The Meaning of illness Book

This is a 1989 book about US women healers that is what you'd expect from the era of second-wave feminism: cis normative, gender essentialist (medicine is being reshaped by more feminine perspectives, etc), and white. The three main sections that are implied by the title are each made up of interviews with women, mostly born in the 1910s or 1920s, talking about their lives and ideas about healing. The authors position themselves as white women learning from their interview subjects and opening themselves up to different forms of knowledge and experience. The final section is supposed to be their reflections on that learning process, but only one of the authors reflects on it directly. The other two offer some not very interesting, generalized takes on women in healing and medicine.

In between the core interview sections and the authors' reflections is a section on witchcraft that's all over the place. It focuses on what people -- white, Native, and Latinx-- believe about about witchcraft and their approaches to healing ostensible effects of witchcraft. But there's nothing in the section from the perspective of people who identify as practicing witchcraft.

All the "medicine women" interviewed in the book are identified as Native, all the curanderas are identified as Hispanic, but all the MDs are white. There's nothing about how Black women have been more harmed than any other group of US women by "medicine," including by women practitioners (hello, Margaret Sanger -- she isn't mentioned). I'm not sure if this just wasn't well known by white feminists in 1989. Also, one of the "medicine women" interviewed for the book has since been called a "fraud" who isn't actually Native. I couldn't find enough info and don't know enough to assess that claim.

I've already forgotten how I heard about this book that made me want to read it ASAP. There are interesting parts, but I think this is more interesting as a book on women's history and biographies, not as a book on healing and gender.