Documents related to pelvic health conditions, particularly among women, are being archived by a Vancouver Island University research team to shed light on an under-studied area.
The project is being led by Whitney Wood, VIU’s Canada research chair in historical dimensions of women’s health, who told the News Bulletin that studies on women's pelvic health tend to focus on reproduction. This results in gaps in care which impact women, non-binary and gender-diverse populations with 'invisible' conditions such as endometriosis, menstrual pain, yeast infections and urinary tract infections.
"Every one of our 21st-century health concerns, gaps in care, health inequities that we're encountering today in 2024, all of them are rooted in historical context," Wood said. "There's nothing natural about how these gaps in care came to be, they're all based in history and decisions that were made in the past and we need to look to the past to move forward in a good way to provide better health for all Canadians."
Archival sources from 1970 to 2000 include women's health organizations like the Vancouver Women's Health Collective, medical journals, magazines and newspapers. All uploads are done using optical character recognition, which formats the papers into text documents, to allow for easier searching using keywords.
Wood said the team will be expanding the project with oral history interviews starting in the new year.
"What we're interested to do is talk to folks who were involved in health activism during the late 20th century … but also folks who experienced everyday pelvic health issues, pelvic pain, to hear their experiences during those decades."
Wood said when the archive is completed, she would like those involved in women's health care to be able to look to the past to provide lessons for the present.
"We hope to reach practitioners and clinicians who are involved in gynecological practice certainly, but we also really want to take our cues from the folks whose stories we're hearing, both in the archives and the oral history interviews."
Wood said the women's health collective, established in 1971 and still active today, was one of the "earlier players" in feminist health history. While doing the document archival work, the researcher was surprised by the breadth of the women's health issues included in the group's advocacy work.
"Encounters with doctors, safe gynecological care, access to choice in childbirth – those are some of the core issues, access to contraception and abortion, but what's really impressive is just the broad approach these VWHC feminists took to understanding health…" Wood said. "Safe housing, reliable transportation, preventing domestic violence – women's health really broadly conceived was what they were focusing on … You can see these feminist health activists were very attuned to what we today would call the 'social determinants of health' even 50 years ago. They were really ahead of their time in how they were thinking about health more broadly."
The documents will be made publicly available in the coming months on the Rise Up Feminist Digital Archive at https://riseupfeministarchive.ca. The project is funded through a Canadian Institutes of Health Research grant.
One lesson that Wood said can be taken away is to listen to women and gender-diverse populations in medical settings.
"They have been putting their voices out there for at least 50 years – we're going back to 1970, and it was certainly the case before that as well."
