As new government health policy was created and implemented in the late 1910s and the late 1960s, women patients and health practitioners recognized gaps in the new health services and worked together to create better programs. This article brings the histories of the district nursing program (1919–43) and local birth control centres (1970–79) together to recognize women’s health provision (as trained nurses or lay practitioners) as community-based and collaborative endeavours in the province of Alberta. The district nursing and birth control centre programs operated under different health policies, were influenced by different feminisms, and were situated in different Indigenous-settler relations. But the two programs, occurring half a century apart, provided space for health workers and their patients to implement change at a community level. Health practitioners in the early and late twentieth century took women’s experiential knowledge seriously, and, therefore, these communities formed a new field of women’s health expertise.
This article explores the impact of self-examination as a tool of feminist resistance, an act of preventive health care, and a site where mainstream and alternative health models were debated in late twentieth-century Canada. In the early 1970s, a range of women’s health groups increasingly turned their liberationist critiques towards the structures of mainstream medicine, and the self-exam became a vehicle that allowed women to push back against what they cast as the systemic power imbalances involved with the traditional doctor-patient relationship. Both breast and pelvic self-exams became staples of the women’s health movement as feminists encouraged women to take health care into their own hands, both figuratively and literally. As the decade progressed, breast self-examination transformed from a niche feminist technique to a relatively commonplace preventative health practice, increasingly discussed within popular women’s magazines across North America. Pelvic self-examination remained more controversial as the practice was denounced by a small but vocal group of Canadian physicians, resentful of lay incursions into medical practice. Drawing on women’s magazines and feminist newsletters, archival files from Canadian women’s health centres, and debates about self-examination in national newspapers, we reveal how shifting narratives about women’s liberation, responsibility for preventative health practices, and medical authority intersected in the feminist practice of self-examination.
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