What Makes Women Sick: Gender and the Political Economy of Health / Edition 1

by Lesley Doyal

Overview

What makes women sick? To an Ecuadorean woman, it’s nervios from constant worry about her children’s illnesses. To a woman working in a New Mexico electronics factory, it’s the solvents that leave her with a form of dementia. To a Ugandan woman, it’s HIV from her husband's sleeping with the widow of an AIDS patient. To a Bangladeshi woman, it’s a fatal infection following an IUD insertion. What they all share is a recognition that their sickness is somehow caused by  situations they face every day at home and at work.

In this clearly written and compelling book, Lesley Doyal investigates the effects of social, economic, and cultural conditions on women’s health. The “fault line” of gender that continues to divide all societies has, Doyal demonstrates, profound and pervasive consequences for the health of women throughout the world. Her broad synthesis highlights variations between men and women in patterns of health and illness, and it identifies inequalities in medical care that separate groups of women from each other. Doyal’s wide-ranging arguments, her wealth of data, her use of women’s voices from many cultures—and her examples of women mobilizing to find their own solutions—make this book required reading for everyone concerned with women’s health.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813522074
Publisher:	Rutgers University Press
Publication date:	05/01/1995
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

LESLEY DOYAL is a Professor for Health and Social Care, School of Policy Studies, at the University of Bristol. She has published widely on health policy and women’s studies. Her Previous books include The Political Economy of Health and HIV and AIDS: Setting a Feminist Agenda.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
1 In Sickness and in Health
2 Hazards of Hearth and Home
3 Safe Sex?
4 Regulating Reproduction
5 A Labour of Love
6 Waged Work and Well-being
7 Abusing Women
8 Women's Movements for Health
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

An immensely useful review of a very wide range of up-to-date literature [which] will be of great interest to health planners, researchers and health politicians and activists...' - Mike Shepperdson, Journal of Development Studies