Huertahas quoted2 years ago
    But at that time consumption was blamed on woman’s nature and on her reproductive system. When men were consumptive, doctors sought some environmental factor, such as overexposure, to explain the disease. But in popular imagery, consumption was always effeminate: novels of the time usually featured as male consumptives only such “effete” types as poets, artists, and other men “incompetent” for serious masculine pursuits.
  • Nast Huertahas quoted2 years ago
    Doctors became obsessed with this “most, confusing, mysterious and rebellious of diseases.” In some ways, it was the ideal disease for the doctors: it was never fatal, and it required an almost endless amount of medical attention. But it was not an ideal disease from the point of view of the husband and family of the afflicted woman. Gentle invalidism had been one thing; violent fits were quite another. So hysteria put the doctors on the spot. It was essential to their professional self-esteem either to find an organic basis for the disease and cure it, or to expose it as a clever charade.
  • Nast Huertahas quoted2 years ago
    Sickness, exhaustion, and injury were routine in the life of the working-class woman. Contagious diseases always hit the homes of the poor first and hardest.
  • Nast Huertahas quoted2 years ago
    We only went from bed to work and from work to bed again . . . and sometimes if we sat up a little while at home we were so tired we could not speak to the rest and we hardly knew what we were talking about. And still, there was nothing for us but bed and machine, we could not earn enough to take care of ourselves through the slack season.
  • Nast Huertahas quoted2 years ago
    The progressive achievements of these movements are obvious: legal contraception, free garbage removal, compulsory immunization, to name just a few. But their story as social movements is somewhat more ambiguous: both mobilized large numbers of middle- and upper-class women in a way which solidified their new relationship to working-class women—not as sisters, but as uplifters.
  • Nast Huertahas quoted2 years ago
    The fragmented pattern of public health services for low-income women—here a VD clinic, there a Planned Parenthood clinic, almost nowhere a low-cost comprehensive care center—shows that they are still treated more as public health problems than as human beings needing individualized medical care.
  • Nast Huertahas quoted2 years ago
    So for most of us, the intimate, paternalistic doctor-patient relationship of the nineteenth century is little more than a historical curiosity. Being sick is no longer consistent with our social roles nor is it a practical possibility, given the doctor shortage. Our medical image has come almost full circle from the days of female invalidism. Because women have longer life expectancies than men, with lower risks of heart disease, stroke, and lung cancer, we are considered the “stronger” sex, and the popular health books eagerly advise us how to keep our husbands alive and well. Just as surely as ever, our medical care does serve to enforce our social role, only now that role is to be workers (domestic or otherwise), not pampered invalids.
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