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Periods. From Menarche to Menopause. SHARON GOLUB. Sage, Newbury Park, CA, 1992. xiv, 282 pp., illus. $38; paper, $18.95.
Menstrual Health in Women's Lives. ALICE J. DAN and LINDA L. LEWIS, Eds. University of Illinois Press, Champaign, IL, 1992. vi, 301 pp., illus. $37.50; paper, $16.95. Based on a conference, Galveston, TX, 1985.
Twenty-five years ago an activist women's health movement emerged in this country that had broad popular appeal; a representative text, Our Bodies, Ourselves, is now in its fourth edition, having sold more than three million copies and been translated into more than a dozen languages. Explicitly feminist, this movement was critical of received medical knowledge and practices on two grounds: diseases primarily affecting women were being neglected (both in federally funded health research and in clinical practice), and entirely expectable events in women's reproductive lives (childbirth, menopause, the late luteal phase of the menstrual cycle) were being interpreted as potential health risks requiring medical management.
Critiques of the latter practice came both from within and from outside scientific communities. It was argued that a reductionist "biomedical model" (a set of concepts embedded in the practices of medicine and other socially powerful institutions) often inappropriately "medicalized" women's lives by focusing on biological events in isolation from their social and psychological contexts. When these biologized representations of women are taken up in the broader culture, they sometimes are represented as offering a scientific basis for resolving controversial social questions. (For example, a July 1970 New York Times article was headlined "Women Unfit for Top Jobs" because of the "raging hormonal influences of the menstrual cycle.")
The two books under review report and summarize menstrual-cycle research shaped by the concepts and concerns of the women's health movement and addressed in part to the role scientific data can play in gender politics. Periods: From Menarche to Menopause, by Sharon Golub, is an accessible book summarizing research on a...