One of the worst-kept secrets of modern healthcare is that female subjects have consistently been left out of medical research, which affects the care that women do and don’t receive.

Women’s health as a separate consideration is “a long time coming,” says Harper Wave founder and publisher Karen Rinaldi, “because so many of the studies that have been done were done on male bodies.” Rinaldi edited All in Her Head (Jan. 2024), by Memorial Sloan Kettering oncologist and medical historian Elizabeth Comen, which probes the deep roots of medical bias and misinformation against women.

All in Her Head is “like reading a thriller where women’s bodies are the victim,” Rinaldi says, citing the story of 19th-century physician Horatio Robinson Storer, who was “seen as one of the fathers of OB-GYN science” and was one of the first surgeons to perform a Cesarean section. He was also a virulent anti-abortion activist, and he had his wife committed to an asylum for “menses-induced insanity.”

Storer’s complicated history is just one example of how science developed by men was “based on assumptions and preconceived ideas of what’s ‘wrong’ with a woman,” Rinaldi says. Conditions involving libido (or lack thereof) and masturbation were “pathologized into every problem.”

PW spoke with editors and publishers whose new books act as a corrective. They address formerly taboo topics including fertility, menstruation, and menopause; acknowledge expansive gender and sexual identities; and appeal to readers who want to be educated about the workings of their own bodies.

Fertile territory

As understanding around gender evolves, editors and authors are reassessing at a fundamental level the language they use to discuss medical care.

“The term ‘women’s health’ might be a little out of sync with the ways we understand gender today,” says Lee Oglesby, senior editor at Flatiron. She acquired and edited The Cycle (Feb. 2024), a reported memoir by journalist Shalene Gupta about painful periods and premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD). “What we’re really talking about is gynecological health and anything that affects people with uteruses, including transgender and nonbinary people.”

Natalie Lampert, author of The Big Freeze (Ballantine, Apr. 2024), dedicates her journalistic memoir about egg preservation to “all the people with ovaries confronting uncertainty and the consequential questions.” Egg freezing is enormously expensive, costing an average of $16,000 per cycle and rarely covered by insurance. “This financial bias is a major equity issue,” says Ballantine v-p and executive editor Susanna Porter. “Stigmatizing laws and entrenched social and cultural attitudes have made reproductive technologies difficult to access.”

In The Expert Guide to Fertility (Johns Hopkins Univ., Dec.), Joseph S. Sanfilippo, a professor and reproductive sciences specialist at UPMC Magee-Womens Hospital, educates readers about increasing the chances of a successful pregnancy. He takes into account diverse family structures—for instance, single prospective parents or LGBTQ couples—and concerns such as preserving fertility after a cancer diagnosis.

Suzanne Staszak-Silva, senior acquisitions editor for health and wellness at Johns Hopkins University Press, says that Sanfilippo, writing with NYU Langone Health OB-GYN resident Aarti Kumar, varies pronouns for healthcare providers mentioned in the book among he, she, and they. He also uses phrasing like “Jennifer and her male partner” to clarify the identities of the people he features as sources and in anecdotes.

Rites of passage

OB-GYN and pain medicine physician Jen Gunter, author of The Vagina Bible and The Menopause Manifesto, frequently uses the inclusive term “people who menstruate” in the forthcoming Blood (Citadel, Jan. 2024), which explores scientific truths and common myths about menstruation. “Given misinformation and attacks on women’s healthcare, it’s more important than ever that women understand their bodies,” says Denise Silvestro, executive editor at Citadel.

Julia Blohberger and Roos Neeter, yoga teachers and Ayurveda practitioners in the Netherlands, are the authors of the Feel Good series of holistic wellness titles from Quirk Books: Good Sh*t, Good Night, and the forthcoming Good Flow (Dec.), which encourages readers to embrace their periods as an opportunity for personal growth, not a burden to be endured. The authors offer journal prompts, suggest rituals to use throughout the month, and share recipes for soothing herbal tonics to ease discomfort.

