Jennifer Block

press release: A Room of One's Own welcomes journalist Jennifer Block, author of Everything Below the Waist: Why Health Care Needs a Feminist Revolution!

Everything Below the Waist: Why Healthcare Needs a Feminist Revolution, provides an eye-opening, investigative account of how the U.S. health system is failing women specifically. Block examines several staples of modern health care, from fertility technology to contraception to pelvic surgery to miscarriage treatment, and finds that while overdiagnosis and overtreatment persist in medicine writ large, they are particularly acute for women. Feminism turned the world upside down, yet to a large extent the doctor's office has remained stuck in time. Block returns to the 1970s women's health movement to understand what is achieved, and what remains unfinished. Block challenges people and clinicians to examine historic notions of female biology as oppressive. She asks: “Do we sometimes confuse medical technology with empowerment…Are we relying on medicine as a workaround for social change?”

Jennifer Block is an award-winning journalist and winner of a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant. A reporter with Type Investigations, Block has written for The Washington Post magazine, The Cut, Newsweek, Pacific Standard, Quartz, Reveal, and many others. Her first book Pushed was named a “Best of” by Kirkus Reviews and Library Journal and led a wave of national attention to the crisis in maternity care.