19.10.2023 Conference: Health Feminism, Reproductive Knowledge and Women’s Activism Across Europe in the long 20th Century (19.-21. October 2023, University of Konstanz)
Conveners: Anne Kwaschik (University of Konstanz), Isabel Heinemann (University of Bayreuth), Emeline Fourment (University of Rouen), Heidi Hein-Kircher (Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe)
Over the course of the 20th century, the idea of women’s rights transformed both the gender order and the concept of civil society: Therein, “health” proved a crucial issue, as it combined reproductive decision-making bodily integrity and access to medical knowledge. Drawing inspiration from both social protest movements and the feminist movement that started in the US and swept across Europe in the late 1960s, women started to organize for legal abortion, safe contraceptives, and women’s centers. Emphasizing self-help as key approach, they sought to counter a largely patriarchal society and protest the male-dominated fields of obstetrics and gynecology. In doing so, they elaborated their own body knowledge, a knowledge on and from the body, wrote their own health books and developed an expertise based on women’s experience. Knowledge appropriation and production became their main mode of action.
This conference aims at exploring health feminism and women’s activism from the perspective of the history of knowledge. It intends to interrogate the homogeneity of the existing Western European narratives focusing on the 1970s and on the argument that North America was the hub of knowledge transfer to the rest of the world. Against this background, this conference focuses on other transnational transfers, from Europe to the US, or within Europe and asks participants to reconsider periodization. Health feminists were already active in the 1920s and 1930s in socialist and anarchist political groups, and also in the eugenics movement. They elaborated and communicated contraceptive knowledge and sometimes even fought for abortion rights which leads us the following questions: How did these early women activists link health issues with claims of women’s emancipation? Was feminist knowledge affected by socialist, anarchist or eugenicist thought? And can we trace continuities between women’s activism around reproduction from the 1920s and 1930s and health feminism of the 1970s?
With its broader regional focus, the conference aims at decentering the history of Western European health feminism. Including Eastern European (and Eastern German) trajectories and constellations helps to reconsider key issues of current research: Can we trace elements of health feminism – understood here as a women’s social movement that framed women’s physical and reproductive health as a central component of individual rights – also in socialist countries of the 1970s and 1980s? How important was the transformation of 1989/90 in this respect? And how can we approach health feminism in (post)socialist countries that at least formally guaranteed their female citizens equal rights, legal abortion and free healthcare by women professionals?
In sum, this international conference examines how women acquired, produced and communicated health knowledge throughout the 20th century and investigates links to demands for civil rights, political agency, and grass-root activism.
