In 1989 the Women, Risk and AIDS Project (WRAP) asked young women aged between 16 and 21 in Manchester and in London ‘is sex good for you?’ By engaging with a newly archived feminist social science data set we revisit this question and the answers it provoked. The late 1980s is understood as a moment when young women in the UK could imagine sex without marriage, love, and commitment. Contraception was available, educational opportunities were opening, and popular culture was replete with representations of a new kind of pleasure-seeking girl. Yet this was also a moment of new sexual danger, and young women were encouraged to turn away from a tactical (even ‘underhand’) model of female agency, towards an explicit and speculative management of risk and self-care. New media spaces (including research) became sites of contestation, regulation, and competing claims to expertise around who could and should speak of and for young women’s sexuality. Over the thirty-year period between the WRAP and its archival revisiting, there continued to be something ‘peculiarly ideological’ about the teenage female body. In keeping with a project of queer temporalities, our approach stages encounters between the two moments in time, 1989 and now (2024), allowing both to remain visible. We situate WRAP at a conjuncture that can be connected backwards with what came before, sideways with other contemporary sources from the time (including teen magazines, youth TV, health education and academic commentary), and forwards to our present.
This chapter is a close reading of oral history interviews with two Black British women, who each have a family history of the genetic blood condition sickle cell disease. In these interviews they discussed their memories of sickle cell and of the National Health Service after 1960. As first- or second-generation migrants from West Africa and the Caribbean, these women experienced institutional racism and ignorance about sickle cell disease within the health service, scrutiny of maternal bodies as the site of reproduction, and the medicalisation of their bonds of kinship and family through genetic diagnosis. This chapter explores how these two women undertook what Julia Chinyere Oparah has called ‘everyday acts of theorising’ in their life narratives. They analysed their experiences within broader structures of patriarchy, racism, and the stigmatisation of disability, and reflected on the networks of care they developed as alternatives to the National Health Service. In these narratives, these women repurposed biomedical and genetic knowledge to reject their exclusion from professional or familial life, and pursued work within the NHS as a form of self-determination.
The introduction to Part I explores the creation and deployment of expertise in forms of ‘everyday health’ related to sexuality, reproduction, and kinship. It considers the relationship between shifting perceptions of sexuality, rights, and activism; how ‘ordinary’ individuals, scientific experts, and activists articulated these perceptions in spaces from the bestseller to the clinic; and the rise of experiential expertise in challenging dominant medical discourses. It illuminates the interrelationship of local, national, and international efforts as different groups used their embodied health experiences to resist, inform, and reformulate dominant modes of medical and/or cultural understanding, and how they have forged new discourses, spaces, and communities out of these shared experiences.
If understanding ‘everyday health’ involves shifting from a top-down to bottom-up perspective, switching from the perspectives of medicine and science to those of ‘ordinary’ people, that also means looking at diverse sites and spaces of health/care. Traditional histories of medicine and health usually focus on institutional sites (hospitals, clinics, laboratories) that are portrayed as clearly demarcated from the spaces of everyday life (home, work, social venues). This perceived division further implies the existence of firm boundaries between public and private life. The concept of ‘everyday health’ challenges these assumptions and collapses these divisions. Part II explores constructions and experiences of ‘everyday health’ in different spaces. It emphasises the porous boundaries between public and private realms; exposes the interaction between ‘top-down’ agencies, sites such as the mass media and community organisations, and individual subjectivities; and explores the challenges researchers face in seeking to understand intimate aspects of embodiment and selfhood and to communicate these understandings to different audiences, past and present.
The introduction to Part III sets out the relationship between chapters exploring different networks of mass communication about ‘everyday health’: radical newsletters, magazines, TV talk shows, and social media. It considers the positioning of differently gendered, abled, and classed bodies within networks of communication, and how different networks offer individuals and groups possibilities for exploitation, affirmation, and resistance to particular positionings of their bodies and selfhood – often at the same time. In doing so, it demonstrates the influence of different forms of media in shaping selfhood and shows how historians can use different media sources to reconstruct histories of ‘everyday health’.
The introduction to Part IV provides a framework for the section’s exploration of ways of researching and writing about ‘everyday health’ that focus on subjectivity and/or intersubjectivity, highlighting the challenges that individuals in the past faced in articulating the embodied self, and those that researchers now face in negotiating their own relationships to emotive topics. It traces the feminist and interdisciplinary roots of scholarship that explores subjectivity. It argues that subjectivities and intersubjectivities, made up of outlooks, emotions, and bodily sensations, constitute experiences of ‘everyday health’ and must form part of its history. More than this, historians are living, breathing people with our own subjectivities and health experiences, and our own relationships to our sources and our participants. We may choose not to position ourselves as part of the history, but we cannot stand outside and look upon ‘everyday health’ as impartial observers.
