Judith A. Houck, <i>Looking through the Speculum: Examining the Women’s Health Movement</i> Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024. Pp. 384. ISBN 978-0-226-83086-5. $35.00 (paper).

American women are living through a moment of political reckoning in health care.In the wake of the Supreme Court's Dobbs v. Jackson decision in 2022, which overturned Roe v. Wade and led to the loss of abortion access across much of the country, long-standing questions of bodily autonomy, medical authority and reproductive health delivery have gained renewed urgency.Who gets to decide what women can and cannot do with their bodies, particularly when it comes to reproductive care?How, where and by whom should that care be performed?These questions are far from new, but in the current landscape, the demands of health consumers and activists can seem almost quaint in their simplicity.The late, great, bombastic feminist health journalist Barbara Seaman would have called this the pursuit of 'pelvic autonomy' -and she did, fifty years ago.In Looking through the Speculum, Judith A. Houck revisits the women who first asked these questions and proposed creative solutions to the crisis in health care a half-century ago.The book is both a long-awaited and definitive synthesis of the women's health movement as a whole and a novel deep dive into some of its more neglected and complicated elements.Grounded in the grass roots -and viewed, as the title suggests, through the speculum itself -Houck's book offers something like a historical and historiographic well-woman exam: attentive, probing and committed to uncovering what lies beneath the surface.Houck presents a carefully crafted and beautifully organized narrative of the movement's history.In a series of paired chapters, she moves from a general history of feminist health activism to specific studies of abortion care provision, the identity politics of lesbian health and the movement's struggle to fully translate its theories into practice when it came to issues of race and class.Chapters 1 and 2 set the stage (or, rather, exam table ), showing how activists in the 1970s envisioned more woman-centered and affirming health spaces as a radical contrast to the paternalistic, sexist and often dehumanizing baseline of mainstream medicine.They attempted to build practices and counterinstitutions of their own as alternatives.This is the genesis of 'self-help' gynaecology, featuring the now-iconic DIY cervical selfexams and the broader project of reclaiming bodily knowledge.The spirit of self-help was also adopted within newly founded feminist clinics.Even if they were formal health care providers in (re-envisioned) clinical spaces, they reconciled radical ideals within regulatory and institutional realities at scale.Chapters 3 and 4 focus on abortion, particularly on the new post-Roe tension between desiring woman-controlled practices on the one hand and establishing formalized clinical