A woman’s right to bodily self-determination is and has been a politically, medically, and socially contested issue, as recent attacks on women’s rights by right-wing actors across the globe show. Therefore, it is important to look back at women’s movements and feminist health activism to understand the confrontations over women’s rights such as access to contraception and abortion, situate them in their respective political and legal contexts and analyze continuities until today. This conference brought together researchers from various disciplines (history, political science, cultural anthropology, and sociology) to present their work on health feminism, reproductive knowledge, and women’s activism across Europe in the long 20th century.

In her welcome speech, ANNE KWASCHIK (Konstanz) underlined the conference’s aim to give more visibility to research on health feminism in Germany and insisted on the role of feminism as a “paradigmatic social movement” for research on movement’s knowledge cultures. In the same vein, EMELINE FOURMENT (Rouen), HEIDI HEIN-KIRCHER (Marburg), and ISABEL HEINEMANN (Bayreuth) stressed the need to investigate women’s health feminism as a deeply political and politicized realm. Bringing together their expertise in the history of knowledge, the history of gender and feminism as well as their transnational perspectives both on Western societies and East Central Europe, they introduced two days of intense interdisciplinary discussion.

IEVA BALČIŪNĖ (Vilnius) presented her research on the “visiting sisters” as a form of women’s medical care in the provinces of Soviet Lithuania after the modernization of medical services. These nurses assumed a crucial double position. They provided lay medical expertise and support for women, especially in rural areas where no doctors were available. At the same time, the Soviet State requested them to monitor and control women, their pregnancies, and births on behalf of the state.

NADEZHDA BELIAKOVA (Bielefeld) and NATALIYA SHOK (Washington) reported findings from their research project on women’s health policies in the late Soviet Republics. They traced back patients, public and professional narratives, which transformed from a core focus on maternal and child health during the 1950-70s, towards featuring family planning in a broader context of reproductive health since the mid-1980s and Perestroika. Beliakova and Shok showed how knowledge about women’s health was a marginalized issue in public discourses and how the female body was seen as a source for advances in medical research.

Adding to these perspectives, LUCILE QUERÉ (Lausanne) shifted the focus from women’s health to lesbian’s health activism, looking at transformations of health feminism in the 1980s in France and Switzerland. Based on her comparative analysis of lesbian feminist activism in Paris and Geneva, Queré demonstrated that in Geneva the reception of self-help was more favorable to its appropriation by lesbians than it was in France. Due to Queré, the Dispensaire des femmes de Genève (1978-1987) helped to create an exchange of self-help practices between Switzerland and France and to develop a lesbian critique of medicine.

Sylvie Chaperon’s (Toulouse) lucid comment carved out important similarities between the three papers: While women were mostly patronized by members of the medical hierarchy, they nonetheless created solidarity, sorority, or even feminism, especially when it came to issues of abortion and birth control.

In her keynote, MAUD BRACKE (Glasgow) targeted the global women’s health movement from the 1970s through the 1990s and the “blind spots of Western feminism”. Bracke offered three case studies of international conferences to map networks of activists and illustrate conflicts within the feminist health movements around topics such as contraception and family planning. She traced back the development of a reproductive justice agenda that succeeded in shaping the UN in defining reproductive rights in the 1990s. Her talk gave ample testimony to the usefulness of the concept of “hegemonic feminism” (G. C. Spivak), especially in decentering Western narratives of feminism and decolonizing knowledge with the help of intersectional approaches and the concept of reproductive justice.

KENA HENRIETTA STÜWE (Berlin) presented anarchist perspectives on women’s health and reproductive rights in the German Empire and the Weimar Republic. Stüwe found that early anarchist newspapers from 1907/08 saw birth control as a central precondition for the liberation of women. At the same time, anarchist authors held potential parents responsible to regulate childbirth, to bear fewer children and raise them according to anarchist values. The syndicalist women’s federation created women-only spaces to provide mutual aid and education as well as self-empowerment. In this context, health knowledge figurd as a prerequisite to women’s emancipation and a political rather than a private issue.

ISABEL HEINEMANN (Bayreuth) focused on health feminism in the two Germanies from the 1970s to the 1990s. By presenting different advice books on contraception, abortion, and other health-related topics, Heinemann illustrated how health activists in both states linked their critique of a patriarchal health system with that of gendered power structures. The West German health movements and the fight for legal abortion showed how political this movement was. Yet, also in the German Democratic Republic, feminist women’s health groups emerged during the 1980s, but were less visible due to surveillance and repression by the Stasi. Heinemann suggested broadening the term “health feminism” to include topics like family, gender relations and sexuality and allow for more nuanced comparisons of women’s activism across the Iron Curtain.

