This research examines gender issues relative to women's health care. The research will examine why, even in the 21st century, health care is not administered on a gender-equal basis. It will be shown that, despite attempts by the health-care infrastructure of the Anglo-American culture to develop certain health-related protocols geared for the special health-care needs of women, the weight of evidence is on the side of the view that women as a group do not receive the level of medical care that is available to their male counterparts. The situation is especially significant if the women in question are known to be lesbians. Central to this research will be development of the argument that the reasons for the palpable "engendered" inequity embedded into the health-care system have to do with protocols and attitudes that emerged in the health-care system that dominated the Victorian era. It will be seen that cultural attitudes toward homosexuality may have changed from the 19th through the 20th century but that, despite the emergence of apparently progressive attitudes toward women with a homosexual orientation, the hard truth is that because of their sexual identity lesbians are placed in an inferior position where the question is one of obtaining the best possible health care. Accordingly, this research will discuss how and why the particular relationship that women identified as homosexuals have had with prevailing health-care protocols and service providers from the Victorian era to the present day, with a view toward forecasting possible lines of policy resolution and change for the future.
A realistic picture of the gender-related inequities embedded in the contemporary health-care system must include knowing how they developed, particularly relative to the debt modern protocols owe to nineteenth-century health-care norms. In the nineteenth century, the mainstream view of health care valorized the knowledge and training of the ...