Cathy C. (cathyskye) -
Through exhaustive research, Lydia Reeder's The Cure for Women shows how gifted women like Mary Putnam Jacobi fought back. Her arsenal of weapons included things that the male physicians' did not: the first-ever data-backed, scientific research on women's reproductive biology. Jacobi fought back with the facts, and the medical profession has never been the same.
I learned so much from reading The Cure for Women, unfortunately, a great deal of it with my teeth clenched. Men writing "learned" treatises on women's reproductive organs when they wouldn't know an ovary or a uterus if one came up and punched them in the nose. Why? Because they'd never seen any of these organs and had no idea how they worked. You would think that we would have all the misinformation squared away here in the twenty-first century, but we don't. The fight for control over women's bodies is still happening, proving that we need more people like Mary Putnam Jacobi-- and more people to read this marvelously researched book.
(Review copy courtesy of the publisher and Net Galley)
I learned so much from reading The Cure for Women, unfortunately, a great deal of it with my teeth clenched. Men writing "learned" treatises on women's reproductive organs when they wouldn't know an ovary or a uterus if one came up and punched them in the nose. Why? Because they'd never seen any of these organs and had no idea how they worked. You would think that we would have all the misinformation squared away here in the twenty-first century, but we don't. The fight for control over women's bodies is still happening, proving that we need more people like Mary Putnam Jacobi-- and more people to read this marvelously researched book.
(Review copy courtesy of the publisher and Net Galley)
