Women's Health: Complexities and Differences

Women, Gender, and Health

by Sheryl Burt Ruzek, Virginia L. Olesen, Adele E. Clarke

Challenging purely biomedical definitions of women's health, Women's Health: Complexities and Differences draws attention to social, cultural, and behavioral elements crucial to a broader understanding of the issues. The contributors to this volume raise important questions about the directions currently being taken to improve women's health in the United States: Is women's health merely the absence of disease? What have been the consequences of promoting narrow biomedical models of health? What do the pervasive patterns and puzzles in the distribution of disease, illness, and death among different groups of women tell us about the sources of ill health? How well do national agendas address all women's health care priorities? What are the implications for social action? Particular attention is paid in this collection of essays to how race, class, gender, and culture shape and in turn are shaped by treatment options and health care for certain subpopulations among Native American, Latina, Asian American, and African American women. Discussions of reproductive health, mental health, violence, and the treatment of stigmatized women raise perplexing issues about choice, chance, and social change.

689 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1997