The Paradox of Inclusion: Queer Women and the Women's Health Movement, 1960s-1980s

Koontz, Delaney

Undergraduate Honors Thesis

The Paradox of Inclusion: Queer Women and the Women's Health Movement, 1960s-1980s Public Deposited

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Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/undergraduate_honors_theses/n583xw20r

Abstract

The Second Women’s Movement of the 1960s-1980s was characterized by several grassroots movements, including the movement for women’s health and the movement for queer rights. This paper examines the crossover between these two movements, and the ways in which queer women were marginalized from the women’s health movement. By looking at archival sources, newspaper articles, and interviews, this project examines the mechanisms by which queer women were marginalized from the movement in both an educational and clinical aspect, as well as the ways in which social factors like abortion legalization and the AIDS epidemic compounded this marginalization. The main argument of this thesis is that there was a unique relationship between implicit exclusion and explicit inclusion of queer women from this movement. Queer women were initially implicitly excluded from the publications of the women’s health movement, namely, Our Bodies, Ourselves. Then, as a result of a push to include queer women, sectors of the women’s health movement made the effort to explicitly include lesbians through the introduction of lesbian-specific publications or clinic days. However, this explicit inclusion only led to more implicit exclusion from the other areas of the movement, because these efforts of inclusion were often insufficient, and created the perception of a lesser “need” to include queer populations elsewhere. This examination fosters a better understanding of the ways in which queer women were subtly and often unintentionally marginalized from the women’s health movement.

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