Gynecology and obstetrics from antiquity to the early twenty-first century

This chapter examines the historical relationship between women, gender, and medicine via three main themes: how people defined the female body and its special health care needs (particularly those pertinent to reproduction), the relative roles that female and male practitioners played in providing care to women, and how women’s experiences of health care were shaped by gender norms and medical practices. After examining the broad outlines of gynecological and obstetrical care in imperial China from antiquity to the nineteenth century, I discuss the advent of biomedicine and how women’s reproductive bodies have been implicated in modern state-building under Republican and Communist regimes in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.