What is the history of 'everyday health' in the postwar world, and where might we find it? This volume moves away from top-down histories of health and medicine that focus on states, medical professionals, and other experts. Instead, it centres the day-to-day lives of people in diverse contexts from 1950 to the present. Chapters explore how gender, class, 'race', sexuality, disability, and age mediated experiences of health and wellbeing in historical context. The volume foregrounds methodologies for writing bottom-up histories of health, subjectivity, and embodiment, offering insights applicable to scholars of times and places beyond those represented in the case studies presented here. Drawing together cutting-edge scholarship, the volume establishes and critically interrogates 'everyday health' as a crucial concept that will shape future histories of health and medicine.
Introduction: ‘Everyday health’, embodiment, and selfhood since 1950 – Hannah Froom, Tracey Loughran, Kate Mahoney, and Daisy Payling Part I: Experiential expertise Introduction: Experiential expertise – Hannah Froom and Tracey Loughran 1. Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex and the tensions of liberal sexpertise – Ben Mechen 2. ‘Two more calls, one in tears …’: emotion, labour, and ethics of care at the Calgary Birth Control Association, 1970-1979 – Karissa Robyn Patton 3. Expertise and experience in the Greek feminist birth control movement, c. 1974-1986 – Evangelia Chordaki 4. Migration, kinship, and ‘everyday theorising’: Black British women’s narratives of genetic diagnosis in the postwar National Health Service – Grace Redhead Part II: Sites and spaces Introduction: Sites and spaces – Tracey Loughran 5. Writing everyday life into law: the ‘household duties test’, disabled women, social security, and assumed normality – Gareth Millward 6. Friendship, mutual aid, and activism in British transfeminine spaces, 1968-1985 – Fleur MacInnes 7. A private matter? The Brook Advisory Centre and young people’s everyday sexual and reproductive health in the 1960s-1980s – Caroline Rusterholz 8. Queering the agony aunt: reusing and adapting a public engagement activity for different audiences – Daisy Payling Part III: Mass media and networks of communication Introduction: Mass media and networks of communication – Daisy Payling and Tracey Loughran 9. ‘Thirty years behind England’? Framing ‘natural’ childbirth in postwar Canada – Whitney Wood 10. ‘I started a new life when I joined Gemma’: disability, community, and sexuality in Gemma newsletters, 1978-2000 – Beckie Rutherford 11. Talk shows and ‘tanorexia’: motherhood and ‘sunbed addiction’ on British television in the 1990s – Fabiola Creed 12. ‘Having been there … I know how hard it is’: relatability and ordinariness in twenty-first century British clean eating – Louise Morgan Part IV: Subjectivity and intersubjectivity Introduction: Subjectivity and intersubjectivity – Kate Mahoney and Tracey Loughran 13. Girlhood menstrual management and the ‘culture of concealment’ in postwar Britain – Hannah Froom 14. Is sex good for you? Risk, reward, and responsibility for young women in the late 1980s – Rosie Gahnstrom, Lucy Robinson, and Rachel Thomson 15. ‘What your generation probably don’t understand is …’: exploring intergenerational dynamics in oral history – Kate Mahoney 16. Cultivating vulnerability: power and the emotional ethics of oral history practice beyond the interview – Tracey Loughran 17. … and breathe: style narratives at home March 2020-March 2021 – Carol Tulloch -- .
Hannah Froom is an independent early career scholar. Tracey Loughran is a Professor of History at the University of Essex. Kate Mahoney is a Research Manager at Healthwatch Essex, and a Community Fellow at the University of Essex. Daisy Payling is an Engagement Officer at Queen Mary University of London.
