Title: Just doctoring: medical ethics in the liberal state 
Author: Brennan, Troyen A
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Philosophy | Ethics | Medicine
Publisher's Description: Just Doctoring draws the doctor-patient relationship out of the consulting room and into the middle of the legal and political arenas where it more and more frequently appears. Traditionally, medical ethics has focused on the isolated relationship of physician to patient in a setting that has left the physician virtually untouched by market constraints or government regulation. Arguing that changes in health care institutions and legal attention to patient rights have made conventional approaches obsolete, Troyen Brennan points the way to a new, more aware and engaged medical ethics.The medical profession is no longer isolated, even theoretically, from the liberal, market-dominated state. Old ideas of physician beneficence and altruism must make way for a justice-based medical ethics, assuming a relationship between equals more compatible with liberal political philosophy. Brennan offers clinical examples of many of today's most challenging medical problems - from informed consent to care rationing and the repercussions of the HIV epidemic - and gives his recommendation for a new ethical perspective. This lively and controversial plea for a rethinking of medical ethics goes right to the heart of medical care at the end of the twentieth century.   [brief]
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Title: Big doctoring in America: profiles in primary care 
Author: Mullan, Fitzhugh
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Medicine | Health Care | Sociology
Publisher's Description: The general practitioner was once America's doctor. The GP delivered babies, removed gallbladders, and sat by the bedsides of the dying. But as the twentieth century progressed, the pattern of medical care in the United States changed dramatically. By the 1960s, the GP was almost extinct. The later part of the twentieth century, however, saw a rebirth of the idea of the GP in the form of primary care practitioners. In this engrossing collection of oral histories and provocative essays about the past and future of generalism in health care, Fitzhugh Mullan - a pediatrician, writer, and historian - argues that primary care is a fascinating, important, and still endangered calling. In conveying the personal voices of primary care practitioners, Mullan sheds light on the political and economic contradictions that confront American medicine. Mullan interviewed dozens of primary care practitioners - family physicians, internists, pediatricians, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants - asking them about their lives and their work. He explains how, during the last forty years, the primary care movement has emerged built on the principles of "big doctoring"--coordinated, comprehensive care over time. This book is essential reading for understanding core issues of the current health care dilemma. As our country struggles with managed care, market reforms, and cost containment strategies in medicine, Big Doctoring in America provides an engrossing and illuminating look at those in the trenches of the profession.   [brief]
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Title: Life without disease: the pursuit of medical utopia 
Author: Schwartz, William B 1922-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Science | Medicine | Economics and Business | History and Philosophy of Science | Public Policy
Publisher's Description: The chaotic state of today's health care is the result of an explosion of effective medical technologies. Rising costs will continue to trouble U.S. health care in the coming decades, but new molecular strategies may eventually contain costs. As life expectancy is dramatically extended by molecular medicine, a growing population of the aged will bring new problems. In the next fifty years genetic intervention will shift the focus of medicine in the United States from repairing the ravages of disease to preventing the onset of disease. Understanding the role of genes in human health, says Dr. William B. Schwartz, is the driving force that will change the direction of medical care, and the age-old dream of life without disease may come close to realization by the middle of the next century. Medical care in 2050 will be vastly more effective, Schwartz maintains, and it may also be less expensive than the resource-intensive procedures such as coronary bypass surgery that medicine relies on today.Schwartz's alluring prospect of a medical utopia raises urgent questions, however. What are the scientific and public policy obstacles that must be overcome if such a goal is to become a reality? Restrictions on access imposed by managed care plans, the corporatization of charitable health care institutions, the increasing numbers of citizens without health insurance, the problems with malpractice insurance, and the threatened Medicare bankruptcy - all are the legacy of medicine's great progress in mastering the human body and society's inability to assimilate that mastery into existing economic, ethical, and legal structures. And if the average American life span is 130 years, a genuine possibility by 2050, what social and economic problems will result?Schwartz examines the forces that have brought us to the current health care state and shows how those same forces will exert themselves in the decades ahead. Focusing on the inextricable link between scientific progress and health policy, he encourages a careful examination of these two forces in order to determine the kind of medical utopia that awaits us. The decisions we make will affect not only our own care, but also the system of care we bequeath to our children.   [brief]
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Title: The corporate practice of medicine: competition and innovation in health care