Knowledge transfer between Germany and the USA was addressed by ALISSA BELLOTTI (Haifa), who presented her research on breast cancer advocacy and the limits of American women’s health activism in Germany. She showed how the study of breast cancer differed medically and socially from the more common issue of abortion, as breast cancer is medically complicated, potentially fatal and considered a strong taboo in Western societies. Bellotti presented the different conceptions of empowerment and women’s health advocacy such as fundraising campaigns in the USA and the dissemination of medical knowledge through local women-help-women groups in Germany.

In her comment, Jane Freeland (London) emphasized that the papers – although focusing on different periods in German history across the 20th century – all contested narratives of linear progress. She encouraged the panelists to think even more about the relationship between the national and the global or transnational, especially for the uneven history of German health feminism.

EMELINE FOURMENT (Rouen) and BIBIA PAVARD (Paris) presented their project on the 1974 international women’s conference in Frankfurt and the circulation of feminist self-help knowledge. Fourment and Pavard argued that this conference was a paradigmatic example of transnationalism from below. The conference was dominated by an atmosphere of building enthusiasm around global sisterhood. It marked a specialization of certain activists e.g., on women’s medicine and sexuality. Finally, it led to other major international events such as the Brussels Tribunal on violence against women in 1976.

In a similar vein, CAROLINA TOPINI (London) analyzed the transnational transfer of reproductive knowledge through the international women and health meetings (IWHMs) from the late 1970s up until 2015. She described these meetings as a catalyst for the global feminist movement and place for exploring political solidarity and transnationalism. Topini showed how they shifted from a predominantly white European movement with a focus on abortion to a global movement to address interlocking oppressions concerning sterilization, abuse, maternal mortality, and disability. Since 1981, meetings got more intersectional, providing increasing visibility for migrant women, women from the Global South as well as lesbian women and women with disabilities.

KASSANDRA HAMMEL (Tübingen) explored the exchange of feminist health knowledge across borders by presenting two key personalities, the German journalist Gudula Lorez and the British publicist Eleanor Stephens. Hammel’s study was based on the analysis of feminist magazines from Germany and the USA. Whereas Lorez travelled to the USA as the “land of feminist possibilities”, Stephens became part of the Boston Women’s collective in 1986 and contributed to the famous British feminist magazine “Spare Rib”. Hammel showed how individual activists’ travels had a significant impact on the dissemination of feminist ideas concerning women’s sexuality.

In her comment, Imke Schmincke (Munich) carved out that all three papers presented feminist activists as producers of alternative knowledge. This knowledge relied on experience, was related to the body and sexuality and was collective in character. Schmincke encouraged to further investigate how feminist public spaces were claimed and to think more about the role of feminism within health activism.

Focusing on women’s health activism between grassroot movements and the state, PEIROU CHU (Lyon) opened the fourth panel with her research on marriage and sexual counselling centers as a space for sexual reform in the Weimar Republic. Chu carved out how gender norms and hierarchies were consolidated by a (pseudo) scientific discourse promoted by antifeminists such as Paul Julius Möbius in 1900. In the context of 20th century social reform movements, first counselling centers were founded following the example of the Magnus Hirschfeld Institute in 1919. Women mainly sought advice on contraception instead of counseling on marriage and family matters, while conservative doctors rallied against contraceptives altogether.

AGNIESZKA KOŚCIAŃSKA (Warsaw) elaborated on activism in Poland in the 1960s and introduced the catholic intellectual and journalist Anna Morawska (1922-1972), who worked on the topics of gender, marriage and family planning in Poland and was involved in global networks such as the civil rights movement in the USA. Contrary to the doctrine of the Catholic church, Morawska represented the idea that marriage was not only for “procreation” but also for the development of a relationship, of one’s own personality and for sexual pleasure. She promoted a catholic argument for contraception based on humanist ideals. Morawska’s ideas are still present in the church today e.g. when polish Catholics take part in abortion rights activism.

AGATA IGNACIUK (Granada) focused on the relationship between grassroots movements and the state in the context of abortion rights in Spain in the 1980s and 1990s. Relying mainly on oral history testimonies, she placed special attention on the experiences of women gynecologists providing abortion services after the decriminalization of abortion in Spain in 1985. Ignaciuk argued that women protagonists like Elisa Sesma and Eva Rodriguez balanced activism, feminism, and the political economies of abortion activism.

Commenting on this section, Heidi Hein-Kircher (Marburg) hinted at the importance of both health experts and counseling, but also practitioners for concepts of health feminism, e.g. abortion professionals in Spain advocated feminist activism, but at the same time followed economic interests.

