More Than Medicine. Jennifer Nelson
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physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”1 Yet, this idea was not predominant in the United States immediately after World War II. Social movement activists in the United States, including those involved in the civil rights, New Left, and feminist movements, gradually transformed the meaning of health care beyond the medical treatment of individual bodies. This book tells a part of that story. Activists involved in the civil rights, New Left, and feminist movements redefined health to encompass traditional notions of medicine—the curative properties of medicine and the medical technologies utilized by medical practitioners—as well as less conventional ideas about “healthy” social and political environments that promote bodies free of disease as well as whole humans who are able to work productively, raise healthy, educated children, and fashion communities free of violence and social inequalities. Civil rights activists like Dr. H. Jack Geiger, for example, argued that the cure for hunger was both plentiful and nutritious food and the eradication of poverty through community action. He recalled,
[I]n addition to the medical care we provided, we had food and other models of activism. We repaired housing. We dug protected wells and sanitary privies. We urged people to start vegetable gardens, and a thousand families raised their hands, and that gave us a better idea. With a grant from a foundation as a start-up, we rented 600 acres of good land, land that was sitting empty nearby in the Delta [Mississippi], and organized what we called the North Bolivar County Cooperative Farm, in which the members of those thousand families pooled their labor to grow vegetables instead of cotton, and worked for shares in the crops. We invented a new occupation: nutritional sharecropping.2
Geiger and other activists created the collective farm and associated medical clinic to address what they believed were the social and economic bases of both ill health and generational poverty.
Later in the 1960s and early 1970s, feminists generated a women’s health movement that shifted the struggle to revolutionize health care to a focus on ending the sex discrimination and gender stereotypes perpetuated in mainstream medical contexts. Like civil rights and New Left movement activists, they transformed the meaning of health and health care, associating them with a revolutionized social landscape in which women had power to control their own life choices. Many feminists argued that women’s second-class social status was powerfully reinforced by both legal and medical institutions (and the male legislators and physicians who populated those institutions) that narrowly restricted women’s ability to make their own choices about reproductive health care. Thus, feminists made the campaign for legal abortion central to the Women’s Liberation movement. They maintained that in order for women to shape their own life paths, including making the choice to enter into sexual relationships without necessarily marrying and starting a family, they would need reproductive autonomy, which required both easily accessible and affordable contraception and legal abortion. Yet, feminists quickly expanded their campaign beyond legal abortion, emphasizing that the medical context in which women acquired health care was also fundamental to women’s overall health and social status. During the early years of the movement and as it evolved, women of color feminists pressed the movement to make eradication of socioeconomic barriers to health and reproductive autonomy more central to a feminist political agenda.
Historians of the women’s health movement usually begin the story with the Women’s Liberation movement of the late 1960s and 1970s.3 I have chosen to ground my telling of the history of how the women’s health movement helped transform ideas about health and health care in the earlier civil rights and New Left movements, which laid the groundwork for feminist women’s health activism. Ideas about revolutionizing health care in order to transform social hierarchy were very much a part of both civil rights and New Left activism, and many of the women who became involved in the feminist movement first worked with these prior movements. Of course, many histories of the Women’s Liberation movement acknowledge the roots of feminism in the civil rights and New Left movements, so in that sense my telling is not original.4 My original contribution is to trace how ideas of revolutionary health care that flourished in the 1960s continued to be developed by Women’s Liberation feminists and women of color feminists through the 1990s.
Scholars of U.S. feminism have long been complicating the historical narrative in order to better represent the way race and class affected experiences of sex, gender, and reproduction and transformed political demands forged by feminist activists. This book fits into this burgeoning historiographical tradition, which includes my first book, Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement (2003). Since the publication of that book, there has been an explosion of historiography that deepens our understanding of how race and class experiences shaped feminist organizing around health and reproduction and affected women’s experiences of reproduction and sexuality.5
A broader focus on regional diversity has also expanded our historical understanding of feminist movements of the late twentieth century.6 With chapters on the women’s health movement in both Seattle and Atlanta, this book helps to develop our understanding of the movement beyond what had been a rather narrow focus on the movement in New York City, Boston, and other parts of the northeast of the United States. There is no doubt that women’s health activists across the country communicated with each other. They shared texts and, as Michelle Murphy points out in her book, “local stratified histories . . . were joined by road trips on interstate highway systems, telephone networks, mimeographed or photocopied pamphlets, manifestos, and periodicals transmitted through mail.”7 As Murphy’s description of these networks suggests, we need to better understand feminist activism outside of major urban centers in the United States, on the West Coast, and in the Northeast, and we need to know more about feminist activism in southern states. I also see a need for deeper understandings of the connections and interactions between United States feminists and feminists fighting for gender and sex equality outside of the United States.8 These parts of the story will need to await another book and future scholars. In this book I will demonstrate that attention to the relationship between socially embedded inequalities and campaigns for better health has deep roots in social movements in the United States, particularly in the movement for civil rights, the New Left social justice campaigns, and feminism.
While voting and political rights took center stage in the public civil rights movement, much of what poor African Americans wanted and needed on a daily basis had more to do with basic survival—a prerequisite for political enfranchisement. Movement organizers responded to demands for basic needs made by everyday people living with Jim Crow. The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) sponsored community projects and freedom schools to attend to basic needs (like demands for food and clothing) among blacks and to build support for the movement. During Freedom Summer (also known as the Freedom Project), in 1964, the Council of Federated Organizations, a coalition of civil rights groups, appealed to medical professionals to support civil rights workers with medical assistance. The Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR), an interracial group of physicians, dentists, nurses, and medical students, responded to this call and sent more than one hundred volunteers to Mississippi for Freedom Summer. Some of these volunteers stayed in Mississippi after the voting rights drive ended in reaction to the dearth of medical care available to poor African Americans.9
Dr. Geiger was one of the physicians who stayed in Mississippi to address entrenched medical problems among African Americans (many of whom were not civil rights workers) linked to long-standing racial and class inequities. These inequities were sustained by legal Jim Crow segregation and political disfranchisement as well as interconnected systems of economic deprivation enforced by physical violence, which was sanctioned by a powerful white supremacist social and political hierarchy. Geiger recognized that the accrual of legal civil rights would not guarantee the provision of life necessities for African Americans. While important, legal rights alone would do little to dismantle white supremacy. Alondra Nelson, historian of the Black Panther Party and its work to fight medical discrimination, calls the “gap between civil rights and social benefits” a “citizenship contradiction.” She explains in her book that the Black Panther survival programs founded in the 1970s were an “effort to provide resources to poor blacks who formally held civil rights, but who by virtue of their degraded social status and social value lacked social and economic citizenship.”10 MCHR, Geiger, and other civil rights activists who created the first Community Health Center demonstration projects in Boston and Mound Bayou, Mississippi,