The ‘Masculine’ Female : The Rise of Women Doctors in Colonial India, c. 1870–1940

Medicine and Gender: An Introduction

One of the central features of the women’s health movement that originated in the West in the 1960s and 1970s was to reclaim pregnant women’s bodies from the allegedly authoritative control of the male-dominated medical establishment, and to restore the midwives to their traditional role – as the ‘mediator between nature and culture’. Beginning with Barbara Ehrenreich and Deidre English, several feminist scholars like Jean Donnison and Jane B. Donegan rose to fame by appropriating this powerful feminist agenda.