ABSTRACT
This chapter reviewed several different aspects of physical health ranging from the nineteenth through the twenty-first century. Early treatment of the physical health problems of women certainly affected their psychological state. As we continued to move forward in time, we saw that physical health cannot be considered apart from psychological health. This is particularly true for women who have found so many impediments to appropriate health care. We have examined the social construction of illness, beginning with Victorian times in the nineteenth century, and described how particular attitudes toward women and the practices borne of this and earlier eras have continued into the present and have affected women’s physical and mental health, their medical care, and the research on the diseases and disorders that they develop.
We recounted how the attitudes of male society in general and of physicians in particular dominated the life of women during Victorian times. We showed how women accepted their roles and inferior status, thus helping society fix and maintain these views into present times. To our twenty-first-century readers, it may be hard to understand how these women accepted their socially constrained roles and how a sexuo-economic relationship with men developed.
Building on these historical associations, we described health problems of women and how they compare with those of men. We attempted to explain why women are sicker than men with the same health problems. The problem of stress and pain was reviewed, as well as the maladaptive behaviors that can develop in response to long-term stressful situations.
The next section of this chapter reviewed issues of gender bias in women’s health from a variety of approaches. We described major illnesses that affect both women and men, cardiovascular disease, lung cancer, HIV/AIDS infection, and the gender differences in these illnesses. We also described research on these diseases to determine whether the treatment of data for women and men was biased and whether this pattern changed across an eight-year period. We discussed the inherent gender bias we found not only in subject selection for the studies but also in evaluating and generalizing results of such studies to women and men without any justification. In doing 483so, we also evaluated the consequences of gender bias on the health of women. Breast cancer and osteoporosis, diseases primarily affecting women, were also reviewed.
In the last section of this chapter, we explored some important changes in the way women’s health was viewed and speculated about the apparent attention these changes are bringing to gender differences in health research and in diagnosis and treatment.
We stated that progress had definitely been made but added that more needs to be done to study the differences between the sexes. We believe that our research studies on sex and gender bias, conducted in 1994, heightened the importance of studying and testing the difference between the sexes in behavioral and biomedical research. The changes in viewing women’s health that have started should lead to important findings for the health of men as well as for women.
