Choice Review

Sociologist Annandale (Univ. of Leicester) surveys the past three decades of Anglo-American scholarship about women's health, critically examining the advantages and pitfalls of different approaches and putting them in historical perspective. Annandale maintains that feminists have not paid sufficient attention to changes in women's health indicators, including the fact that the gap between women's and men's life expectancies is narrowing. She also claims (unconvincingly, in light of the enormous body of scholarship by Lynda Birke, Susan Bordo, Emily Martin, Ann Oakley, Mary Poovey, Martha Vicinus, Rose Weitz, and others) that feminists have not adequately scrutinized the feminization of the role of patient in Western biomedicine over the course of the past three centuries. The first chapter, in which Annandale attempts to refute the idea that 18th- and 19th-century Western feminists had little concern for health and the body, is probably the book's least persuasive. Subsequent chapters, however, include nuanced and thought-provoking investigations of the body-versus-body-politic debate, the glorification of natural childbirth by 1970s-era radical feminists, the limitations of gender difference research, the deleterious impact of late capitalism on biomedicine, the pitfalls of postfeminism and the "body project," and the weakening of health-oriented women's activism caused by identity politics and extreme individualism. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, faculty. A. H. Koblitz Arizona State University