Two studies, widely condemned in the 1970s and 1980s-the Tuskegee study of men with untreated syphilis and the New Zealand study of women with untreated carcinoma in situ of the cervix-received new defenses in the 21st century. We noted remarkable similarities in both the studies and their defenses. Here we evaluate the scientific, political, and moral claims of the defenders. The scientific claims are largely based on incomplete or misinterpreted evidence and exaggeration of the uncertainties of science. The defenders' political arguments mistakenly claim that identity politics clouded the original critiques; in fact such politics opened the eyes of the public to exploitation. The moral defenses demonstrate an overreliance on codes of conduct and have implications for research ethics today.
This article is about the experience of menstruation, a function which many women spend much of their lives concealing. It is a topic which many regard as intensely private. Some, men and women, consider it distasteful and others still, historically unchanging and inconsequential. The authors argue that menstruation has played an important role in the twentieth-century construction of 'womanhood', and in constituting women as 'the other' in the eyes of male non-menstruators. This New Zealand study draws principally on two narratives about women's bodies. One is derived from cultural representations of the modern feminine body through sanitary product advertising, some of it international in origin, covering the time span 1935 to 1969. This is considered alongside the practical lives of bodies, the personal narratives given to us by 50 women relating their experiences of menarche and subsequent periods.
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