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Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, women argued that unless they gained access to information about their own bodies, there would be no equality. In Bodies of Knowledge, Wendy Kline considers the ways in which ordinary women worked to position the female body at the center of women’s liberation.

As Kline shows, the struggle to attain this knowledge unified women but also divided them—according to race, class, sexuality, or level of professionalization. Each of the five chapters of Bodies of Knowledge examines a distinct moment or setting of the women’s movement in order to give life to the ideas, expectations, and pitfalls encountered by the advocates of women’s health: the making of Our Bodies, Ourselves (1973); the conflicts surrounding the training and practice of women’s pelvic exams; the emergence of abortion as a feminist issue; the battles over contraceptive regulation at the 1983 Depo-Provera FDA hearings; and the rise of the profession of midwifery. Including an epilogue that considers the experiences of the daughters of 1970s feminists, Bodies of Knowledge is an important contribution to the study of the bodies—that marked the lives—of feminism’s second wave.

In Bahia, Brazil, the decades following emancipation saw the rise of reformers who sought to reshape the citizenry by educating Bahian women in methods for raising “better babies.” The idealized Brazilian would be better equipped to contribute to the labor and organizational needs of a modern nation. Backed by many physicians, politicians, and intellectuals, the resulting welfare programs for mothers and children mirrored complex debates about Brazilian nationality. Examining the local and national contours of this movement, Progressive Mothers, Better Babies investigates families, medical institutions, state-building, and social stratification to trace the resulting policies, which gathered momentum in the aftermath of abolition (1888) and the declaration of the First Republic (1889), culminating during the administration of President Getúlio Vargas (1930–1945).

Exploring the cultural discourses on race, gender, and poverty that permeated medical knowledge and the public health system for almost a century, Okezi T. Otovo draws on extensive archival research to reconstruct the implications for Bahia, where family patronage politics governed poor women’s labor as the mothers who were the focus of medical interventions were often the nannies and nursemaids of society’s wealthier families. The book reveals key transition points as the state of Bahia transformed from being a place where poor families could expect few social services to becoming the home of numerous programs targeting the poorest mothers and their children. Negotiating crucial questions of identity, this history sheds new light on larger debates about Brazil’s past and future.

Medical clinicians, who are already overworked and burned out, are increasingly expected to understand and treat systemic social issues like poverty and racism. One aspect of this is documenting patient’s social risk factors in electronic health records (EHRs). But EHRs do not aways give the full story. Critically, they omit patients’ voices and perspectives about their lives, care, and whether their needs are being met. In Seen But Not Heard, sociologist Jennifer M. Silva and epidemiologist Annemarie G. Hirsch explore the gaps between what clinicians document in EHRs and women’s lived experiences.

Drawing on interviews with 87 non-college-educated, economically disadvantaged women living in rural America and their health records from a large, non-profit health system, Silva and Hirsch find that the stories that medical records provide and the stories that women tell about themselves differ dramatically. Medical charts often translate women’s suffering into sterile diagnostic codes, prescriptions, and treatment plans. Some women felt heard by their clinicians, believed they received adequate care. Many of these women thought their clinicians went above and beyond to help meet their needs by offering them information on how to apply for benefits like food stamps or childcare subsidies and helping them obtain necessary items like mattress covers and winter coats. More often, however, women felt that clinicians were detached from their everyday struggles to survive, whether that meant keeping their families intact even in the face of violence or finding money to pay the never-ending string of bills.

Silva and Hirsch argue that because the system of healthcare delivery interprets social problems as individual failings it often reproduces long-standing injurious stereotypes of women as hysterical, recalcitrant, impure, and gluttonous. For some healthcare providers, knowledge about patients’ social risk factors can become a source of control and punishment, such as denying patients care or reporting patients to child welfare services. Patients described clinicians mobilizing harmful stereotypes about marriage and motherhood, race, and poverty during their appointments. Some of the women’s most traumatic experiences in the healthcare system were completely missing from their EHRs. These troubling experiences ultimately deter women from accessing healthcare, discourages them from sharing their experiences with clinicians, and in some cases, makes their health and social problems worse. Silva and Hirsch offer several policies and practices that would improve women’s experiences in clinical encounters, such as training clinicians in trauma-informed and culturally responsive care, as well as national investments in housing, food security, transportation, and environmental justice.

Seen But Not Heard is a disturbing but necessary examination of the ways vulnerable women are often failed by the healthcare system and offers solutions that will allow healthcare workers to better address the structural barriers faced by their patients.