"In Into Our Own Hands, Sandra Morgen shows us, not just how the womens health movement started, but how it weathered adversity. This book is important reading for everyone who cares about the future of womens health as defined by women themselves."Cynthia A. Pearson, executive director, National Womens Health Network

"This is an analytically sophisticated and engaging contribution to our understanding of the feminist health movement."Karen Brodkin, professor of anthropology and womens studies, UCLA

Recent history has witnessed a revolution in womens health care. Beginning in the late 1960s, women in communities across the United States challenged medical and male control over womens health. Few people today realize the extent to which these grassroots efforts shifted power and responsibility from the medical establishment into womens hands as health care consumers, providers, and advocates.

Into Our Own Hands traces the womens health care movement in the United States. Richly documented, this study is based on more than a decade of research, including interviews with leading activists; documentary material from feminist health clinics and advocacy organizations; a survey of womens health movement organizations in the early 1990s; and ethnographic fieldwork. Sandra Morgen focuses on the clinics born from this movement, as well as how the movements encounters with organized medicine, the state, and ascendant neoconservative and neoliberal political forces of the 1970s to the1980s shaped the confrontations and accomplishments in womens health care. The book also explores the impact of political struggles over race and class within the movement organizations.

Sandra Morgen is director of the Center for the Study of Women in Society at the University of Oregon. She is an anthropologist who teaches in the department of sociology. Her publications include Women and the Politics of Empowerment, Gender and Anthropology: Critical Reviews for Research and Teaching, and EnGendering Rationalities.