Great Books, Good Health: NWHN's Summer Reading Roundup

For NWHN's first-ever summer reading feature, we asked some of our favorite women's health writers to tell us what they've been reading and why they liked it. We hope you enjoy their mini reviews as much as we do.

Diagnosis: Difference

The Moral Authority Of Medicine

Abby L Wilkerson 1998; Cornell University Press 208 pages; $17.95

review by Sharon Batt

After 15 years as a women's health activist, this year I began a PhD program that allows me to look at issues in feminist activism through the lens of feminist theory. One happy discovery was Abby Wilkerson's Diagnosis: Difference, which critiques the authority of western medicine and bioethics. Wilkerson compares medicine's influence within the different cultures of the women's health movement, the consumer movement and gay, lesbian and bisexual activism. In each case, she shows how medicine has undermined rather than improved the health of these communities. Drawing from feminist philosophy, cultural studies and queer theory she broadens the understanding of health and justice found in mainstream bioethics, where justice is defined in terms of access to medical goods and services. Wilkerson concludes that medicine has stigma- tized women and gay men in different ways. Her analysis helps explain the often contrasting attitudes within the two communities toward drug regulations. Healthy women have often been prescribed drugs to make our bodies conform more closely to a male norm. Feminist activists have responded by resisting medicalization and demanding stronger drug regulation. By contrast, physicians and other health care providers were reluctant to treat patients with AIDS, often denied them visits from partners and issued warnings about the "deadliness" of homosexuality, which fed homophobia by conflating unsafe sex practices with gay identity and the gay community. Many gay activists have responded by demanding access to drugs and medical services. Against these very different backgrounds of experience with medical authority, the contrasting attitudes between feminist health activists and some gay activists toward the regulation of drugs are more readily understood.

Sharon Batt is the author of Patient No More: The Politics of Breast Cancer (Gynergy Books, 1994).

Global Prescriptions: Gendering Health and Human Rights

Rosalind Petchesky 2003; Zed Press 320 pages; $29.95

review by Jael Silliman

In this very ambitious and exciting book, activist scholar Rosalind Petchesky deftly charts and analyzes the course that the transnational women's movement has undertaken over the last two decades to expand health and rights for women. Her insightful understanding and knowledge of global watershed events like the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo and the United Nations Conference on Women in Beijing, as well as her familiarity with current global trends, enables her to assess how health rights can be advanced in today's political climate. Alert to, but undaunted by, the formidable challenges the movement confronts, Petchesky opens up new ways to conceptualize and advance the right to health. She introduces us to the inspirational work of groups like the Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa, which has successfully campaigned for access to essential medicines, to the work of activists in Brazil who are preventing and treating HIV/AIDS. By connecting local struggles to national and transnational events she challenges us to think outside the box and to connect the dots between the local and the global challenges to health and human rights. She challenges us to seize the initiative in shaping the global political agenda around health and human rights, decisively rejecting the current acceptance of profit over people. A must read.

Jael Silliman's new co-authored book with Marlene Fried, Loretta Ross and Elena Gutierrez, Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organizing for Reproductive Justice, will be out this fall from South End Press.

Mind Over Menopause: The Complete Mind/Body Approach to Coping with Menopause

Leslee Kagan, Bruce Kessel and Herbert Benson 2004; Free Press 368 pages; $12

review by Judy Norsigian

This book will be a breath of fresh air for many women coping with some of the more problematic changes that can accompany the "peri-menopause." Its emphasis on how to handle stress better by incorporating practical, self-help approaches — especially techniques to help create what is known as the "relaxation response" — will help many women cope more successfully with mood swings, hormonal fluctuations, changes in sex drive and other disruptive experiences. Ironically, some of the simplest things we can do (like deep or focused breathing, among other basic yoga practices) are not only effective but carry fewer negative side effects or monetary costs than some of the drugs so often recommended as first-line solutions. Since no public relations firms extol the virtues of these simple approaches, we often don't hear about them. While there is some practical and up-to-date information on taking hormones — which sometimes DO offer a good short-term solution for some women — the chapters on nutrition and exercise use recent research findings to underscore the critical role of nutrition and exercise. However, the section on breast cancer screening is weak and includes, for example, a short and inadequate discussion of designer estrogens and their role in breast cancer risk reduction. The book is otherwise easy to read and a good way to start thinking about that transition into and beyond our menopause years.

Judy Norsigian is executive director of Our Bodies Ourselves (www.ourbodiesourselves. org) and co-author of Our Bodies, Ourselves (2005 edition forthcoming).

