Introduction to Essay Series 4

As far back as Ancient Greece, health care practitioners have treated women as if they were inferior to men.¹⁹⁶ In addition, practitioners have asserted that women’s health problems are due to their reproductive systems and fragile emotional health. These myths still infect modern medicine.

Western societies have long assumed that women are weaker and less intelligent than men. This is a myth based on assumptions that men are the gold standard for being human; they are not. Women are at least as strong physically, mentally, and emotionally as men. (See Essay Series 1.1)

In addition, until the past few decades, the vast majority of people who have been doing health and medical research have been men. As a result, medical research has harmed women because researchers either failed to include them in studies or failed to analyze women’s data.

Essay Series 4 discusses the ways in which health and mental health care have harmed, institutionalized, or killed women. The first essay documents medicine’s history of treating women as the weaker, more emotional sex and the second shows that women weren’t included in most medical research until the 1990s in the United States. The third essay focuses on the inadequacy of reproductive health care and the harms that occur, particularly for women of color. The fourth essay shows how sexist stereotypes in health and mental health hurt everyone. The last essay addresses how ageism affects women and men.