Author: Robinson, James C 1953-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Politics | Public Policy | Medicine | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: One of the country's leading health economists presents a provocative analysis of the transformation of American medicine from a system of professional dominance to an industry under corporate control. James Robinson examines the economic and political forces that have eroded the traditional medical system of solo practice and fee-for-service insurance, hindered governmental regulation, and invited the market competition and organizational innovations that now are under way. The trend toward health care corporatization is irreversible, he says, and it parallels analogous trends toward privatization in the world economy.The physician is the key figure in health care, and how physicians are organized is central to the health care system, says Robinson. He focuses on four forms of physician organization to illustrate how external pressures have led to health care innovations: multispecialty medical groups, Independent Practice Associations (IPAs), physician practice management firms, and physician-hospital organizations. These physician organizations have evolved in the past two decades by adopting from the larger corporate sector similar forms of ownership, governance, finance, compensation, and marketing.In applying economic principles to the maelstrom of health care, Robinson highlights the similarities between competition and consolidation in medicine and in other sectors of the economy. He points to hidden costs in fee-for-service medicine - overtreatment, rampant inflation, uncritical professional dominance regarding treatment decisions - factors often overlooked when newer organizational models are criticized.Not everyone will share Robinson's appreciation for market competition and corporate organization in American health care, but he challenges those who would return to the inefficient and inequitable era of medicine from which we've just emerged. Forcefully written and thoroughly documented, The Corporate Practice of Medicine presents a thoughtful - and optimistic - view of a future health care system, one in which physician entrepreneurship is a dynamic component.   [brief]
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Title: Lost lullaby
Author: Alecson, Deborah Golden 1954-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: American Studies | Gender Studies | Women's Studies | Medicine | Ethics | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Lost Lullaby makes one think the unthinkable: how a loving parent can pray for the death of her child. It is Deborah Alecson's story of her daughter, Andrea, who was born after a full-term, uneventful pregnancy, weighing 7 pounds 11 ounces, perfectly formed and exquisitely featured. But an inexplicable accident at birth left her with massive and irreversible brain damage. On a vitality scale of one to ten, her initial reading was one. And so begins Deborah Alecson's heart-rending struggle to come to terms with two desperately conflicting and powerful emotions: her desire to nurture and love Andrea, and her desire to do everything in her power to bring about her death.Told in a mother's voice, with a simplicity and directness that heighten the intensity of the drama that unfolds, Lost Lullaby reaffirms the human dimension of what is too often an abstract and purely theoretical discussion. During the two months that Andrea spent in the Infant Intensive Care Unit, Ms. Alecson spoke with lawyers, doctors, and ethicists in an effort to understand the legal, medical and ethical implications of her plight. She recounts those discussions and describes legal cases that have a direct bearing on her own situation. Her battle - both in coming to the agonizing decision to let her child die and in convincing the medical and legal establishments to respect that decision - will engender empathy for the plight of many families, and an awareness of the need to use medical technology with restraint. It is a must-read for everyone who cares about how we make life-and-death decisions on these new medical, legal, and moral frontiers.   [brief]
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Title: Under the medical gaze: facts and fictions of chronic pain
Author: Greenhalgh, Susan
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Anthropology | Folklore and Mythology | Medical Anthropology | Physical Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Medicine | Gender Studies | Sociology | Social Problems | Social Problems
Publisher's Description: This compelling account of the author's experience with a chronic pain disorder and subsequent interaction with the American health care system goes to the heart of the workings of power and culture in the biomedical domain. It is a medical whodunit full of mysterious misdiagnosis, subtle power plays, and shrewd detective work. Setting a new standard for the practice of autoethnography, Susan Greenhalgh presents a case study of her intense encounter with an enthusiastic young specialist who, through creative interpretation of the diagnostic criteria for a newly emerging chronic disease, became convinced she had a painful, essentially untreatable, lifelong muscle condition called fibromyalgia. Greenhalgh traces the ruinous effects of this diagnosis on her inner world, bodily health, and overall well-being. Under the Medical Gaze serves as a powerful illustration of medicine's power to create and inflict suffering, to define disease and the self, and to manage relationships and lives. Greenhalgh ultimately learns that she had been misdiagnosed and begins the long process of undoing the physical and emotional damage brought about by her nearly catastrophic treatment. In considering how things could go so awry, she embarks on a cogent and powerful analysis of the sociopolitical sources of pain through feminist, cultural, and political understandings of the nature of medical discourse and practice in the United States. She develops fresh arguments about the power of medicine to medicalize our selves and lives, the seductions of medical science, and the deep, psychologically rooted difficulties women patients face in interactions with male physicians. In the end, Under the Medical Gaze goes beyond the critique of biomedicine to probe the social roots of chronic pain and therapeutic alternatives that rely on neither the body-cure of conventional medicine nor the mind-cure of some alternative medicines, but rather a broader set of strategies that address the sociopolitical sources of pain.   [brief]
