Judith A. Houck

I have recently published Looking through the Speculum: Examining the Women’s Health Movement (Chicago: 2024). This historical exploration highlights local history to tell a national story about the evolution of the women’s health movement, illuminating the struggles and successes of bringing feminist dreams into clinical spaces.

The women’s health movement in the United States, beginning in 1969 and taking hold in the 1970s, was a broad-based movement seeking to increase women’s bodily knowledge, reproductive control, and well-being. It was a political movement that insisted that bodily autonomy provided the key to women’s liberation. It was also an institution-building movement that sought to transform women’s relationships with medicine; it was dedicated to increasing women’s access to affordable health care without the barriers of homophobia, racism, and sexism. But the movement did not only focus on women’s bodies. It also encouraged activists to reimagine their relationships with one another, to develop their relationships in the name of personal and political change, and, eventually, to discover and confront the limitations of the bonds of womanhood.

This book examines historically the emergence, development, travails, and triumphs of the women’s health movement in the United States. By bringing medical history and the history of women’s bodies into our emerging understandings of second-wave feminism, Looking through the Speculum sheds light on the understudied efforts to shape health care and reproductive control beyond the hospital and the doctor’s office—in the home, the women’s center, the church basement, the bookshop, and the clinic. Lesbians, straight women, and women of color all play crucial roles in this history. At its center are the politics, institutions, and relationships created by and within the women’s health movement, depicted primarily from the perspective of the activists who shaped its priorities, fought its battles, and grappled with its shortcomings.

I am working on a history of lesbians in the anti-AIDS movement in the United States. In the 1980s, as AIDS ravaged the gay male community across the country, lesbians rushed to be of use. They delivered food to AIDS patients, used their bodies to protest FDA rules, led AIDS social service organizations, and demanded more HIV/AIDS research. They were caregivers, educators, theorists, agitators, health providers, researchers, and case managers. Because they were understood to be part of a “gay community,” lesbians’ participation in AIDS activism and social service has often been understood as unremarkable. Nevertheless, in part because they were considered “low risk” for HIV infection, the participation of lesbians in AIDS work was always complicated and often contentious. To explore the rich issues at play, I am writing the first book-length history of HIV/AIDS organizing that centers the experience of lesbians.

The place of lesbians in anti-AIDS projects raises a series of questions ripe for historical analysis. Why were lesbians over-represented in AIDS work? How did lesbian activists understand their role in AIDS organizing? How was their participation received and represented? How did lesbian feminists influence the shape of AIDS activism? How did lesbians understand their own risk of HIV infection? How were HIV-positive lesbians treated by the lesbian community? By looking at HIV-positive lesbians, lesbian activists, and lesbian health institutions, this book promises to illuminate themes central to the history of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and to expand our historical understanding of gender, sexuality, feminism, racism, and identity politics.

Education

Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison, History of Science and Medicine, 1998
M.A., University of Wisconsin-Madison, History of Science and Medicine, 1994
B.A., St. John’s College, Santa Fe, NM, Liberal Arts, 1985

Books

Looking Through the Speculum: Examining the Women’s Health Movement

Judith A. Houck. Looking Through the Speculum: Examining the Women’s Health Movement. University of Chicago Press, 2024.

Highlights local history to tell a national story about the evolution of the women’s health movement, illuminating the struggles and successes of bringing feminist dreams into clinical spaces. The women’s health movement in the United States, beginning in 1969 and taking hold in the 1970s, was a broad-based movement seeking to increase women’s bodily knowledge, reproductive control, and well-being. It was a political movement that insisted that bodily autonomy provided the key to women’s liberation. It was also an institution-building movement that sought to transform women’s relationships with medicine; it was dedicated to increasing women’s access to affordable health care without the barriers of homophobia, racism, and sexism. But the movement did not only focus on women’s bodies. It also encouraged activists to reimagine their relationships with one another, to develop their relationships in the name of personal and political change, and, eventually, to discover and confront the limitations of the bonds of womanhood. This book examines historically the emergence, development, travails, and triumphs of the women’s health movement in the United States. By bringing medical history and the history of women’s bodies into our emerging understandings of second-wave feminism, the author sheds light on the understudied efforts to shape health care and reproductive control beyond the hospital and the doctor’s office—in the home, the women’s center, the church basement, the bookshop, and the clinic. Lesbians, straight women, and women of color all play crucial roles in this history. At its center are the politics, institutions, and relationships created by and within the women’s health movement, depicted primarily from the perspective of the activists who shaped its priorities, fought its battles, and grappled with its shortcomings.

Hot and Bothered: Women, Medicine, and Menopause in Modern America

Judith A. Houck. Hot and Bothered: Women, Medicine, and Menopause in Modern America. Harvard University Press, 2008.

How did menopause change from being a natural (and often welcome) end to a woman’s childbearing years to a deficiency disease in need of medical and pharmacological intervention? As she traces the medicalization of menopause over the last 100 years, historian Judith Houck challenges some widely held assumptions. Physicians hardly foisted hormones on reluctant female patients; rather, physicians themselves were often reluctant to claim menopause as a medical problem and resisted the widespread use of hormone therapy for what was, after all, a normal transition in a woman’s lifespan. Houck argues that the medical and popular understandings of menopause at any given time depended on both pharmacological options and cultural ideas and anxieties of the moment. As women delayed marriage and motherhood and entered the workforce in greater numbers, the medical understanding, cultural meaning, and experience of menopause changed. By examining the history of menopause over the course of the twentieth century, Houck shows how the experience and representation of menopause has been profoundly influenced by biomedical developments and by changing roles for women and the changing definition of womanhood.

Selected Publications

• “Lesbian Health Matters: The History of An Evolving Concept” for International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences,
• “The Best Prescription for Women’s Health: Feminist Approaches to Well-Woman Care” section in Jeremy A. Greene and Elizabeth Siegel Watkins, eds., Prescribed: Writing, Filling, Using, and Abusing the Prescription in Modern America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012).
• “The Medicalization of Menopause in America, 1897-2000: Mapping the Terrain” section in Daniel Lee Kleinman, Abby J. Kinchy, and Jo Handelsman, eds., Controversies in Science and Technology Volume 1: From Maize to Menopause (Wisconsin University Press, 2005).
• “‘What Do These Women Want?’ Feminist Responses to Feminine Forever,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 77 (2003), 103-132.
• “How to Treat a Menopausal Woman: A History, 1900-2000,” Current Woman’s Health Reports 2 (2002), 349-355.

Advisor To

• Isobel Ashby
• Kyle Miron
• Suzanna Schulert
• Emma Wathen
• Nathan Coonts

Courses Taught

• History of Science 404 – A History of Disease – Syllabus 2021 (pdf)
• History of Science 532 – A History of the (American) Body – Syllabus 2023 (pdf)
• HistSci/MHB/GWS 531 – Women and Health in American History – Syllabus 2019 (pdf)
• MHB 275 – Science, Medicine, and Race: A History
• MHB 524 – The Medical History of Sex and Sexuality
• MHB 919 – A History of Health Activism: Gender, Race, and Sexuality
• GWS 720 – Intro to Graduate Studies in Gender and Women’s Studies