Judith Houck interviewed by Isabell Dahms
The women’s health movement in the United States, beginning in 1969 and taking hold in the 1970s, sought to develop women’s knowledge of their bodies, and reproductive health. As a political movement, it demanded bodily autonomy as an essential component of women’s liberation. But women’s bodies were not the only focus of the movement. It also centered women’s relationships with each other, and their position within politics, institutions, and the confined of womanhood. Looking through the Speculum is an historical examination of the development, travails, and triumphs of this movement. It follows the movement from hospital and doctors’ offices to the home, the women’s center, the church basement, the bookshop, and beyond.
Isabell Dahms: This book examines the history of the women’s health movement in the United States beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s. What drew you to this topic and how did your research questions and focus change while writing the book?
Judith Houck: I am a historian of women’s health, and while researching my first book (Hot and Bothered: Women, Medicine and Menopause in Modern America) I discovered the women’s health movement. I was inspired by the activists’ creativity and determination. As I learned more, I realized that my own career had been shaped by the women’s health movement. While in graduate school, I was a Teaching Assistant for a Women’s Studies class, then called Women and their Bodies in Health and Disease, and I took a course on Women and Health in American History (I now teach the latter). Both of these courses are products, artifacts, of the women’s health movement. As a result, I wanted to know more about the movement that so directly influenced my life.
One of my commitments as I researched this topic was the inclusion of lesbian health activists and their work for the larger lesbian community. My determination to include lesbian perspectives paid off as I discovered the deep and widespread health activism by lesbians and the efforts of some of them to create a lesbian health agenda. I was also thrilled to discover and recount the complicated and compelling history of Lyon-Martin Women’s Health Services (now Lyon-Martin Community Health Services) as they considered and reconsidered the boundaries of lesbian health services.
ID: What was your approach to selecting the case studies for the book and focusing on feminist health collectives in California?
JH: I was interested in clinics because I wanted to study activists who built things. The shift from feminist principles to feminist praxis is complicated; feminist praxis within institutions governed by medical regulations and funded, at least partially, by the state was especially challenging. California called to me in part because I am a California native, but there were several historical and historiographical reasons for focusing on California. First, when I started the project, we knew more about the women’s health movement in the east than in the west. That changed a bit during the period I was writing, but that was part of my original reasoning. Second, I wanted to explore self-help activism, as envisioned by health and abortion activist Carol Downer (who pioneered the speculum self-exam) and trace how it changed as it moved into clinical spaces. While self-help clearly took hold beyond California, I was interested in its origin story and how it traveled across the state and beyond. Finally, in California several feminist health clinics survived into the 21st century, and they each had quite different origins and politics. Because they survived so long, they allowed me to tell a story of change over time.
ID: Could you tell us a little bit more about the structure of the book and your decision to pair chapters?
JH: I began my project focused on writing the history of feminist health clinics. Although clinic histories remain central to the project, I realized that an exclusive focus on institutions didn’t let me explore some of the broader issues that interested me. From there, I developed the paired chapter structure, looking at national features and concerns of the women’s health movement and how they were enacted in clinic spaces.
Chapter 6 traces the history of the Lyon-Martin Women’s Health Service. It also addresses the contradictions and struggles inherent in the wider movement through the history of this one clinic. The chapter focuses on racial and economic justice, racism within the feminist health movement, lesbian health, trans inclusionary politics in feminism and health care, and how a project that emerged in a particular political moment can adapt to changing needs.
ID: How did you approach telling these challenging moments in political organising?
JH: When I began researching the history of Lyon-Martin, I had no sense of the rich and complicated history it would reveal. I discovered a complex organization fighting regularly for survival while meeting the health care needs of some of the California Bay Area’s most marginalized residents. Founded to meet the health care needs of lesbians at the end of the 1970s, it always served a broader clientele, sometimes by design and sometimes by accident. As other people sought access, most notably HIV+ women and trans men and trans women, the leaders of the clinic continually struggled to reconcile the obvious health needs of the clinic’s patients and the narrow focus of the clinic’s mission to serve lesbians.
These complicated stories emerged both from the clinic’s records and in the accounts of the people I interviewed. I remain grateful to the people who acknowledged the difficult work of rethinking a political vision that responded to one moment in the face of changing needs and changing politics.