“We have a tendency to say menstruation is just going to be a bad experience, and the best that you can do is to mitigate it,” says Jess Zimmerman, who edited the English translation of Good Flow. “It’s almost confrontational to be told no, you can celebrate that, you can make use of that.”

Meanwhile, women with typical life spans spend decades in menopause, and they too deserve space and attention in the medical research community, says Caroline Sutton, editor-in-chief at Avery Books. In March, the imprint is releasing The Menopause Brain by Lisa Mosconi, a Weill Cornell Medicine associate professor of neuroscience. Research on menopause is scarce and the demand for information is high, Suttons notes—as are the stakes: brain imaging studies have demonstrated a link between estrogen declines and increased Alzheimer’s risk in women.

Questioning authority

Another emerging theme in health publishing is patient empowerment, and new books aim to help people ask the right questions of their doctors.

At a recent appointment to discuss a potential surgery, Madhulika Sikka, v-p and executive editor at Crown and a breast cancer survivor, found herself “channeling” OB-GYN Sharon Malone, author of Grown Woman Talk (Apr. 2024). She asked the doctor how often they’d performed the surgery under consideration, a question she hadn’t thought to pose before working with Malone.

“There’s a sort of deference to the medical establishment that we don’t need to embrace, particularly as women,” Sikka says. “You can’t change the medical system overnight, but you can change your part in it.”

Daniela Rapp, senior editor at Mayo Clinic Press, says patients need to sharpen their ability to ask questions like whether a medical device or drug has been tested on women, or whether the dosage of a medication is different for women. “Women are not small men,” she adds, so they should approach medical conversations “with a whole different arsenal of questions.”

Rapp acquired Sex Cells (Apr. 2024), by health policy advocate and social worker Phyllis E. Greenberger and health journalist Kalia Doner, which examines medical inequities through a public policy lens. The book, Rapp says, “proves over and over again that it doesn’t work to just use the research or the treatments or the diagnoses that we’re using for men, on women.”

A more comprehensive, inclusive approach will help patients better advocate for themselves. “Women are becoming involved in their own healthcare and seeking change,” says Anna Whiting, publisher for the medicine department at Cambridge University Press, which is releasing Enough: Because We Can Stop Cervical Cancer in January. Author Linda Eckert, an OB-GYN professor with an infectious disease fellowship at University of Washington, makes clear that the onus isn’t only on women: “Men need to be involved in the solution” too, Whiting says. For example, if teen boys and men received the vaccination against human papillomavirus (HPV), the leading cause of cervical cancer, the disease “could be eradicated in our lifetime.”

The timing of books with urgent, education-focused messages is “especially important given the national debate about what kinds of books are allowed in school libraries,” says Leyla Moushabeck at Interlink Publishing. Against this backdrop, Moushabeck acquired Why Aren’t We Talking About This?! (Mar. 2024), an illustrated guide to topics including body image, desire, and mental health. Author-illustrator Hazel Mead’s infographics include a comic about self-defense, a depiction of how to escape a domestic violence situation, and a full-page illustration showing diversity in genitalia; Mead writes that “growing up as a mixed-race person, she never saw a brown vulva in a textbook,” Moushabeck says.

Body image is the focus of My Belly (Greystone, Apr. 2024), journalist and cultural critic Hilde Østby’s memoir about “women’s bodies and women’s bellies–a topic that does not seem to ever go away,” says Jennifer Croll, editorial director at Greystone Books. The book was originally published in 2021 in the author’s native Norway and translated by Lucy Moffatt as part of an all-woman book production team.

Croll says that Østby and Moffatt did a lot of “careful” editing, particularly in sections about uteruses and pregnancy, to keep the language inclusive. “The same biases and stereotypes affect how bodies are perceived,” she adds, “regardless of whether someone is cis or trans, regardless of their womanhood.”

Holly Lebowitz Rossi is a freelance writer and coauthor of The Yoga Effect.

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