The Making of the “Women's Physician” in American Obstetrics and Gynecology: Re-Forging an Occupational Identity and a Division of Labor

Abstract

After struggling as a surgical specialty, obstetrics and gynecology initiated its “women's physician” program in the 1970s. This program officially defined the mostly male obstetricians and gynecologists at that time as women's primary care physicians. Using archival data, this article explains this development as a response to the specialty's dishonored position within the medical division of labor. Whatever else it was intended to be, the women's physician program, in its most developed form, aimed to galvanize the various interests within obstetrics and gynecology behind a strategy to restructure the medical division of labor serving women so that obstetricians and gynecologists controlled both the upstream positions responsible for their own case referrals and the downstream positions to which they referred their difficult cases. The article illustrates the importance of integrating insights from both macro-institutional and intra-occupational explanatory frameworks in accounting for significant developments in medicine.