"A Form of Suffrage Movement:" The Women's Health Initiative and Feminist Health Activism since the 1990s

In 1991, National Institutes of Health director Bernadine Healy unveiled the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI), the most ambitious clinical trial undertaken by NIH.  The WHI was intended to be a fourteen-year, $625 million study of key health problems affecting older women, including prevention of breast cancer, heart disease, and osteoporosis. The WHI emerged after years of pressure from women activists in Congress, federal health agencies, and non-governmental feminist health organizations. Healy called the growing attention to women’s health research during this era “a form of suffrage movement . . . that by necessity grew out of two earlier movements.”

 

Londa Schiebinger has called the rise of women’s health research a “triumph for feminism,” but this paper will show that the reaction of feminist health activists at the time was more complex. The National Women’s Health Network saw the NIH’s increased attention to women’s health issues as a “victory.” Yet they expressed disappointment that the ORWH ignored the viewpoints of women consumers in setting the agenda for women’s health research. They were especially concerned that the WHI privileged the interests of medical researchers, clinicians, and the pharmaceutical industry at the expense of female patients. This paper will use the Network’s activism as an example of the ongoing role of feminist health organizations in shaping health research policy and biomedical knowledge production in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.