Many in the women's health movement embraced self-help, from reading the seminal text Our Bodies, Ourselves to performing illegal abortions as part of the infamous Jane Collective in Chicago.
[10] It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that women were pushed out of medicine by increasingly professionalized health care delivery in the United States.
[11] Throughout their early years, feminist health centers struggled to uphold their ideals while simultaneously meeting the needs of their clients and their employees.
It is always a compromise between the ideals by which it judges itself and the realities of its daily practices.” [12] Many clinics realized that change was necessary for their continued operations – for example, many feminist health centers began as collectives.
While many activists believed that collective decision-making promoted egalitarianism, most clinics found that reaching a consensus took too much time, especially as organizations grew to include more personnel and began to serve more clients.
The Women's Community Health Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts is an example of a clinic that maintained an unyielding commitment to its political values.
In 1988, during the Democratic National Convention held in Atlanta, the Feminist Women's Health Center was bombarded with hundreds of protestors outside its doors, making it difficult to continue clinic operations.
[26][27] Thus, some practices that were once deemed radical and found primarily in feminist health centers have become routine in medical facilities throughout the country.
[29][30] Furthermore, feminist health centers maintain a commitment to reaching underserved populations that is largely unseen in other medical providers.
Feminist health centers provide services to minorities, immigrants, refugees, the LGBTQI community, and the uninsured.