First, I want to emphasize the importance of reading the Second Edition of this work, as it includes an additional introduction that explains the limitations and outdated information from the First Edition.

So, this was an interesting read for me, as it laid the foundation for a lot of research that followed. And I think that history in this type of research and the lens they were looking at these things in the 70's is cool to take a look at. Though I do understand and agree with something the authors stated in the additional introduction, and that is that they "cringe[d] a little at what read now like overstatements and overly militant ways of stating things." And they do admit that there was a lot of anger and other emotions at play that influenced how this was written. Another important thing to note was that this was originally a self-published pamphlet from the 70's, so it is not the most intersectional, and it wasn't written so much for an academic audience, as much as I'd say it was written for nurses and women in the medical field in general.

Now, I think it could be more intersectional, and that more of their beliefs and conclusions should have been expanded on, but due to the time and format, I do understand why it wasn't. One of my bigger concerns is that they teeter on this line of uplifting women by disparaging certain roles associated with women. It's not super blatant, but in their bluntness about how women have been pushed out of certain medical roles, mixed with the lack of nuance added to the conversation, they inadvertently place nurses in a lower position than doctors. And it feels reminiscent of movements and ideologies that disparaged housewives, in their efforts to fight for more rights and opportunities for women in the workforce.

There are some moments where I believe they balance this better and add more nuance. I also think it is unintentional because they aren't actively disparaging nurses or saying that work isn't valuable; they are just putting it in a weird opposition to Doctors without emphasizing the nuance between societal systems and roles within them. Much like with the housewives, the problem is not with the role itself. There is nothing wrong with being a housewife or a Nurse, the issue is when the systems in place work to trap certain groups within these very specific and narrow roles/jobs. And I just wish that distinction were more prominent in this discussion, especially as I am not reading this with the emotional tie to the biases nurses face, nor the systematic hoops women at the time had to jump through to become doctors, so without that, I think this disjointedness in how they represent the roles is more prominent.

In a positive, I think this book still holds a lot of relevance, especially regarding the power imbalances at play when one holds a monopoly on knowledge and who has access. In the first edition's intro, they state total control of medicine means potential power to determine who will live and will die, who is fertile and who is sterile, who is "mad" and who sane. And although this is 50 years later, we still see how this power and control in medicine negatively impacts marginalized communities and not only harms but kills people, so I still found value and benefited from reading this perspective despite the outdated information and lack of nuance at points.