Women and Obstetrics: The Loss of Childbirth to Male Physicians Essay

Women and Obstetrics The Loss of Childbirth to Male Physicians adult female is a good deal referred to as a diseased state of the male norm. Medical test is done on men, with men as the norm. Womens bodies are diseased and dysfunctional. womanish processes are non normal occurrences in the female body. They are abnormal processes, needing male consultation and male solutions. This medicalization of womens bodies occurred during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as medication became professionalised and men came to be in control of womens bodies and their processes. During the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth and part of the eighteenth century, midwives oversaw womens medical needs. Childbirth and diseases of the reproductive organs were the domain of midwives. Books on tocology taught midwives to diagnose problems, to suggest treatments, and to oversee birth. As men sought to professionalize medicine and to further their control they began to become involved in midwif ery and developed obstetrics and gynecology. The shift from midwife to obstetrician and gynecologist occurred from the archeozoic eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Relinquishing control of their territory was not something midwives did voluntarily, rather it happened as a result of questions of womens place and innovations in technology. mens room access to education and to technology provided them with an advantage over female midwives. effeminate midwives and women in general were denied medical education. They were not exposed, nor allowed to use certain technologies. In order for midwives to keep their job, they were forbidden from practicing medicine. Using technology was practicing medicine midwives could not use technology to ease labor or to diagnose... ...d (New York, New York Oxford University Press, 1986)Leavitt, Judith Walzer, ed., Women and health in America (Madison, Wisconsin The University of Wisconsin Press, 1984)Mitchinson, Wendy, Hysteria and Insani ty in Women A nineteenth Century Canadian Perspective Journal of Canadian Studies 21 (1988) 1199-208Morantz-Sanchez, Regina Markell, beneficence and Science Women Physicians in American Medicine (New York, New York Oxford University Press, 1985)Moscucci, Ornella, The Science of Woman Gynecology and Gender in England 1800-1929 (Cambridge, England Cambridge University Press, 1990)Tatlock, Lynne, Speculum Feminarum Gendered Perspectives on Obstetrics and Gynecology in Early Modern Germany Signs 17 (1992) 725-56Wajcman, Judy, Feminism Confronts Technology (University Park, dad The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991)