ABSTRACT
In 1981, six women in the United States were noted to have an unexplained underlying cellular immune deficiency (Guinan and Hardy 1987). It was a description of the same phenomenon among five previously healthy young gay white men, however, that prompted the 1981 MMWR report now viewed as the first official recognition of AIDS (Centers for Disease Control 1981). A retrospective study of underlying causes of death suggested that forty-eight young women died of AIDS in the years 1980-1 (Chu et al. 1990). Although not described in that report, we imagine, based on what has been documented since then, that these women were young, between the ages of fifteen and forty-four years; their neighbourhoods were poor and so were they; if they could get work, they were rarely earning wages to meet basic needs for food, childcare, clothing and shelter; mostly they depended on public assistance and men for economic survival. Most were also likely to have been women of colour – African-American, Latina, Haitian, American Indian – who were raising young children. Unlike white gay men diagnosed with AIDS, sickness among these women was not unexpected. It was just a part of the ongoing, usual excess morbidity and mortality among the poor and racially oppressed.
