When Knowledge Became Power For Women’s Health

The story of women’s health is not a straight line—it’s a tug-of-war between power withheld and power reclaimed. We trace the path from being spoken about in exam rooms to being heard as full decision-makers, and we do it with clear language, lived experience, and a practical playbook you can use right now.

We start with the roots: coverture laws that subsumed a married woman’s identity, a medical culture that labeled complex symptoms as “hysteria,” and practices like Twilight Sleep that erased consent during childbirth. From there, we follow the inflection points—contraception rights for married couples, then for everyone, and the rejection of spousal control over abortion decisions—that reframed care as a personal right. Alongside these legal shifts, the internet revolutionized access to information, turning symptom searches, patient forums, and journal articles into tools for informed choices. That change empowered many, but it also raised the stakes for credibility, context, and respectful dialogue with clinicians.

We bring the history home with real talk about today’s gaps: lingering bias that dismisses pain as mood, recent rollbacks that make access dependent on geography, and the emotional labor of advocating when you’re unwell. To counter that, we share a step-by-step approach to self-advocacy: prepare a one-sentence chief concern, track symptoms with dates and impacts, ask for plain-language explanations and differentials, and request risks, benefits, and alternatives—including doing nothing. We honor trailblazers like Mary Edwards Walker, the only woman to receive the Medal of Honor, and Elizabeth Blackwell, who broke the medical school barrier and graduated at the top of her class, as proof that persistence shifts norms.

If you care about women’s medical autonomy, shared decision-making, and practical strategies that make appointments more productive, this conversation offers history, context, and tools. Listen, take notes, and share it with someone who needs a boost before their next visit. Subscribe, leave a review to help others find the show, and tell us the one question you always ask your doctor.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Winter Check-In
• 0:33 Setting The Theme: Medical Autonomy
• 1:35 Information Access Before The Internet
• 2:40 Coverture And Paternalism In Care
• 4:08 Hysteria And The “It’s In Your Head” Era
• 5:23 Consent Gaps And Twilight Sleep
• 6:09 Withholding Diagnoses In The 1960s
• 7:00 Contraception Rights Expand 1965–1977
• 8:06 Abortion Rights And Spousal Control
• 9:09 Modern Rollbacks And Ongoing Battles
• 10:22 Everyday Bias And Self-Advocacy
• 11:44 Honoring Trailblazers: Walker And Blackwell
• 13:32 Why History Matters And Closing

