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The book also contains important lessons for those who wish to advance the cause of women in medicine today. What is particularly notable is its focus on broad cultural factors that have impeded the work of women physicians, not merely on explicit barriers of entry to the profession.
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“ Restoring the Balance is an exceedingly important and needed study of the history of women in the American medical profession. ” -Judith Walzer Leavitt, University of Wisconsin Medical School There is lots to learn in this highly readable and highly recommended book.
#Sheppard towner act s medicine professional#
Just as she writes in this book that the history of women in medicine represents a constant search for balance, between personal, community, and professional interests, More balances her own account between wonderful individual stories of medical women’s lives and a flowing narrative of the ups and downs of their collective professional history over 150 years. The last two chapters are especially relevant to the concerns of women physicians today. “This scholarly yet accessible work traces the struggle of women physicians to achieve a balance between personal and professional obligations… It also exposes the barriers encountered by these women, who were often excluded from hospital staffs, specialty training programs, and medical societies… The book is well researched and reverberates with the voices and experiences of remarkable women physicians. This book has a great deal to say about the process of professionalization of American medicine, from a personal or individual perspective and from an institutional one. Using well chosen examples from the lives of Sarah Dolley, Mary Calderone, and others, More shows how these women responded in different ways to varying personal and social needs. Her emphasis on balance between the roles of women in families and in their profession is a useful one and her focus on the Women’s National Association, on women in hospital settings and on the Sheppard Towner Act all make Restoring the Balance stand out from previous books on this subject. “To tell the story of women in medicine in this country over the last century and a half, More focuses on a few physicians to say something in detail about their lives, work, and the obstacles they overcame.
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More weaves profiles of unsung female doctors into a history that ranges from the ‘maternalist’ health care initiatives that grew out of the pioneering efforts of Victorian women doctors such as Sarah Adamson Dolley (1829–1909) to the impact of the civil rights and women’s movement on the medical profession. “In her probing and meticulous study, Ellen S. Perhaps most interesting is her analysis of how these women reconciled the conflicts between traditional values and career goals as they began to gain some level of prestige during the baby boom era. She also surveys the evolution of women’s medical societies and looks at women physicians’ efforts during the world wars. More concentrates on the concerns and difficulties these women encountered as they attempted to find a balance between their personal and professional lives. More’s book covers these eras, but its real strength lies in its examination of the obstacles women physicians faced in the mid- to late 20th century. Ironically, the one woman serving in Congress at that time, Representative Alice Mary Robertson of Oklahoma, voted against Sheppard–Towner and dismissed it as “a harmful bill.” Historians acknowledge it as a landmark in the development of social welfare programs in the United States.“A number of books about women physicians are available, but most focus on the lives of women doctors during the 19th and early 20th centuries. With former Representative Rankin sitting in the House Gallery, the bill was debated for 12 hours and passed by a vote of 279 to 39 on Novemseveral months earlier the Senate had approved it by a similarly wide margin.
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To combat elevated mortality rates among mothers and newborns, Sheppard–Towner provided $1 million annually in federal aid (for a five-year period) to state programs for mothers and babies, particularly prenatal and newborn care facilities in rural states. After Rankin left the House in 1919, Senator Morris Sheppard of Texas, a proponent of women’s suffrage, and Representative Horace Mann Towner of Iowa, chairman of the House Committee on Insular Affairs, became the main sponsors of the bill. Representative Jeannette Rankin of Montana originally sponsored the legislation in July 1918 women’s groups lobbied on its behalf for years. Harding signed the Sheppard–Towner Maternity and Infancy Act into law. House of RepresentativesĪbout this object Jeannette Rankin of Montana first sponsored the legislation in 1918.