December 2024 SHC Lecture to Feature Dr. Judith Houck

Join us for the December 2024 Student History Club (SHC) Lecture for a talk with Dr. Judith Houck on the connection of women's health and feminism. The SHC Noon Lectures are free and open to anyone interested in the history of the health sciences. It will be held Wednesday, December 11, 2024, at 12:00pm on Zoom.

In the early 1970s, women across the country wielded flashlights, hand mirrors, and specula hoping to catch a glimpse of their cervices. In bookstores, living rooms, church basements, and women's centers, women peered into their bodies to satisfy their curiosity, to bond with other women, and to assert control over their bodies. In this talk, Houck explores the political deployment of cervical self-exam and examines how women reacted to the semi-public display of their privates.

Judith Houck is Professor and Chair of Gender and Women’s Studies and Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her work focuses on the history of women’s health in the United States. Her first book, Hot and Bothered: Women, Medicine, and Menopause in Modern America (Harvard UP, 2006) examined the medical, popular, and personal meanings of menopause and how they changed over the course of the twentieth century. Her most recent book, Looking Through the Speculum: Examining the Women’s Health Movement (Chicago University Press, 2024) examines the emergence, development, travails, and triumphs of the women’s health movement in the United States. Houck brings medical history and the history of women’s bodies into our emerging understandings of second-wave feminism, and sheds light on the efforts to shape health care and reproductive control beyond the hospital and the doctor’s office. She is currently working on a history of lesbians in HIV/AIDS activism.

This event is open to the public. Virtual seating is limited and registration is required by Monday, December 9, 2024, at 6 PM to reserve your seat and to receive login information.