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Title: What I learned in medical school: personal stories of young doctors
Author: Takakuwa, Kevin M
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: Medicine | Sociology | Ethnic Studies | Gender Studies | Anthropology | Health Care
Publisher's Description: Like many an exclusive club, the medical profession subjects its prospective members to rigorous indoctrination: medical students are overloaded with work, deprived of sleep and normal human contact, drilled and tested and scheduled down to the last minute. Difficult as the regimen may be, for those who don't fit the traditional mold - white, male, middle-to-upper class, and heterosexual - medical school can be that much more harrowing. This riveting book tells the tales of a new generation of medical students - students whose varied backgrounds are far from traditional. Their stories will forever alter the way we see tomorrow's doctors. In these pages, a black teenage mother overcomes seemingly insurmountable odds, an observant Muslim dons the hijab during training, an alcoholic hides her addiction. We hear the stories of an Asian refugee, a Mexican immigrant, a closeted Christian, an oversized woman - these once unlikely students are among those who describe their medical school experiences with uncommon candor, giving a close-up look at the inflexible curriculum, the pervasive competitive culture, and the daunting obstacles that come with being "different" in medical school. Their tales of courage are by turns poignant, amusing, eye-opening - and altogether unforgettable.   [brief]
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Title: American medicine: the quest for competence
Author: Good, Mary-Jo DelVecchio
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Medicine | Science | Medical Anthropology | Public Policy
Publisher's Description: What does it mean to be a good doctor in America today? How do such challenges as new biotechnologies, the threat of malpractice suits, and proposed health-care reform affect physicians' ability to provide quality care?These and many other crucial questions are examined in this book, the first to fully explore the meaning and politics of competence in modern American medicine. Based on Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good's recent ethnographic studies of three distinct medical communities - physicians in rural California, academics and students involved in Harvard Medical School's innovative "New Pathway" curriculum, and oncologists working on breast cancer treatment - the book demonstrates the centrality of the issue of competence throughout the medical world. Competence, it shows, provides the framework for discussing the power struggles between rural general practitioners and specialists, organizational changes in medical education, and the clinical narratives of high-technology oncologists. In their own words, practitioners, students, and academics describe what competence means to them and reveal their frustration with medical-legal institutions, malpractice, and the limitations of peer review and medical training.Timely and provocative, this study is essential reading for medical professionals, academics, anthropologists, and sociologists, as well as health-care policymakers.   [brief]
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Title: When a doctor hates a patient, and other chapters in a young physician's life 
Author: Peschel, Richard E
Published: University of California Press,  1988
Subjects: Medicine | Science
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Title: Power and illness: the failure and future of American health policy 
Author: Fox, Daniel M
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Sociology | Medicine | History | American Studies | United States History
Publisher's Description: During most of this century, American health policy has emphasized caring for acute conditions rather than preventing and managing chronic illness - even though chronic illness has caused most sickness and death since the 1920s. In this provocative and wide-ranging book, Daniel Fox explains why this has been so and offers a forceful argument for fundamental change in national health care priorities.Fox discusses how ideas about illness and health care, as well as the power of special interest groups, have shaped the ways in which Americans have treated illness. Those who make health policy decisions have increased support for hospitals, physicians, and medical research, believing that people then would become healthier. This position, implemented at considerable cost, has not adequately taken into account the growing burden of chronic disabling illness. While decision makers may have defined chronic disease as a high priority in research, they have not given it such a priority in the financing of health services.The increasing burden of chronic illness is critical. Fox suggests ways to solve this problem without increasing the already high cost of health care - but he does not underestimate the difficulties in such a strategy. Advocating the redistribution of resources within hospital and medical services, he targets those that are redundant or marginally effective.There could be no more timely subject today than American health care. And Daniel Fox is uniquely able to address its problems. A historian of medicine, with knowledge of how hospitals and physicians behave and how health policy is made at government levels, he has extensively researched published and unpublished documents on health care. What he proposes could profoundly affect all Americans.   [brief]
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Title: Prescription for profit: how doctors defraud Medicaid
