The Case Against the Doctors: Gender, Authority, and Critical Science Writing in the 1960s

Abstract

Abstract In the 1960s, widespread popular-cultural deference to the authority of science and medicine in the United States began to wane as a generation of journalists and activists reevaluated and criticized researchers and physicians. This article uses the career of feminist journalist Barbara Seaman to show the role that the emerging genre of critical science writing played in this broader cultural shift. First writing from her position as a mother, then as the wife of a physician, and finally as a credentialed science writer, Seaman advanced through distinct categories of journalistic authority throughout the 1960s. An investigation of Seaman’s early years in the profession also vividly demonstrates the roles that gender and professional expertise played in both constricting and permitting new forms of critique during this era.