Thesis
Why Women's Health Services? A Case Study of Community-Based, Non-Government Women's Health Centres in NSW
Southern Cross University
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Southern Cross University
2022
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25918/thesis.310
Appears in Recent Faculty of Health Publications
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Abstract
This thesis examines non-government, community-based women’s health centres in New South Wales (NSW), Australia, that emerged with the Australian women’s health movement and ‘second wave’ feminism in the late 1960s – early 1970s. The thesis explores geopolitical forces involved in shaping women’s health movements internationally – primarily Britain, Canada and the United States. It focuses, however, on those that prevailed in Australia in: i) representing and understanding women’s health (the symbolic dynamics), and ii) establishing specific services and programs to respond to it (the policy and politics dynamics). As the thesis argues, these reflected a geopolitical specificity of history and place. Yet they also included significantly impactful ways of understanding and responding to women’s health from comparators in the global North (Connell, 2007), namely Britain, Canada and the United States.
Conducted in partnership with Women’s Health NSW, the peak advocacy body for women’s health centres, the study aimed to: (i) investigate the development and distinctiveness of the Australian women’s health approach within a comparative international context; (ii) document and analyse the scope, scale and distinctiveness of the non-government, community-based women’s health model of service delivery as it operates in women’s health centres; and, (iii) examine the experiences of women’s health service provision in NSW from the perspective of providers and clients, with a focus on those associated with the services’ response to gender-based violence, and its impacts on women’s lives and health.
In addressing these aims, the study engages with global scholarly literature to which it also seeks to contribute: feminism and women’s health; feminist health service responses to gender inequality and its impacts on women’s health; significance of geo-politics and place in feminist struggles against gender inequality; women's health policy and services; women’s experiences of feminist women’s health services and their relationship to women’s empowerment; and feminist health service responses to gender-based violence as a foundation for a distinctive women’s health approach.
Details
- Title
- Why Women's Health Services? A Case Study of Community-Based, Non-Government Women's Health Centres in NSW
- Creators
- Jacqueline Schroeder
- Contributors
- Sandra Grace (Supervisor) - Southern Cross UniversityToni Schofield (Supervisor) - Southern Cross University
- Awarding Institution
- Southern Cross University; Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Theses
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Southern Cross University
- Publisher
- Southern Cross University
- Number of pages
- x, 197
- Identifiers
- 991013143812102368
- Copyright
- © J Schroeder 2022
- Academic Unit
- Faculty of Health; School of Health and Human Sciences
- Resource Type
- Thesis