Angry womb cartoon

When Wombs Fly!

By Carrie Adkins

Last Tuesday, February 11, the German athlete Carina Vogt became the first woman to win an Olympic gold medal in the women’s ski jump event. The sport itself is not new; ski jumping dates back to the early twentieth century, and men have been competing in the event at the Olympics since 1924. But until these 2014 games in Sochi, the International Olympic Committee refused again and again to allow women to participate – even when faced with mounting pressure from female skiers who wanted to compete in the 2006 and 2010 games.

And their rationale for denying women entry was incredibly stupid.

Sunday Morning Medicine

When I Remember Margaret Thatcher, I Remember…

By Sandra Trudgen Dawson

When Margaret Thatcher died on Monday, her policies, leadership, and legacy evoked strong reactions. Margaret Thatcher has been hailed Britain’s finest postwar leader; the person who single-mindedly transformed Britain’s society; the leader who “did the necessary” to remake Britain’s ailing economy. She fought an Imperialist war and she won. Thatcher was the first woman to become Prime Minister of Britain and, considering the current pool of candidates, she might continue to be the only woman to achieve that position for the next decade. Educated at the elite Somerville College, Oxford in the late 1940s, Thatcher believed she could reverse the postwar consensus that laid the foundation of the welfare state and the idea that all Britons should have the right to a certain standard of living. She was a committed capitalist and believed that Britain had strayed from capitalism–or at least her form of capitalism. Thatcher claimed only those who worked hard and pulled themselves up by the bootstraps should expect a good standard of living, that it was a reward, not an entitlement.

Downton Abbey, Maternal Death and the Crisis of Childbirth in Britain

Poster, yellow background with red house sketching on the left, "I do not refer to myself as a housewife for the reason that I did not marry a house" on the right side

Believe it or not there were and are Mormon feminists

By Heather Munro Prescott

During the presidential election there were a number of speculations about Republican candidate Mitt Romney’s views on women, including horror stories circulated about his “shameful” behavior while serving as an elder in the LDS church. This led some to assume that the LDS church as a whole is poisonous for women.

Call the Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times Britain in the 1950s

A poster showing a group of women in vintage clothes, one woman standing in the center holding a white paper, singing, the other sitting down looking at her

See Sally Menstruate

Sunday Morning Medicine

A Black woman in a dress and apron walks away from the camera down a dirt road. A small house is in the distance

Designing Women: Midwives, Class, and Choice

A group of people gathering, holding slogans for public health reform, in Boston

Get Out of Our Exam Rooms: A Brief History of the Uneasy Relationship between Medicine and Politics

So far, 2012 has seen state legislators proposing an unprecedented number of bills aimed at regulating women’s access to various reproductive health services, including mammograms, annual pap smears to detect cervical cancer, contraceptives, and abortion, as well as women’s ability to pay for these services through private and public insurance providers. The underlying assumption in all of this health legislation is that women are unable to make informed, responsible decisions about their bodies unless they are mandated to do so by the state. A parallel implication is that even the physicians treating these women are incapable of making medically appropriate decisions without state interference. Medical professionals finally began fighting back on this political trespassing on their terrain just this week.