Documentary: 'Women's healthcare. Discovery and innovation'
Up until the 1970s, the medical establishment did not take women seriously. Women’s specific questions and complaints were not understood. The documentary ‘Women’s healthcare. Discovery and innovation’ (available on DVD) describes how the second wave of the women’s movement in the 1970s and 1980s changed this.
The women’s health centers, therapy centers, self-help groups and activist groups that emerged from the second wave of the women’s movement in the 70s and 80s did take women seriously. Finally, phenomena like domestic violence and incest were being talked about openly. At the height of its influence, the women’s health movement reached tens of thousands of women.
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How are babies born?
“I was going to have a child, but I had no idea how a baby was born”, tells one older woman at the beginning of the documentary. “When I asked my mother, she said, ‘Child, don’t ask me that question.’”Uncharted territory
“For most women, their bodies below the waist were a mystery, as if there was an emptiness or an absence in their bodies”, says Dutch psychiatrist and psychotherapist Nelleke Nicolai in Aletta’s documentary. Physicians learned that women were weaker than men and that they complained more easily. In reality, these doctors knew as little about the specific health issues facing women as did the women themselves. As a result, doctors wrote countless prescriptions for sedatives, and gynecologists performed 30,000 preventive hysterectomies per year.Energy and spirit
?These stories and scenes seem shocking to us today, but the documentary reminds us of what those days were like, and at the same time, shows how the feminists of the women’s movement rebelled with energy and creativity. “It was an interesting time”, one of the women who was involved now says in retrospect. “There was so much work to do, and we had to discover and invent everything ourselves.”Documentary
Documentary makers Grietje Keller and Josien Pieterse conducted video interviews with important women from the women’s health movement and illustrated the interviews with archival images from the 70s to the 90s . The inspiring documentary is available on DVD.Video History Project
Aletta maintains a digitized video archive about the second wave of the women’s movement. The latest speech recognition technology allows the user to search through the interviews (in Dutch) with key figures from the women’s movement from the 1970s and 1980s.Read more
Details
Direction and script: Grietje Keller and Josien Pieterse
Producer: Terrain Vague Film, 2008
Language: Dutch spoken, English subtitles
Length: 33 minutes
The documentary features interviews with Marlies Bosch, Ingrid Foeken, Gunilla Kleiverda, Riekje Kok, Nelleke Nicolai, Leonore Nicolaï, Yvonne Saro, Nel Willekens.
Price: €15.00 (5 copies for €50.00)