Jessica Callahan and Dr. Marie Cornwall, Sociology

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The 1960s showed marked improvements in the realm of decreasing the inequality gap between men and women. However, in the area of healthcare, women felt that there was a disconnect between themselves and the way that their bodies were being treated. Doctors spent little time with their patients and did not believe in sharing vital health information with their patients; doctors often thought that if they did so, their patients would fantasize health problems that they did not actually have as side effects of treatment (Morgen 2002).

Being spurred on by strides made in other areas of gender equality, women across the country began grassroots movements that started the women’s healthcare revolution (Morgen 2002). Not only did these groups pioneer the women’s health care issue during the latter half of the 20th century but they became the model of care for early women’s clinics. These clinic workers believed in open communication between doctor and patient, “for women, by women” healthcare, reproductive rights, self -help, education and free/low cost care. These clinics prospered for a time but became subject to outside forces that threatened to shut them down. Clinics that supported or performed abortions were vandalized, and increased vandalism to the clinics called for increased funds to fix the damage. However, funds became limited in the 1980s due to Reagan’s presidency and his focus on “Reaganomics” (Morgen 2002).

Around the same time clinics were facing decreased funds, hospital administrators realized the market potential of women. This led to the co-optation of women’s healthcare, or the feminist health care goals being diluted by the economic priorities of the health care system. Thus, hospitals started advertising more heavily to women in general and even started to open women specific programs, wings and centers. They also added a wide diversity of services and options clinics usually did not offer, including mammography, plastic surgery and mental health services (Thomas & Zimmerman 2007).

Because of the decreased funding towards clinics and the increased market potential hospitals discovered, we hypothesized that there would be a visual relationship between the decline of women’s clinics and the growth of hospitals that advertised and offered services towards women. We also proposed that the services offered in 2000, in both clinics and hospitals, would be substantially different from those offered in 1980. We believed that there would be an increased number of services offered and a variety of “new” services entering the women’s health marketplace as a result of increased competition for marketing to women.

We gathered our data from the Boston, San Francisco, and Denver yellow pages, every four years from 1980 to 2000. We recorded all clinics and hospitals that appeared to be associated with women’s health. We included all clinics or hospitals that were advertising women’s services, including abortion, therapy for women, and birth control. For each listing that featured an advertisement, we recorded the particular services that were marketed toward women’s health, such as gynecology, abortion, mammography, etc. After we recorded the data, we used a line graph to show the number of clinics in each city, for each year. We also used a bar graph to demonstrate the most common services advertised to women in 1980 and in 2000.

We found that the growth of clinics over time was consistent with our hypothesis. Each city followed the same pattern of growth, increasing in the 1980s until reaching its peak in 1988. Then, we found a sharp decline as the 1990s ensued. The number of clinics increased slightly again after the Reagan administration ended and they tapered off by the end of the decade.

We hypothesized that an increase of hospitals offering services to women in an area would be the result of a decrease in clinics in the same area. However, we found the number of hospitals offering services to women to be quite fewer than our expectations. We can attribute some of these results to the splitting of the phonebooks into smaller areas over the years. Other factors that may have contributed to the hospital decrease could be the increased availability of the internet as a source of advertising for hospitals and possible hospital buyouts and mergers.

We found that, consistent with our hypothesis, the types of services offered in 2000 was a varied version of those offered in 1980. Although there was not a substantial shift in services, there are some important differences. In 1980, abortion and birth control were among the most common services offered, but in 2000, they decreased in popularity. Further, in 2000, pregnancy and birth control counseling became a new significant service offered. Additionally, in both 1980 and 2000, gynecology and obstetrics were the leading service offered to women, but while clinics offered the majority of these two services in 1980, obstetrics became more centralized in hospitals by 2000.

Our results indicate that the growth of women’s health services in hospitals may not be as exponential as we previously thought it was. Previous research proposed that clinics were being overtaken and replaced by hospital programs because hospital administrators realized the marketing potential of women’s health services (Stratigaki 2004). However, because we found that both hospitals and clinics decreased from 1980 to 2000, we propose that there were many other factors at work in the women’s health industry.

The women’s health industry continues to change and develop as the need for new services arises. As medicine advances, a new standard of care is introduced. With it, new services are validated and deemed necessary. Our results indicate that perhaps the marketability of women’s services was realized not only by hospital administrators, but by the entire women’s health services movement, including clinics. Clinics followed the market trend and were transformed to accommodate the demand for particular women’s services.

References

• Morgen, Sandra. 2002. Into our own hands: The women’s movement in the United States, 1969-1990. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ Pr.
• Stratigaki, Maria. 2004. The cooptation of gender concepts in EU policies: The case of “reconciliation of work and family.” Social Politics 11 (1): 30-56.
• Thomas, J. E., & Zimmerman, M. K. (2007). FEMINISM AND PROFIT IN AMERICAN HOSPITALS the corporate construction of women’s health centers. Gender & Society, 21(3), 359-383.