Author: Jesilow, Paul 1950-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Science | Sociology | Medicine | Social Problems | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: In this explosive exposé of our health care system, Paul Jesilow, Henry N. Pontell, and Gilbert Geis uncover the dark side of physician practice. Using interviews with doctors and federal, state, and private officials and extensive investigation of case files, they tell the stories of doctors who profit from abortions on women who aren't pregnant, of needless surgery, overcharging for services, and excessive testing.How can doctors, recipients of a sacred trust and sworn to the Hippocratic Oath, violate Medicaid so egregiously? The authors trace patterns of abuse to the program's inauguration in the mid 1960s, when government authorities, not individual patients, were entrusted with responsibility for payments. Determining fees and regulating treatment also became the job of government agencies, thus limiting the doctors' traditional role. Physicians continue to disagree with Medicare and Medicaid policies that infringe on their autonomy and judgment.The medical profession has not accepted the gravity or extent of some members' illegal behavior, and individual doctors continue to blame violations on subordinates and patients. In the meantime, program guidelines have grown more confusing, hamstringing efforts to detect, apprehend, and prosecute Medicaid defrauders. Failure to institute a coherent policy for fraud control in the medical benefit program has allowed self-serving and greedy practitioners to violate the law with impunity. Prescription for Profit is a shocking revelation of abuse within a once-hallowed profession. It is a book that every doctor, and every patient, needs to read this year.   [brief]
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Title: Lives at risk: public health in nineteenth-century Egypt 
Author: Kuhnke, LaVerne
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Anthropology | Medical Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Lives at Risk describes the introduction of Western medicine into Egypt. The two major innovations undertaken by Muhammad Ali in the mid-nineteenth century were a Western-style school of medicine and an international Quarantine Board. The ways in which these institutions succeeded and failed will greatly interest historians of medicine and of modern Egypt. And because the author relates her narrative to twentieth-century health issues in developing countries, Lives at Risk will also interest medical and social anthropologists.The presence of the quarantine establishment and the medical school in Egypt resulted in a rudimentary public health service. Paramedical personnel were trained to provide primary health care for the peasant population. A vaccination program effectively freed the nation from smallpox. But the disease-oriented, individual-care practice of medicine derived from the urban hospital model of industrializing Europe was totally incompatible with the health care requirements of a largely rural, agrarian population.   [brief]
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Title: Healing the masses: Cuban health politics at home and abroad
Author: Feinsilver, Julie Margot
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Latin American Studies | Politics | Medicine | Public Policy
Publisher's Description: How has Cuba, a small, developing country, achieved its stunning medical breakthroughs? Hampered by scarce resources and a long-standing U.S. embargo, Cuba nevertheless has managed to provide universal access to health care, comprehensive health education, and advanced technology, even amid desperate economic conditions. Moreover, Cuba has sent disaster relief, donations of medical supplies and technology, and cadres of volunteer doctors throughout the world, emerging, in Castro's phrase, as a "world medical power."In her significant and timely study, Julie Feinsilver explores the Cuban medical phenomenon, examining how a governmental obsession with health has reaped medical and political benefits at home and abroad. As a result of Cuba's forward strides in health care, infant mortality rates are low even by First World standards. Cuba has successfully dealt with the AIDS epidemic in a manner that has aroused controversy and that some claim has infringed on individual liberties - issues that Feinsilver succinctly evaluates.Feinsilver's research and travel in Cuba over many years give her a unique perspective on the challenges Cuba faces in this time of unprecedented economic and political uncertainty. Her book is a must-read for everyone concerned with health policy, international relations, and Third World societies.   [brief]
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Title: Picturing Chinatown: art and orientalism in San Francisco
Author: Lee, Anthony W 1960-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Art | California and the West | Asian American Studies | Photography | Art History
Publisher's Description: This visually and intellectually exciting book brings the history of San Francisco's Chinatown alive by taking a close look at images of the quarter created during its first hundred years, from 1850 to 1950. Picturing Chinatown contains more than 160 photographs and paintings, some well known and many never reproduced before, to illustrate how this famous district has acted on the photographic and painterly imagination. Bringing together art history and the social and political history of San Francisco, this vividly detailed study unravels the complex cultural encounter that occurred between the women and men living in Chinatown and the artists who walked its streets, observed its commerce, and visited its nightclubs. Artistic representations of San Francisco's Chinatown include the work of some of the city's most gifted artists, among them the photographers Laura Adams Armer, Arnold Genthe, Dorothea Lange, Eadweard Muybridge, and Carleton Watkins and the painters Edwin Deakin, Yun Gee, Theodore Wores, and the members of the Chinese Revolutionary Artists' Club. Looking at the work of these artists and many others, Anthony Lee shows how their experiences in the district helped encourage, and even structured, some of their most ambitious experiments with brush and lens. In addition to discussing important developments in modern art history, Lee highlights the social and political context behind these striking images. He demonstrates the value of seeing paintings and photographs as cultural documents, and in so doing, opens a fascinating new perspective on San Francisco's Chinatown.   [brief]
