Summary

In the United States, "the male takeover of healing roles" started later than in Europe, "but ultimately went much further" (61). The United States has possibly the lowest percentage of female doctors among industrialized nations and midwifery is almost non-existent. Women have been forcibly relegated to nursing "which is in no way a substitute for the autonomous roles woman had enjoyed as midwives and general healers" (61). These statements by the authors are based on the status quo at the time of WMN's original publication in the 1970s. Ehrenreich and English ask: "How did one particular set of healers, who happened to be male, white, and middle class, manage to oust all the competing folk healers, midwives, and other practitioners who had dominated the American medical scene in the early 1800s?" (62). While dominant medical historians argue that this...