Why are women so sick?

And can we all chill out about the word "feminist"?

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When I launched the Catholic Feminist podcast in 2017, I was well aware that many Catholics believe feminism to be a cancer of the terminal sort. Clearly, all feminists are under a conspiracy to burn their bras and rip children from their mothers. Simone de Beauvoir thought it would be better for society if children were raised by the state and really, how much could we have evolved from that? Remember the heyday of the 1950s, when women weren’t allowed to have bank accounts?

I’m being snarky; of course I realize that there are many tenants of secular feminism that have deeply harmed society. Most Catholics who are against the use of the word “feminist” completely understand that women have historically been oppressed and want to see an end to male violence. But that one little word really lights people up.

What I have consistently responded with is that I really don’t give a shit if you embrace the level of “feminist” or not. I do give a shit that you know 1 in 3 women globally will be a victim of male violence¹,  1 out of 6 American women will experience an attempted rape in their lifetime², and women develop depression at twice the rate of men³. I have spent the past decade of my life telling people who think the church is a sexist, backwater institution that we actually celebrate female doctors of the church, believe a woman is the greatest human being to have ever lived, and have extensive papal writings on the equality and dignity of women. It’s been nitty-gritty work, the kind where dirt gets under your fingernails and people say mean things about you on the internet.

It would be foolish to say that women haven’t made leaps and bounds of progress in the past century. On paper (and frequently in practice), women’s rights have exploded in our modern day and age. Women in the western world can have bank accounts and credit cards; they can become surgeons and senators. Within the church, we’re having many more conversations about how women can participate in our institution besides the beautiful vocation of motherhood. (See: Pope Francis allows women to vote at bishops’ meetings.) More workplaces are offering paid maternity leave than ever before and far more women are going to college than in generations prior. There is much to celebrate when it comes to feminism.

But there is still a great need to highlight where women are experiencing undue suffering. And one of those areas is within the field of healthcare.

Last week I had the good fortune of watching Below the Belt, a PBS documentary on endometriosis. I learned that doctors believe 11% of women suffer from this disease, where uterine lining grows outside the uterus. It often results in crippling pain and fertility issues.

I’ve spilled plenty of ink on hyperemesis gravidarum, the pregnancy condition that crippled me while I carried my three littles.

One of my favorite episodes I ever recorded of the Catholic Feminist was with Dr. Chelsea Harkins, a pelvic floor therapist, where we talked about how many women experience pain during intercourse (a lot).

And the more I talk with friends, the more I learn of various ailments that seem to be affecting…us. And the more I hear about how difficult finding care has been. I learned from Below the Belt that on average, women with endometriosis had to visit four different doctors before receiving a diagnosis.

The word hysteria is derived from the word hystera, the Greek word for uterus. From the fourth-century until the seventeenth-century, scientists believed the uterus floated around the body, causing women to be overly emotional and untrustworthy. Hysterical.

Dr. Kate Young: “Rather than acknowledge the limitations of medical knowledge, medicine expected women to take control (with their minds) of their disease (in their body) by accepting their illness, making ‘lifestyle’ changes and conforming to their gendered social roles of wife and mother. Moralizing discourses surrounded those who rebel; they are represented as irrational and irresponsible, the safety net for medicine when it cannot fulfill its claim to control the body.”⁴

I don’t think that a bunch of doctors just don’t care. After all, plenty of doctors are women themselves, and I tend to take the perhaps-too-optimistic belief that most people go into medicine to help people. I am literally surrounded by people in the medical profession; one sister’s a nurse, one sister’s an NP, and one’s in medical residency. My mother-in-law is a doctor and two of my dearest friends are PAs. I think every single one of those people care about human beings, and want to improve their health. I really can’t see them or any other medical professional walking into an appointment and being like, “woman in pain, Do Not Care.”

So what’s going on? Why are so many women just…sick?

A lack of equitable research

Women’s and men’s bodies are very different, from their lung capacity to their fat mass to their facial structures to their cardiovascular systems. But it wasn’t until the 1990s that medical trials funded by the NIH were required to include women. Even in the medical studies that do include women, men are much more likely to be studied (for instance, even though women are 70% more likely to suffer from depression, animal studies on depression are five times as likely to be done on male animals). When studies aren’t done on women’s bodies, the results found aren’t going to be all as beneficial to women. Anatomy textbooks also favor men’s bodies. Author Caroline Perez writes in Invisible Women that “The covers of books entitled ‘Human Anatomy’ [are] still adorned with be-muscled men. Drawings of features common to both sexes continued to routinely include penises. I found posters entitled ‘Ear, Nose and Throat’, ‘The Nervous System’ . . . all of which featured a large-scale drawing of a man. The vascular-system poster did, however, include a small ‘female pelvis’ off to one side, and me and my female pelvis were grateful for small mercies.” Medical students are literally learning men’s bodies as typical and women’s bodies as “other”.

My favorite example took place in the 1960s. As Maya Dusenbery wrote in Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed and Sick: “Observing that women tended to have lower rates of heart disease until their estrogen levels dropped after menopause, researchers conducted the first trial to look at whether supplementation with the hormone was an effective preventive treatment. The study enrolled 8,341 men and no women.”

