2022.001.022

"Disorder and Complaints: The Sexual Politics of Sickness" is the second pamphlet in a series in the Feminist Press. The authors, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English analyze the social role of women and how the medical system of the period contributed to the creation and support of that social role. In the introduction, Ehrenreich and English claim: "Medicine's prime contribution to sexist ideology has been to describe women as sick, and as potentially sickening to men" (5). The authors emphasize they are not blaming the medical system for the establishment of sexism or other views toward women, but their objective is to analyze the state of the society in which they were writing this pamphlet. The authors clearly state the goal of their work: "In this pamphlet, our focus is on women and their relation to medical practice and medical beliefs. But the context goes beyond medicine itself and embraces all oppressed groups." Ehrenreich and English deconstruct and analyze sexist ideology by providing a history of women and medicine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, comparing issues of women in the upper class and working class, and also utilizing images throughout.