Gynaecological Proletarians

Anne Summers

• The Charge of the Parasols: Women’s Entry to the Medical Profession by Catriona Blake
  Women’s Press, 254 pp, £6.95, October 1990, ISBN 0 7043 4239 1
• Women under the Knife: A History of Surgery by Ann Dally
  Radius, 289 pp, £18.99, April 1991, ISBN 0 09 174508 X
• The Science of Woman: Gynaecology and Gender in England, 1800-1929 by Ornella Moscucci
  Cambridge, 278 pp, £35.00, April 1991, ISBN 0 521 32741 5

Since the rebirth of the feminist movement in the Seventies, the theory and practice of medicine, and the role of women as patients and practitioners, have been strongly contested issues in sexual politics. Much recent feminist writing, especially in the United States, has interpreted the history of the modern medical profession as a succession of male impositions on women. The outlawing of folk (for which read female) medicine, the marginalisation of the traditional midwife, the medicalisation of childbirth, and the introduction of drastic surgical techniques for dealing with real or supposed dysfunctions of the reproductive organs, have all been characterised as examples of oppression and exploitation, inspired by greed, opportunism and, for good measure, possibly sadism and voyeurism.