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Hello, everybody. This is Still Versus Podcast. This podcast was created for women by women to elevate women's voices. I hope everybody is doing well. And weathering, if you're in the cold areas, weathering the cold. I have a few relatives and friends in warmer climates, and I am incredibly jealous, although they have informed me that when it gets hot there, it's like brutals. Perhaps I like my mild New Jersey summers and winters and springs and falls. Um but again, hope everyone's doing good. We're mid-January. Like we're we're in 2026. Like this is happening. So I have uh been focusing a bit. Well, health and wellness is always like top of mind for me. I've been going through challenges and hurdles myself that I'm gonna share once I have a resolution to everything because it's just like wild. Um, you know, but with it top of mind, you know, women's women's medical autonomy has been something that's come up in my mind quite a bit. Now, by medical autonomy, I mean the right to be able to make decisions for yourself and the right to be informed about your own care. I did a brief, I did a really brief scrub to get some dates because I actually wanted to share some history of this with you. Now, I talk a lot about shared decision making on these calls. Um, and I talk about advocating for yourself at your doctor's office, making sure that you can educate yourself. We have the benefit, my friends, of being able to look things up on our own. We are able to research things on our own and then come in and be informed about what we think might be going on in our bodies. And that's like a never-before seen thing. That's new. I don't know if everyone's aware of how new that is, but that's actually fairly new. I'm gonna run through dates here, but like that's like kind of a new thing here. Prior to the internet really exploding, there wasn't anywhere to get information beyond like going to the library and sifting through books. But like, how are you gonna realistically do that, right? You're gonna open up a book, and if you don't have any medical knowledge or medical training, you're gonna feel pretty like in over your head pretty quickly. And you're gonna, you would have to be really, really committed in order to make heads or tails about whatever you're reading. I'm not saying that I'm, you know, that you're not committed if you do this and give it a shot. Give it a shot. Like, I mean, this is how you learn, right? But I could understand why older generations and and you know, generations that are no longer here um had to rely on medical professionals and they they didn't have a choice that that was it. It was what the doctor said is what was gonna happen. And sometimes you weren't even given all the information. So this is actually quite interesting to me. Obviously, this is way, way back, but 1700, 1800s, legal non-personhood and medical paternalism was the default, which means married women's legal identity was often treated as covered, quote unquote, by their husbands, shaping norms that the male had the authority in the family and medical life. So once you got before you're married, your father makes all the decisions for your health, makes all the medical decisions for you, is the one that the doctor speaks to when you're in the room, you know, at the doctor's offices and kind of handles you. Once you're married, you're then passed over to your husband, who then is in charge of your care, which sounds insane. Even saying it out loud hurts my face. In the mid-1800s, there was a gradual erosion of coverture via married women's property acts, helping establish married women as separate legal entities, which is important for later on. In the 1800s, medicine broadly operated and paternalistic model, which we already have an idea, physicians decided and patients complied. So basically, and this was often amplified for women by stereotypes, framing them as overly emotional or less rational, which, you know, it's interesting because and I'm gonna digress for a second, but women's emotions and women's women's sense of things is actually a a unique gift that we have in order to gauge what's happening around us. And it has been like deteriorated to the point of it make, oh, you're hysterical if you have feelings, you're hysterical if you cry, you're hysterical if you have big emotions over something. That's ridiculous. Like, this is our barometer. This is how we know what's going on. Like, this is our sense. And yes, fine, don't have a crying fit every, you know, like don't make a spectacle of yourself. But at the same time, if you go down to the core, this is basically making us women believe that our intuition and our emotions are wrong and we're not wrong. 19th century moves into a bit of a hysteria. So now it's a long-running, but now discredited, obviously, diagnostic tradition disproportionately applied to women, which is part of a broader pattern where women's symptoms were psych psycholog psychologized or minimized. It's all in your head. That's what that says. In the 19th century, which is the 1900s, I was born in the 1900s, everybody, where I think most of you were too. It's all in your head, is a big deal. That that that's the rhetoric. It's you're crazy. It's in your head. You have PMS, your emotions are all over the it's in your head. No, no, no, it's in my hormones. It's interesting too because this way of thinking is actually still heavily present today. How many times has your husband told you it's in your head, or a male relative told you it's in your head? I had uh, my poor son-in-law, I said something about perimenopause, and he kind of just slipped, I guess, in front of me. He was like, Oh, now it's in your head. And I was like, don't make me pull medical research out on you. Just don't, because I will. And he started laughing, but I'm like, don't mess with me with that because you guys, they my whole family kind of teases me a little bit about how uh worked up I get about everything, but it's just so important to me. Anyway, 1900s to 1940s, this is where modern medicine expands and women's consent often doesn't. So 1902 to 1906, there was a there was a thing called twilight sleep um in childbirth where there was a drug regimen promoted as pain relief, but also produced amnesia uh during childbirth. It's that's actually kind of crazy because then you have no con you have no nothing, you have no idea what's happening to your body. In 1914, there was a case that happened in the United States um recognizing that performing a procedure without consent can be legally wrong. Yes, this was happening because they would dope you up and then just make the best decision for you, but then tell you about it later. Maybe. This is next part is actually really, really important. And I thought this was kind of crazy. Let me see, is it here? In the 960s, non-disclosure to patients, including women, was common, meaning they didn't tell them what was going on. A historical review notes that not telling patients they had cancer was often the norm. A 1961 study found most physicians would not usually inform patients of a cancer diagnosis. This is a clear example of the clinicians assuming patients couldn't handle or wouldn't understand serious information. Oh my God. So basically, you could have terminal illness, death is knocking on your door, but no one's gonna tell you about it because your little brain can't handle it. 1965 to 1971, 1979 was the most interesting to me, um, because this is a little bit closer to where I was born, which is 1985. But again, I'd like to point out here, I I'm only 42. Like I was alive, not during everything I just said, but in the next things that I talk about, I was alive. I was born during some of this, which means my parents are still with me. My aunts and uncles and everybody of that generation are still alive. Everyone who was part of these practices is still alive today, 1965. Somebody that was a teenager in 1965 or very young in 1965, they're still alive today, which means they're permeating some of this, some of these thoughts and some of this culture because this was the norm, which is crazy. And let's see here. So 1965 to 1979, reproductive privacy rights and the women's health movement pushed autonomy forward. 