Building Community and Transforming Knowledge: Histories of Women’s Health Practitioners and Community-Based Health Services in 20^th-Century Alberta, Canada

Abstract

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.