Week 7

The authors in both chapter 5 and chapter 7 of Autistic Community and the Neurodiversity Movement contributed their activism to support of others, especially in the beginning stages of their activism. I believe that it is crucial to have resources to pull from in activism including prior activists, peers, informative media, and anything else that may be beneficial. The most successful activist movements have a strong rally of support behind them and beside them, and the most successful activists welcome this support and use it to share their information and spread their message.

This is true of many women involved in early healthcare, whether that be through taking interest in how to treat women at a time when that aspect of medicine was especially neglected or training other female health care professionals when many hospitals and schools refused to. Here is a list of female medical industry pioneers, and as is discussed in the article, many of them went on to take a special interest in treating female patients or opened their own hospitals and educational facilities to treat female doctors and nurses. There is still discrimination against female healthcare providers, with the most common and easily recognizable issue being assuming that women who work in the medical industry are less trained or able to treat ailments. Some examples of this include assuming that female doctors are nurses, requesting male doctors instead of female doctors because they are not trusted, assuming that nursing is not a valuable or intellectual position because it is a "feminine" job, etc.