1965, constitutional protection for married couples, contraception use was a major step forward in reproductive decision making. This made contraceptives available for married couples. 60s to 1970s was the second wave of the women's health movement. Women organized specifically because they felt discouraged from asking questions and pressured to depend on the experts, building the cultural expectation that women should be informed participants in their own care. Yes, we want that. I did a quick search on the side because I wanted some key milestones in when did it become legal for women to obtain their own birth control? This is crazy. 1960 was the first oral contraceptive pill was approved by the FDA. In 1965, the Supreme Court struck down a Connecticut law banning contraception for married couples, ruling it violating marital privacy. 1960, mid-1960s is when it became okay to use contraception when you were married, but only when you were married. It was illegal to obtain it as a single woman. You were not allowed to have it. I don't know how I feel about this. I mean, I know how I feel about it. And I go back and forth in my head about this because I'm like, they didn't trust us to be able to deal with it. But then part of it was also probably more so that our bodies was were not our own. And our bodies were basically the seller, the selling thing, the selling point to prospective males to come marry us. So if your body has been touched by other males, no one's gonna want to marry you. And thus, I think is where the snowball happened here. In 1972, the court expanded the right to contraception to unmarried individuals, ensuring equal access for all. And in 1977, the right was further affirmed for minors, invalidating state prohibitions and their access to birth control in 77. My husband was born in 75. He grew up in this day and age where women were treated as not idiots, but yeah, basically like treated as non-equals, which often brings interesting conversations to our household because I was not born in this time. Um, let me see here. So it goes a little bit further and it continues to go. And we like you start to see in the early 2000s. Um, let's see, 1973 to 1992, abortion rights recognized, then husband controlled provisions rejected. 1976, Planned Parenthood strikes down spousal consent requirements for abortion. So at this point, you could individually go and have um an abortion if you wanted to. You did not have to have your husband's consent. 92, again, reinforcing that married women aren't subordinate decision makers in reproductive care, reject spousal notification requirements, meaning, ta-da, women can go by themselves to the doctor and make decisions for their bodies on their own. They do not have to have their partner, their husband, there saying, yes, you can do this. 1973 and 1992, I was born in 1985, again, or 1983. So I look at this and I'm like, holy cow, like this was happening when I was growing up. Um, let's see, 2000s to 2010s, medication, abortion access, and patient-centered cons consent standards are expanded. I actually was aware of a lot of this because I worked at doctors' offices. And then unfortunately, 2022 to 2024, a major legal rollback on abortion rights, but medication access battles continue. And then it goes further. It's interesting though, because I've read articles where, and I've seen and seen quotes and I've seen things where it talks about how, like, you know, even if women were at a doctor's appointment, the doctor wouldn't even speak to the woman. The woman would be sitting to the side and the doctor would speak to the husband about the woman and say to the husband, well, what's wrong? What's going on with her? And it's it's insane to me because it's so important for us to be able to understand what's going on with our bodies, and it's important for us to be able to speak about what is happening and to feel empowered to speak about what's going on in our own bodies. I again, like I noted, I'm going through something right now that is not pleasant and uncomfortable and highly frustrating. I could only imagine if I was growing up in a different, if I was living my life in a different day and age where I couldn't make an appointment for the doctor myself and come and say, like, hey, I have this problem. Some stuff is really sensitive. And I will admit, some stuff is embarrassing. You don't want to have to like go to your husband, please, can you make an appointment for me? I can only imagine what these women went through and probably staying silent a lot of the time because they didn't want to speak up. And thus was the beginning of what you see today. Because while we have more rights today, there's still this undertone of, you know, women are too emotional. My husband just said it to me the other day, and I almost frying panned him. Like, you know, like it's it's the craziest thing to see like how far we've come and then to see where we're at. And I'm like, my God, we've come so far. But it feels like we still have so much more to go. And we do. We do have more to go, but I have hopes, and I hope you all do too. I want to mention one other person, and I think I might have lost the tab. Oh, there it is. Well, I don't have the whole tab. Um, I wanted to recognize Mary Edwards Walker. She was the only women woman to ever earn the Medal of Honor. Um, I started looking for historical women um to talk about on the podcast because there's so many women that have done so many amazing things, and we don't hear anything about them. Ta-da! Why? You know why. So I'm gonna start just kind of plugging and mentioning these women that I'm I'm reading up on. There was the very first female doctor, and I lost the tab, but I'm actually kind of annoyed about it, because she did such amazing things. Oh, here it is. Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell. So she actually applied to medical school. Let's see, she was rejected by 29 medical schools, and then she was admitted to the Geneva Medical College in 1847. The reason why she was admitted, and there's a little bit of like debate about around it, was that the um, the the folks, the administration that was looking at the application, they wanted to reject her, but then they kind of went back and forth and back and forth on it. They turned it around and decided we're not gonna reject her outright. We're gonna put it to the student body and let the student body vote. And the student body is all male, so they're assuming, all right, the student body's gonna take care of this. We don't have to dirty our hands, right? Well, they put it to the student body to vote. Well, the student body apparently either thought it was a joke, they thought it was a joke, didn't take it seriously, and they thought they were just messing with the administrators. So they all voted yes and let her in. And then she got an education. Two years later, graduated at the top of her class. Like it's an amazing, amazing thing to hear. So wanted to highlight her in this moment where I was talking about medical autonomy for women. I hope you found this episode interesting. I think it's interesting to know the history. I think we all really need to pay attention here to the history because it actually does help inform what we have going on today. Thank you so much with being for being here with me today. I appreciate you very much, and I will catch you on the next one. Take care.