Women s History will be history conference that looks to the future as much as to the past. And on what we can learn from the past and from women s experience around the world as we face the future. The history of women s bodies is central to the history of women, just as women s own health has always been central to the quality of their lives.
Women remain the greatest consumers of therapies either as patients or as carers of patients.
In a mere hundred years, however, western biomedicine has transformed human health and reproduction, offering for the first time reliable fertility control, safer childbirth, healthier babies, less infection, childbirth without pain, hormonal therapies, the conquest of infertility. Women also have shaped biomedicine as health professionals and as alert and critical clients. The renewal of the women s movement in the late 1960s brought a new concern with women s health and with women s relationship with biomedicine. And much of the most thoughtful work has come from historians of medicine and science. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century we need to take stock, and to do so with a global perspective.