Summary

Once focusing solely on reproduction and reproductive matters, the study of women's health has expanded to include cardiovascular disease, breast cancer, colorectal cancer, and osteoporosis. The United States has established an office dedicated to researching women's health issues, and the Women's Health Initiative has begun collecting data on the prevention of diseases common among women. Yet the health care issues affecting diverse groups of women have remained underfunded and understudied.

Diversity and Women's Health calls attention to this glaring discrepancy and presents cutting-edge research on women's health from a feminist perspective. The contributors argue that the health issues specific to lesbians, elderly women, women of color, immigrant women, and disabled women must become a central part of the broader conversation on women's health in the United States.

Essays in this collection highlight the disparities in diagnosis and treatment among women because of their race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, and age from both medical and women's studies perspectives.

In reviewing the history of feminist scholarship on health care, the contributors to this volume show how bringing a feminist perspective to biomedical research will address the health care needs of marginalized groups in the United States.

Choice Review

Only since 1993 has the National Institutes of Health mandated that women be included as subjects in clinical trials. Diversity and Women's Health, a collection of articles previously published in the National Women's Studies Association Journal, reminds readers how much still needs to be done. Topics covered give needed attention to women who frequently have remained at the margins of diversity discourses, including the disabled, Latinas, the aged, and nonheterosexuals. The collection is at its best when it invites readers to go beyond two-dimensional understandings of issues such as pro-life and pro-choice, menopause, aging, and family relationships, and to recognize deeply ingrained societal practices of exclusion. Unfortunately, many of the chapter authors rely heavily on data from more than a decade ago. This undermines these writers' claims that various groups are being ignored in health care research and practice, and makes for an uneven compilation. Such arguments would be more compelling if placed within the historical contexts within which they were written, or supplemented with current data. Summing Up: Optional. Graduate students and faculty/researchers. M. D. Lagerwey Western Michigan University