1970s feminist health activism fought institutional change, unlike today’s commodified wellness.

Evidence

This is a marked shift from the early days of the feminist health movement in the 1970s, which was, in its low-key way, anti-capitalist, focused on efforts like boycotting Nestlé because the company marketed powdered infant formula to poor mothers in the Global South. Feminist health, back then, was a movement fighting for changes at the collective and institutional level—like birthing centers inside hospitals, and certification of midwives and doulas, and access to safe abortions, and building research institutions focused on long-ignored aspects of women’s health. It was also about the right to go on paid parental leave and the right to breastfeed without being criminalized. Having grown up inside this movement, thanks to my father’s research and my mother’s advocacy, I can attest that nothing about it was glamorous. Midwives and doulas got paid (not very much); family doctors got paid more, but still far less than obstetricians; copies of Our Bodies, Ourselves helped fund the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, but nobody was getting rich. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 587

Categorization

• XREF: The institutional-versus-individual care dichotomy parallels Klein’s broader argument about the left abandoning collective infrastructure, feeding the Mirror World’s individual ‘freedom’ rhetoric.
• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the reader’s ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ piece: both track how genuine collective care movements get siphoned into individual boutique markets.