Elinor Cleghorn: The Sacrifices Behind Women’s Health

Simplify is back! When you leave the doctor with a protocol for what ails you, do you wonder where the knowledge behind your prescription came from? In fact, we know how to treat today's woes thanks to the bodies of people who suffered—and nowhere is that data more inexact and editorialized than in women's health. Feminist cultural historian Dr. Elinor Cleghorn, who specializes in women’s health and its history, is just the person to set the story straight. 

Her book, Unwell Women, demystifies myths around women’s health—stories about what women's bodies are for, whether pain is just a necessary side effect of being a woman, and why women's bodies have been policed and traded as political capital, yet we still have to fight to be believed about our own bodily experiences. Women's bodies aren't mysteries—they are our own to care for and make decisions about.

In this episode, Caitlin Schiller talks with Dr. Cleghorn about the relevance of this history today, as women's sexuality and reproductive freedoms are being redefined in response to a threatened patriarchy and budding pronatalist movements across the west.

In the Bookend, Ben and Caitlin make reading recommendations and discuss Simplify's new, independent era. 
Caitlin's rec: Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Evolution by Cat Bohannon
Ben's rec: The Confessions of Frannie Langton by Sara Collins

Let us know what you thought of this episode! Find us on instagram at @simplifypod on instagram. Subscribe to our newsletter here. Email us at info@kollomedia.com

This episode of Simplify was produced by Caitlin Schiller, Ben Schuman-Stoler, and Ody Constantinou in Berlin, Germany, for Kollo Media.