Review

Reclaim the knife

ESSAYS ON WOMEN, MEDICINE AND HEALTH
Ann Oakley
Edinburgh University Press, 1993, £14.95

Anyone needing to be convinced that the subject of women and health is of more than passing academic interest should look no further. Few authors have written more comprehensively or authoritatively on the subject than Ann Oakley, as witnessed by this latest collection of essays, lectures and papers written between 1981 and 1992.

As Oakley herself states, the very concept of women and health challenges two of the most prevalent cultural myths in modern western society: first, the belief that health is inherently a medical activity; second, that gender inequalities are ‘mere surface blemished’ in a society where women continue to be viewed as very much the second sex. These essays pursue this challenge and find the myths wanting.

For those familiar with Oakley’s work, the book will hold no surprises. A major focus is the medicalisation of pregnancy and childbirth, the different perspectives of doctors and ‘consumers’ of health care, and medical control of reproductive technologies.

Yet the strength of her analysis is to draw from these issues much wider questions, revealing the social, economic and political context of health, and the limitations of the medical paradigm, and its relationship with the sexual division of labour and construction of motherhood in our culture.

An important feature of Oakley’s work is the very different picture which comes from exploring these issues from a specifically feminist standpoint. As the later chapters make clear, it is not simply that medical science has tended to reflect and reinforce negative stereotypes of women, but that women have been excluded from academic discourse as a whole, including social sciences. While exposing the inadequacies of ‘malestream’ academia, Oakley also begins to identify what a feminist social science and feminist research might look like, drawing on her own experience and that of other feminist researchers.

The clarity of analysis, combined with an accessible and often humourous writing style make this book an important contribution to medical sociology and women’s studies and is a tribute to Oakley’s commitment to both disciplines. It is also a welcome relief in these so-called post-feminist times.