The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How it Has Undermined Women

Susan J. Douglas and Meredith W. Michaels 2004; Free Press 400 pages; $26

review by Leora Tanenbaum

If you're a mother of young children, how would you rate your parenting skills — excellent, satisfactory or terrible? If you're like many of us, you probably do a great job in reality but secretly worry that you're botching up your children's lives. This is because, as Douglas and Michaels explain in The Mommy Myth, media and cultural messages have raised the bar so high for mothers (especially working mothers) that we are made to feel inadequate. This book is the perfect antidote. With lively writing and hilarious examples, Douglas and Michaels show that mothers have always been pressured to be self-sacrificing, but in the last 20 years we have been bullied to buy into the myth that there is only one right and rigid way to mother. This book will help keep you sane.

Leora Tanenbaum's most recent book is Catfight: Rivalries Among Women — From Diets to Dating, From the Boardroom to the Delivery Room (HarperPerennial, 2003).

Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World

Tracy Kidder 2003; Random House 336 pages; $14.95

review by Anne S. Kasper

I read Mountains Beyond Mountains with great anticipation. I have long admired the work of Paul Farmer, a public health physician and anthropologist who is committed to caring for those most in need. This book is the story of Farmer's medical clinic, Zanmi Lasante, in rural Haiti and his impressive, resilient fight to serve some of Haiti's, and the world's, most desperately poor people. Kidder's portrait of Farmer falls short, largely because the author fails to fully capture this outsized human being. The descriptions of the vital work of Zanmi Lasante and the local Haitians who come to depend on its medicines and practitioners are a glimpse of how much needs to be done the world over. Yet, I am obliged to think of Farmer and his clinic in the light of recent tragic, political events in Haiti. The reader is left to wonder what will become of Zanmi Lasante's terribly needy patients and others like them in other countries, in the teeth of crisis upon crisis, war after war.

Anne S. Kasper, PhD, is editor and author of Breast Cancer: Society Shapes an Epidemic (St. Martin's/Palgrave, 2000).

Own Your Health: Choosing The Best From Alternative and Conventional Medicine

Roanne Weisman and Brian Berman 2003; Health Communications 500 pages; $16.95

review by Ester Shapiro

I'm re-reading Own Your Health, an accessible, engaging book about integrating high technology medicine with holistic health practices. Weisman, a gifted science writer, evocatively describes her successful recovery from a debilitating stroke that occurred during surgery to replace her mitral heart valve, which had been weakened by Marfan syndrome, a chronic connective tissue disease. Grateful for her full life thanks to biomedicine, she immediately realized that her hands-on, spiritually oriented physical and occupational therapists (both young women) were more effective than her distant, pessimistic neurologists in activating her journey back to health. The book's inspiring voice successfully combines clearly written scientific information supporting integrative medicine, testimonials from patients and practitioners (myself included), and an empowering message affirming how holistic treatments help activate the many sources contributing to our own good health, very much in the spirit of Our Bodies, Ourselves.

Ester Shapiro teaches health psychology practice at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and coordinated Nuestros Cuerpos, Nuestras Vidas, the Spanish-language cultural adaptation of Our Bodies, Ourselves.

Sexual Chemistry: A History of the  Contraceptive Pill

Lara V. Marks 2001; Yale University Press 372 pages; $40

review by Leonore Tiefer

This scholarly book by a British feminist researcher places the history of oral contraceptives, a "doubled-edged liberation," in a larger international framework than I've been familiar with. The book includes much about how social, cultural and religious factors operated in the history of planning, testing and marketing the pill, and I recommend it both for classroom use and to those who know much of the story but are always interested in more.

Leonore Tiefer, PhD, is a professor of clinical psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine and author of Sex Is Not a Natural Act and Other Essays (Westview, 2004).

Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement

Jennifer Nelson 2003; New York University Press 256 pages; $20

review by Barbara Katz Rothman

One of the unanticipated joys of aging is reading the histories of times we've lived through — things glimpsed out of peripheral vision, as well as things over which we have agonized. The years covered by Nelson's history are primarily the turbulent, difficult 1970s, when things seem to have gotten complicated. Second Wave Feminism, as we all know by now, was not as inclusive as it thought it was. Many white women of privilege — busy as they were with their own choices NOT to have children — failed to see the restrictions poor women of color faced in choosing to have children. But African-American women were right there, setting everybody straight on the issues, and by 1976, a diverse group of activists founded CARASA (Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse) and articulated a more inclusive program for reproductive rights. And, in what I found the most interesting piece of this history, the Young Lords, the Puerto Rican activist group founded in Chicago in 1968, seemed to listen to everybody — Black Panthers, Women's Liberationists, abortion activists, the whole pantheon of voices — and put together a sensible, feminist, community based call for reproductive rights. Nelson concludes her history by "emphasizing how essential women of color were to the transformation of the abortion rights movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s into a more inclusive movement for reproductive freedom by the early 1980s." This is a very important point. But even more important is the question she asks us at the end of the book: "Are we still fighting for the rights of the women with the least?" Freedoms do not trickle down.

Barbara Katz Rothman, PhD, is professor of sociology at City University of New York. Her most recent book is The Book of Life (Beacon,2001). «V