This chapter explores the role of the Brook Advisory Centres (BAC) in the everyday sexual and reproductive health of young people in postwar Britain. BAC was the first organisation to provide sexual health advice and methods to unmarried young people. As such, it operated at the intersection of the private and public realms. Drawing on archival materials, oral history interviews, and teenage magazines, this chapter examines BAC’s tactics for intervening in young people’s intimate lives, their activities in public forums from schools to magazines, and their success in shaping the everyday sexual and reproductive health of young people between 1964 and the outset of the AIDS crisis in the mid-1980s – including attempts to make sex education more inclusive and so to reshape concepts of ‘everyday sex’. Operating at the cusp of private and public life, BAC constituted a key channel of information on everyday sexual and reproductive health in postwar Britain and helped to foster a more inclusive view of sex education, where information on contraception was not limited to able-bodied young women.
A discussion of public engagement ‘on the ground’ rather than an idealised account, this chapter demonstrates some of the messiness that shifts in research and encounters with different publics can bring to public engagement projects. It discusses the development of a public engagement activity called ‘Could you be an agony aunt?’ and how it was adapted for different audiences. As the author’s research into the representations of women’s health in women’s magazines evolved to include titles aimed at LGBTQ+ readers, she included examples from these sources in the activity. The chapter reflects on how people responded to this representation in the context of different events, exploring the difficulties of framing public engagement activities for marginalised groups that neither ignore nor replicate the terms of that marginalisation. Taking a reflexive approach, the chapter also discusses the author’s own grappling with the question of what queer public engagement looks like as a queer academic and how the conversations she had with people at these events influenced her perspective. In documenting an ad hoc approach to public engagement, the chapter demonstrates the value in remaining receptive to unexpected opportunities and conversations. However, it also highlights the importance of attending to the audience not just in terms of identity but also within the context of the event and those individuals’ likely experiences of representation or invisibility at similar events.
The rise in melanoma skin cancer rates from the 1950s in mostly fair-skinned populations, such as in Britain, triggered a global panic on skin cancer in the 1990s. Some countries tightened restrictions on sunbeds to lower these rates, eventually leading to outright bans. However, the British government, medical experts, and the media could not deter sunbed operators and instead focused on discouraging sunbed users. Soon, the media, endorsed by psychologists, confirmed a widespread ‘condition’ across Britain, termed either ‘sunbed addiction’ or ‘tanorexia’. This ‘disorder’ became a hot topic on new women-centred talk shows in mid-1990s Britain. As this talk show genre originated in the United States of America, it encouraged an ‘American style’ of public confession culture. Although ‘American’ openness did not resonate with expectations of the British ‘stiff upper lip’, audience members aggressively contributed when topics touched on motherhood. This reflected the unanimous consensus that mothers should be ‘selfless’ and act in the best interests of their children. As such, debates on motherhood-related topics on talk shows were double edged: mothers, as talk show guests, received both intense support and scrutiny from the public. By focusing on ‘tanorexia’, this chapter therefore demonstrates how new television genres linked to third wave feminism continued a long-standing tradition of pathologising women’s pleasure – especially if it deterred them from maternal responsibilities. By historicising and contextualising talk shows, this chapter also offers novel approaches for health historians to build on, including how to evaluate the rhetorical and emotional reactions of their subjects and audience members.
Following the North American publication of British obstetrician Grantly Dick-Read’s Childbirth Without Fear in 1944, natural childbirth theories reached new audiences, including Canadians who were interested in what they perceived as a ‘new’ way to give birth. In newspaper columns and popular titles including Chatelaine, Canadian women and experts alike discussed their perceptions of and engagement with natural childbirth ideas. In so doing, Canadian mothers and mothers-to-be articulated a range of attitudes surrounding women’s bodies and postwar gender roles. Canadian women, like their global counterparts, conceptualised their pregnancies and childbirths in various ways, demonstrating myriad understandings of what exactly constituted a ‘natural’ birth. Many women, however, regularly drew on international comparisons to position individual experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood as ‘modern’ or ‘antiquated’. While some women continued to pathologise both pregnancy and childbirth and emphasise the need for continuous medical surveillance, others sought to position these life events as ordinary, everyday, and routine, requiring little in the way of medical intervention. Personal histories, geographic location, class, and race shaped individual perceptions of pregnancy and childbirth, fundamentally mediating Canadian women’s broader experiences of health and wellbeing.