Less funding for women’s diseases

Diseases that exclusively affect women, such as vaginismus, endometriosis, and hyperemesis gravidarum are chronically underfunded and under researched. Applied mathematician Arthur Mirin researched the differences between funding for diseases that were primarily affecting women vs. those that were primarily affecting men in 2021 and found that “In the majority of cases, diseases that predominantly affect women — such as migraines, headaches, anorexia and endometriosis — received funding that was a fraction of what was awarded for diseases that predominantly affected men, when funding amounts are matched to disease burden.”⁵ Premenstrual syndromes, affecting 90% of women, get one-fifth of the funding of erectile dysfunctions, affecting 19% of men.⁶

Socialized misogyny from both patient and professional

This one gets people uppity, but there are plenty of studies that have shown that women are more likely than men to use tentative language⁷ and are less assertive in conflict-settings. We can argue all day about whether this is socialized misogyny or simply a natural factor of womanhood, but it is what it is, and it leaves more women nodding along with their doctors vs. pushing for evidence-based care. (Do all women have a tendency to do this? Of course not. But if we can’t occasionally speak in generalizations it’s really hard to address larger patterns.)

Additionally, I would ask you to find me a woman who hasn’t, at some point in her life, been talked down to by a male *or* female doctor. The age-old trick of handing every teenager with period cramps birth control pills instead of actually trying to identify why their uterus is on fire every month is evidence enough of the way many healthcare providers prefer to cover up women’s pain vs. actually deal with it.

Inadequate access to healthcare

In the United States, where our healthcare basically runs on an employer-funded insurance system, inadequate access to decent care is a real problem. It’s very hard to get in to see specialists without an extraordinary amount of cash, as well as a way to get to appointments. And for as much money as we’re spending, it isn’t exactly producing terrific results.⁸ Women are more likely than men to suffer from chronic illness and more likely than men to require healthcare throughout their lives, leading to higher medical expenses.⁹

If you want to make a meaningful difference in the lives of women, beyond all of the culture war nonsense about Barbie movies or the word “womxn” or diversity councils, think about what kind of healthcare women receive on a daily basis. Think about what it’s like to live every day—or even for one week a month—in pain. The answer is that it’s excruciatingly difficult, and while we’re arguing about whether or not the word “feminism” is evil, human beings are being shrugged at due to a very fixable lack of research and education.

Saint John Paul the Great: “In transforming culture so that it supports life, women occupy a place, in thought and action, which is unique and decisive. It depends on them to promote a ‘new feminism’ which rejects the temptation of imitating models of ‘male domination,’ in order to acknowledge and affirm the true genius of women in every aspect of the life of society and overcome all discrimination, violence, and exploitation.”

I like to end most of my letters in some sort of hopeful fashion. Here’s what you can do about it! We don’t like to be thrown essays of statistics and sadness without an action plan. And, yeah, prayer and advocacy and donations aren’t going to hurt. But I moreso want to extend an invitation.

Next time you’re in a group of people who are complaining about ~the feminists~ and talking about how far women have come, feel free to nod in agreement. Yes, women have come so far. Yes, some ideologies of modern-day secular feminism are very harmful. Yes, feminism without God isn’t going to lead us anywhere good. But also, pipe in, wouldn’t it be great if women were included in medical studies just as much as men? And wouldn’t it be great if women’s diseases received equal research funding? And wouldn’t it be great if we could help women learn to be more assertive when it comes to their healthcare? You can be that rational voice in the room.

Maybe you can’t get over your hatred for the word feminism. That’s fine. But that doesn’t give you a free pass to ignore the areas in life where women are being discriminated against, purposefully or accidentally.

It does not have to be us vs. them, feminists vs. not, Catholics vs. Gloria Steinem. All people of goodwill want women to live free of pain. So let’s start acting like it.

St. Gianna, pray for us!

On My Nightstand 

• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: Dug into one of my all-time favorites this month. The perfect late-summer read, and a very easy place to start if you haven’t read many classics! Easy-breezy and thoughtful at the same time.

• European Countries’ Restrictions on Gender Treatment for Minors Contrasts Sharply With US Push: Just a reminder. “The situation is somewhat different in Europe, where countries have been using the Dutch Protocol as a reference point since the 1990s. The protocol, developed by the Center of Expertise on Gender Dysphoria in Amsterdam, establishes criteria for pharmacological and surgical interventions based on persistent gender dysphoria, absence of psychiatric conditions, informed consent, and emphasizes the importance of psychotherapeutic support. ‘Countries like Finland and Sweden have so far been especially cautious in applying the protocol rigorously and have been likewise bold in calling attention to failures to adhere to such standards,’ Father Baggot said.”

• Separating Fact from Fiction—Who Was Mary Magdalene?: I loved this primer from FemCatholic on the real history behind a very misunderstood saint.

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In case you missed these Letters:

• Shiny Happy All of Us - for subscribers

• Belonging to One Another - for subscribers

• The Prairie Woman of Shame - for everyone

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1. https://www.who.int/news/item/09-03-2021-devastatingly-pervasive-1-in-3-women-globally-experience-violence

2. https://www.rainn.org/statistics/victims-sexual-violence

3. https://adaa.org/find-help-for/women/depression

4. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0959353518815704

5. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01472-5

6. https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/epub/10.1089/jwh.2020.8682

7. https://www.sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~levitan/nlp-psych/papers/leaper_tentative_empirical.pdf

8. https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/31/health/us-health-care-spending-global-perspective/index.html

9. https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/the-state-of-healthcare-in-the-united-states/poverty-on-womens-health/