VERONIKA LACINOVÁ NAJMANOVÁ (Pardubice) described how doctors in interwar Czechoslovakia focused on maternal health and the prevention of abortion as a central motive in the promotion of contraception, joined by feminist activists and birth control associations. After the legalization of abortion in socialist Czechoslovakia in 1957, doctors advocated contraception to enhance participation in social and public life. However, in the interwar period, the reasons were mainly the popularity of eugenics, while in the 1960s new arguments came up like the quality of the sex life or the involvement of women on the labor market.

MARÍA MUNDI LÓPEZ (Granada) talked about medical abortion through Mifepristone in France and Spain from 1980 to 1990. While developed in 1982 in France, the abortive drug RU486 got marketing approval in France in 1988. This was the beginning of a controversial campaign accompanied by threats of boycott and harassment. In 1990 arguments by the feminist movement in Spain included that Mifepristone would prevent physical and psychological trauma of surgical abortions, strongly opposed by the Spanish Catholic Church.

In her comment, Claudia Roesch (Konstanz) stressed the value of studying two countries “at the periphery” of current research on reproductive rights. Roesch suggested to further explore the interactions between medical professionals and feminist groups in both countries when advocating and making use of new reproductive technologies.

The conference successfully brought together various perspectives on health feminism and women’s movements in the 20th century stressing the importance of social movement’s knowledge production and the relationship between national, transnational, and global history of women’s health activism. Discussions both demonstrated the importance of intersectional perspectives and discussed patterns and actors of transnational knowledge transfer. Main findings were the huge importance of international networks forged at international women’s conferences and the fact that feminist knowledge even crossed the iron curtain.

Conference overview:

Welcome and introduction to the conference

Anne Kwaschik (Konstanz) / Emeline Fourment (Rouen) / Heidi Hein-Kircher (Marburg) / Isabel Heinemann (Bayreuth)

Panel 1: Health knowledge as a source of women’s empowerment

Chair: Emeline Fourment (Rouen)

Comment: Sylvie Chaperon (Toulouse)

Ieva Balčiūnė (Vilnius): Visiting sisters: Women’s medical care in the provinces of Soviet Lithuania

Nadezhda Beliakova (Bielefeld) / Nataliya Shok (Washington, D.C.): Rights / Duties / ‘Traditions’? Controversial women’s health policies in the late soviet republics

Lucile Queré (Lausanne): From women’s health to lesbians’ health activism? The transformation of health feminism in the 1980s in Western Europe

Roundtable: Creating a network for the study of transnational health feminism – Perspectives, challenges, funding options

Chair: Heidi Hein-Kircher (Marburg)

Keynote

Maud Bracke (Glasgow): Contesting global sisterhood: The global women’s health movement of the 1970–90s and the blind spots of Western feminism

Chair: Isabel Heinemann (Bayreuth)

Panel 2: Knowledge transfer across borders and times

Chair: Abena A. Yalley (Konstanz)

Comment: Jane Freeland (London)

Kena Henrietta Stüwe (Berlin): Anarchist perspectives on women’s health and reproductive rights in the German Empire and the Weimar Republic

Isabel Heinemann (Bayreuth): Challenging patriarchy and the state: Health feminism in the two Germanies, 1970s–1990s

Alissa Belotti (Haifa): „Failure to Graft”: Breast cancer and the limits of American women’s health activism in Germany (online)

Panel 3: Transnational encounters as sites of knowledge transfer

Chair: Anne Kwaschik (Konstanz)

Comment: Imke Schmincke (Munich)

Emeline Fourment (Rouen) / Bibia Pavard (Paris): “Towards an international network of information”. The 1974 International Women’s Conference in Frankfurt and the circulation of feminist self-help knowledge

Carolina Topini (London): Forging an intersectional movement. Feminist Health Conferences and the transnational transfer of reproductive knowledge (late 1970s – first half of the 1980s)

Kassandra Hammel (Tübingen): „Die Frauen reisen viel herum [...]“ Exchanging feminist health knowledge beyond borders

Panel 4: Women’s health activism between grassroot movements and the state

Chair: Claudia Roesch (Washington, D.C.)

Comment: Heidi Hein-Kircher (Marburg)

Peirou Chu (Lyon): Marriage and sexual counselling centres: The space of sexual reform

Agnieszka Kościańska (Warsaw): Modern catholic women? Polish religious activism of the 1960s

Agata Ignaciuk (Granada): Gender, activism and healthcare: Abortion providers in Spain (1980s–2000s)

Panel 5: Women’s health activism and technologies of reproductive control

Chair: Bibia Pavard (Paris)

Comment: Claudia Roesch (Washington, D.C.)

Veronika Lacinová Najmanová (Pardubice): Women’s health as an (un)important motive in the promotion of contraception in Czechoslovakia

María Mundi López (Granada): RU486: Social controversies provoked by a new technology (1980-1990)

Concluding remarks by the organizers