| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Kirsten E. Gardner. Early Detection: Women, Cancer, and Awareness Campaigns in the Twentieth-Century United States. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2006. Pp. xii, 283. Cloth $55.00, paper 21.95.

In 1974, when the First Lady Betty Ford announced her mastectomy, activists heralded a new day, with breast cancer "out of the closet" and its victims no longer shamed into avoiding early treatment. In this book, historian Kirsten E. Gardner demonstrates just how short memories can be. Throughout the twentieth century, such prominent groups as the American Association of University Women, the Women's Field Army of the American Society for the Control of Cancer, the General Federation of Women's Clubs, and the American Cancer Society had conducted vigorous public health campaigns, trafficking in the discourse of early detection and early treatment as guarantees of cure. In doing so they had frankly discussed topics that might have been taboo in the nineteenth century, such as diseases of the breast, ovaries, uterus, and cervix. They placed articles in women's magazines, distributed pamphlets in doctors' offices, sponsored lectures, and held public meetings, always trumpeting the virtues of early detection. By the time of Betty Ford's surgery, few topics in women's health had been more discussed than cancer, and Gardner's book dispassionately describes the crusade with keen insight.

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