ID: The book mentions the movement’s opposition to eugenics and sterilisation and in the last two chapters addresses the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and its afterlives. Could you elaborate on how important this focus on the long history of racism and reproductive oppression was for the movement in the United States and globally?
JH: Looking through the Speculum is not primarily a history of reproductive rights or reproductive oppression. Part of its goal is to demonstrate that the women’s health movement paid attention to reproduction but was not limited to reproductive issues. One of the book’s chapters focuses on how Black women understood the effects of racism on their bodies and minds, and how they developed tools to meet their particular health needs in community with other Black women. The book also explores how white-majority health clinics strove to create diverse institutions even as white activists struggled to recognize their own racism and their desire to retain control of the clinic’s vision and politics.
ID: In the book we encounter Loretta Ross, one of the Black feminist organisers who co-developed the framework of reproductive justice. Could you say a bit more on the relationship of feminist self-help to reproductive justice movements?
JH: Loretta Ross is truly amazing! As the book shows, feminist self-help looked different in different feminist communities, but at its core, it sought to empower women and to encourage social justice through social change. Although reproductive justice, the principle that people have the right to have a child, to not have a child, and to parent children in safe and health environments, was not articulated in this powerful way until 1994, aspects of it were enacted in the feminist health movement. Health activists, for example, deplored population control organizations for their anti-natalist policies and their efforts to address economic and political problems by controlling women’s reproduction. Also, the chapter that looks explicitly at Black women’s health organizing shows that activists let Black women identify the issues that needed attention. Black self-help groups met women where they were and helped them get where they wanted to go.
ID: The book skillfully moves between the local and the national as well as the personal and collective lives of those involved. What were your strategies for bringing out the different voices and experiences of the women, groups and centres engaged in feminist health activism?
JH: I was determined to show that the movement was not monolithic in strategies, goals, and politics even as various groups shared nodes of commonality. There were clearly different strands, but they were united in their desire to empower women and improves women’s lives. I used case studies to highlight different local responses and to illuminate varied political approaches to meeting women’s health needs.
ID: To follow on from this, one of the achievements of the book is to put forward a method for telling social movement histories. Could you say a bit more about the challenges of this kind of historical scholarship and the strategies you develop in the book?
JH: This book relies on more than seventy-five oral histories of health activists. These histories were invaluable for this project, bringing to life the passion, determination, and resourcefulness of these activists. They also offered useful reflections on and analyses of the movements they founded and supported. I am so grateful that these people shared their stories, and sometimes their documents, with me.
Oral histories, however, only go so far in documenting the history of a movement. Memories fade, subjects are too difficult to recount, self-knowledge is limited. Traditional archival and published sources read alongside of oral histories allowed me to establish the timelines and capture the details that memory alone cannot recall with accuracy.
ID: What can historians and activists learn from this history for the current context? In other words, why does this history matter today?
JH: The book speaks to our current moment in many ways. First, it shows that determined people working together can make a significant difference. Most of the activists in these stories did not have traditional expertise to do the things they did. They learned as they built. Second, institutional survival requires flexibility and adaptation in order to respond to shifting internal demands and external challenges. Today, surviving clinics respond to the needs of their communities with feminist tools and analysis that speak to the current moment. Finally, this book shows that the work of social justice and feminist revolution is hard. Internal conflict and external challenges were ordinary and taxing. Political battles frequently overlapped with personal animus. Social justice work can be bruising, but worthwhile work is often hard.
Overall, I am inspired by these stories, and I see in them and in the women who lived them the chance for a better, more just world.
Judith Houck is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor Gender and Women’s Studies and Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her work focuses on the history of women’s health in the United States. Her first book, Hot and Bothered: Women, Medicine, and Menopause in Modern America (Harvard UP, 2006) examined the medical, popular, and personal meanings of menopause and how they changed over the course of the twentieth century. Her most recent book, Looking Through the Speculum: Examining the Women’s Health Movement (Chicago University Press, 2024) examines the emergence, development, travails, and triumphs of the women’s health movement in the United States. Houck brings medical history and the history of women’s bodies into our emerging understandings of second-wave feminism, and sheds light on the efforts to shape health care and reproductive control beyond the hospital and the doctor’s office. She is currently working on a history of lesbians in HIV/AIDS activism.
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