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Title: Doctors within borders: profession, ethnicity, and modernity in colonial Taiwan
Author: Lo, Ming-cheng Miriam
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Asian Studies | Medical Anthropology | China | Asian History | Sociology
Publisher's Description: This book explores Japan's "scientific colonialism" through a careful study of the changing roles of Taiwanese doctors under Japanese colonial rule. By integrating individual stories based on interviews and archival materials with discussions of political and social theories, Ming-cheng Lo unearths . . . [more]
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Title: City for sale: the transformation of San Francisco
Author: Hartman, Chester W
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Urban Studies | Californian and Western History | Politics | California and the West
Publisher's Description: San Francisco is perhaps the most exhilarating of all American cities--its beauty, cultural and political avant-gardism, and history are legendary, while its idiosyncrasies make front-page news. In this revised edition of his highly regarded study of San Francisco's economic and political development since the mid-1950s, Chester Hartman gives a detailed account of how the city has been transformed by the expansion--outward and upward--of its downtown. His story is fueled by a wide range of players and an astonishing array of events, from police storming the International Hotel to citizens forcing the midair termination of a freeway. Throughout, Hartman raises a troubling question: can San Francisco's unique qualities survive the changes that have altered the city's skyline, neighborhoods, and economy? Hartman was directly involved in many of the events he chronicles and thus had access to sources that might otherwise have been unavailable. A former activist with the National Housing Law Project, San Franciscans for Affordable Housing, and other neighborhood organizations, he explains how corporate San Francisco obtained the necessary cooperation of city and federal governments in undertaking massive redevelopment. He illustrates the rationale that produced BART, a subway system that serves upper-income suburbs but few of the city's poor neighborhoods, and cites the environmental effects of unrestrained highrise development, such as powerful wind tunnels and lack of sunshine. In describing the struggle to keep housing affordable in San Francisco and the seemingly intractable problem of homelessness, Hartman reveals the human face of the city's economic transformation.   [brief]
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Title: Customers and patrons of the mad-trade: the management of lunacy in eighteenth-century London: with the complete text of John Monro's 1766 case book
Author: Andrews, Jonathan 1961-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | History of Science | Psychology | Social Problems | Psychiatry
Publisher's Description: This book is a lively commentary on the eighteenth-century mad-business, its practitioners, its patients (or "customers"), and its patrons, viewed through the unique lens of the private case book kept by the most famous mad-doctor in Augustan England, Dr. John Monro (1715-1791). Monro's case book, comprising the doctor's jottings on patients he saw in the course of his private practice--patients drawn from a great variety of social strata--offers an extraordinary window into the subterranean world of the mad-trade in eighteenth-century London. The volume concludes with a complete edition of the case book itself, transcribed in full with editorial annotations by the authors. In the fragmented stories Monro's case book provides, Andrews and Scull find a poignant underworld of human psychological distress, some of it strange and some quite familiar. They place these "cases" in a real world where John Monro and othersuccessful doctors were practicing, not to say inventing, the diagnosis and treatment of madness.   [brief]
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Title: The caregiving dilemma: work in an American nursing home
Author: Foner, Nancy 1945-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Anthropology | Medical Anthropology | Social Problems | Medicine | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: Along with increasing life expectancy comes the knowledge that many Americans will one day enter nursing homes. Who are the people who will care for us or for our relatives? Nancy Foner provides a major study of institutional care that focuses on nursing aides, who are the backbone of American nursing homes. She examines the strains and paradoxes facing nursing aides - asked, on the one hand, to provide compassionate care and, on the other, to cope with the pressures of the workplace and the institution.Aides are expected to look after patients, who are predominantly older women, with kindness and consideration, but nursing home regulations and bureaucratic forces often hinder even the best efforts to offer consistently supportive care. Positioned at the bottom of the nursing hierarchy, aides must cope with the needs of frail, dependent residents, pressures from patients' relatives and from their own families, and demands of supervisors and coworkers.Foner's detailed description and analysis of caregiving dilemmas, based on intensive field research in a New York facility, brings the perspective of the nursing aides to the fore. This is a timely contribution to the study of work, bureaucracy, and the future of an aging American population.   [brief]
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Title: Who survives cancer? 
