Unwell Women by Elinor Cleghorn review – battle for the female body | Books

reuring recent concerns about the AstraZeneca Covid vaccine and its possible link to blood clots, many women felt compelled to point out, on social media and in the press, that the risk of fatal thrombosis was significantly higher with use of hormonal contraception, yet it continues to be prescribed to millions of women without anything comparable to the level of concern or scrutiny the vaccine has received. The potential danger of a drug that only affects women is less in the headlines, it seems. In fact, when the pill was first approved in the United States in 1960, it contained more than three times as many synthetic hormones as the modern version, and the side effects – including fatal pulmonary emboli and thrombosis. – have been deliberately downplayed. It took a grassroots campaign backed by women’s groups to bring the issue to the attention of a Congressional hearing in 1970. “From the start, the pill was conceived as a way for women to take control. their body and their fertility, ”writes the culture historian. Elinor Cleghorn in her first book, Sick women. “But it also means that the costs – physical and mental – remain a burden on women. “

The story of the pill is just one fascinating episode in a detailed, vast and enraged story of how mainstream medicine has pathologized, rejected and abused women from ancient times to the present day. A male-dominated medical facility, influenced by religious, cultural, and political ideas about women’s bodies – especially when it comes to sexuality and reproduction – has inflicted immeasurable suffering on women and girls, often with zeal. fair. Some of the cases that Cleghorn uncovered could have come directly from The Handmaid’s Tale. There’s 19th-century London surgeon Isaac Baker Brown, a staunch supporter of clitoridectomy to cure hysterical and nervous disorders thought to be caused by excessive masturbation in young, middle-class women. Or the American neurologists Walter Freeman and James Watts, who pioneered the lobotomy craze in the 1930s and 1940s – in 1942, 75% of their patients were women. “In an age when a mentally healthy woman was a serene wife and mother, almost any behavior or emotion that disturbed domestic harmony could be interpreted as a justification for a lobotomy. “

The belief that a woman’s natural state was to be an obedient wife and devoted mother, and that any deviation from this was either the cause or the effect of a disordered body and mind, repeats itself depressingly throughout the history of androcentric western medicine. Cleghorn strives to highlight the extent to which race and class also played a role in the diagnosis: the lingering idea that women were likely to suffer from unexplained pain and nervous ailments because they were more delicate and more weak than men was only true for white upper-class women. “The more civilized a woman was, the more she was able to feel pain. This belief underlies some of the book’s most gruesome case studies; the history of medical experimentation on slave women and sex workers.

Cleghorn organizes his ambitious amount of material with clarity and often with dry humor, but there is a sustained note of justified anger running through the book. She approaches her subject not only from a historical point of view but also from a personal point of view; she suffers from lupus, an autoimmune disease, which mainly affects women. In a final chapter, she tells her own story: the unexplained pain that persisted until she was 20, dismissed as “just your hormones” by a male general practitioner; her developing son’s congenital heart block caused by his undiagnosed disease; the rush to A&E when she developed heart problems, only to be sent home on ibuprofen and rushed home two days later. In total, it took seven years to receive diagnosis and treatment. Like so many women, “I began to believe that I had to make it up, that the pain was only in my head.”

Her conclusion is a passionate call to arms: By speaking out and sharing our stories, women can empower each other to challenge the stigma that has historically been attached to the female experience. “To be a sick woman today is to fight against rooted injustices against the body, mind and life of women; but we no longer have to live in silence and shame, ”she writes. Sick women is not only a compelling investigation, but essential.