In her meticulously researched history, Cheryl Krasnick Warsh challenges readers to rethink the norms of women's health and treatment in Canada and the United States since 1800. Prescribed Norms details a disturbing socio-medical history that limits and discounts women's own knowledge of their bodies and their health.

By comparing ritual practices of various cultures, Prescribed Norms demonstrates how looking at women's health through a masculine lens has distorted current medical understandings of menstruation, menopause, and childbirth, and has often led to...

Health is a gendered concept in Western cultures. Customarily it is associated with strength in men and beauty in women. This gendered concept was transmitted through visual representations of the ideal female and male bodies, and ubiquitous media images resulted in the absorption of universal standards of beauty and health and generalized desires to achieve them. Today, genuine or self-styled experts--from physicians to newspaper columnists to advertisers--offer advice on achieving optimal health.

Topics in this collection are wide ranging and include childbirth advice in...

Positioning consumer culture in Canada within a wider international context, Consuming Modernity explores the roots of modern Western mass culture between 1919 and 1945, when the female worker, student, and homemaker relied on new products to raise their standards of living and separate themselves from oppressive traditional attitudes. Mass-produced consumer expectations. This volume is a fascinating look at how the forces of consumerism defined and redefined a generation.

Positioning consumer culture in Canada within a wider international context, Consuming Modernity explores the roots of modern Western mass culture between 1919 and 1945, when the female worker, student, and homemaker relied on new products to raise their standards of living and separate themselves from oppressive traditional attitudes. Mass-produced consumer expectations. This volume is a fascinating look at how the forces of consumerism defined and redefined a generation.