“Doctors Aren’t Familiar with Your Tissues”: Self-Examination and Feminist Health Activism in 1970s Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores the impact of self-examination as a tool of feminist resistance, an act of preventive health care, and a site where mainstream and alternative health models were debated in late twentieth-century Canada. In the early 1970s, a range of women's health groups increasingly turned their liberationist critiques towards the structures of mainstream medicine, and the self-exam became a vehicle that allowed women to push back against what they cast as the systemic power imbalances involved with the traditional doctor-patient relationship. Both breast and pelvic self-exams became staples of the women's health movement as feminists encouraged women to take health care into their own hands, both figuratively and literally. As the decade progressed, breast self-examination transformed from a niche feminist technique to a relatively commonplace preventative health practice, increasingly discussed within popular women's magazines across North America. Pelvic self-examination remained more controversial as the practice was denounced by a small but vocal group of Canadian physicians, resentful of lay incursions into medical practice. Drawing on women's magazines and feminist newsletters, archival files from Canadian women's health centres, and debates about self-examination in national newspapers, we reveal how shifting narratives about women's liberation, responsibility for preventative health practices, and medical authority intersected in the feminist practice of self-examination.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.048 | 0.041 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".