Author: Greenwald, Howard P
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Sociology | Environmental Studies | Medicine
Publisher's Description: FACT OR FICTION? *A white male earning over $35,000 a year has a better chance of surviving most types of cancer than an unemployed African-American male.*Psychological factors predispose people to contracting cancer and improved emotional health promotes recovery.*Early detection is useless in curing cancer.*Experimental, not conventional, treatments offer the most benefits and longer survival rates to cancer patients.*A scientific breakthrough of practical and immediate significance in cancer treatment is imminent.*Cancer prevention is ineffective in many areas and campaigns will probably never achieve a reduction of cancer mortality approaching 50 percent.*Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs) increase survival chances for most cancer patients.Howard Greenwald takes an incisive new look at how class, race, sex, psychological state, type of health care and available treatments affect one's chance of surviving cancer. Drawing on an original ten-year survival study of cancer patients, he synthesizes medical, epidemiological, and psychosocial research in a uniquely interdisciplinary and eye-opening approach to the question of who survives cancer and why.Scientists, health care professionals, philanthropists, government agencies, and ordinary people all agree that significant resources must be allocated to fight this dreaded disease. But what is the most effective way to do it? Greenwald argues that our priorities have been misplaced and calls for a fundamental rethinking of the way the American medical establishment deals with the disease. He asserts that the emphasis on prevention and experimental therapy has only limited value, whereas the availability of conventional medical care is very important in influencing cancer survival. Class and race become strikingly significant in predicting who has access to health care and can therefore obtain medical treatment in a timely, effective manner. Greenwald counters the popular notion that personality and psychological factors strongly affect survival, and he underscores the importance of early detection. His research shows that Health Maintenance Organizations, while sometimes prone to delays, offer low-income patients a better chance of ultimate survival. Greenwald pleads for immediate attention to the inadequacies and inequalities in our health care delivery system that deter patients from seeking regular medical care.Instead of focusing on research and the hope for a breakthrough cure, Greenwald urges renewed emphasis on ensuring available health care to all Americans. In its challenge to the thrust of much biomedical research and its critique of contemporary American health care, as well as in its fresh and often counterintuitive look at cancer survival, Who Survives Cancer? is invaluable for policymakers, health care professionals, and anyone who has survived or been touched by cancer.   [brief]
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Title: Unbound voices: a documentary history of Chinese women in San Francisco
Author: Yung, Judy
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: History | Asian American Studies | Women's Studies | California and the West | Californian and Western History | Social Science
Publisher's Description: Unbound Voices brings together the voices of Chinese American women in a fascinating, intimate collection of documents - letters, essays, poems, autobiographies, speeches, testimonials, and oral histories - detailing half a century of their lives in America. Together, these sources provide a captivating mosaic of Chinese women's experiences in their own words, as they tell of making a home for themselves and their families in San Francisco from the Gold Rush years through World War II.The personal nature of these documents makes for compelling reading. We hear the voices of prostitutes and domestic slavegirls, immigrant wives of merchants, Christians and pagans, homemakers, and social activists alike. We read the stories of daughters who confronted cultural conflicts and racial discrimination; the myriad ways women coped with the Great Depression; and personal contributions to the causes of women's emancipation, Chinese nationalism, workers' rights, and World War II. The symphony of voices presented here lends immediacy and authenticity to our understanding of the Chinese American women's lives.This rich collection of women's stories also serves to demonstrate collective change over time as well as to highlight individual struggles for survival and advancement in both private and public spheres. An educational tool on researching and reclaiming women's history, Unbound Voices offers us a valuable lesson on how one group of women overcame the legacy of bound feet and bound lives in America. The selections are accompanied by photographs, with extensive introductions and annotation by Judy Yung, a noted authority on primary resources relating to the history of Chinese American women.   [brief]
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