Women's Health Movement

Buttons, Canadian Women's Movement Collection, 10-001-S4, Archives and special collections, University of Ottawa Library. 

Nineteen-sixties' second wave feminism encompassed the women’s health movement a movement that was especially marked by women’s demand for abortion rights and rights to childbirth care. The movement was also concerned with raising awareness about the oppressiveness of perceived “scientific knowledge,” and its failure to respect the physical and mental integrity of women. The women's health movement resulted in the founding of autonomous resources that aimed to fill the gaps of “traditional" medical practices. Works, such as the “Birth Control Handbook,” and Our Bodies, Ourselves, offered diverse and independent information about women's bodies and health. As a result of women’s advocacy work, many women's centers, health collectives, and shelters for abused women were established in 1970s urban North America. These settings offered women a collective means of challenging the misogyny of authoritarian health knowledge, and a personal approach for them to reappropriate their bodies and their health.

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