Navigating Medical Authority: The Emma Goldman Clinic and the Feminist Health Movement’s Lay Roots

From the late 1960s – 1980s, the women’s health movement sought to empower women by hosting workshops, publishing literature, and founding women-controlled clinics that helped women gain access to safe birth control and abortion services, revive homebirths and midwifery, or simply learn about how their own anatomy and sexuality. Notable among the movement's leaders was their lack of traditional medical training or degrees. Carol Downer, the founder of the self-help movement and self-help clinics, was a lawyer, the authors of the movement’s foundational text Our Bodies, Ourselves (1970) were members of a radical feminist collective from many walks of life. Broadly, they hoped to wrest control of women's reproductive health from a mostly male medical establishment which they felt had kept them locked out of their own bodies.

At the same time, others in the women’s health movement utilized existing medical authority to their benefit. Journalist Barbara Seaman’s book The Doctor’s Case Against the Pill (1969) leveraged the idea of doctors’ expertise to push for safer birth control and many women’s health clinics contracted with licensed physicians to provide abortion care.

I will focus on the example of the Emma Goldman Clinic (EGC) in Iowa City, Iowa to explore how feminist activists navigated the tension between medical authority and the lay women leaders of the women’s health movement. The EGC, founded in 1973, sits at the crossroads of the country in a town with a university hospital, but is rarely mentioned as more than a passing example in existing literature on the women’s health movement. However, a closer inspection of the EGC and the community built around it provides a valuable insight into how the feminist health movement maintained its lay roots while surviving challenges from both politicians and the medical establishment.