Women's Health: Contents of Volume 45, Supplement II (2003)

This supplement gathers several papers centered on women's health, with contributors writing from both European and American research settings. The topics run from the social weight of body image to the day-to-day reality of living with long-term illness, and on through cancer, reproductive life, and the quality of that life as patients themselves describe it.

Judy M. Price and Vid Pecjak open with a piece on obesity and the stigma that follows it, treating weight not only as a medical question but as something that shapes how women are judged and how they move through the world. Their argument places stigma squarely inside the conversation about women's health rather than off to the side.

Ilse Kryspin-Exner, together with R. Jagsch, B. Hoheisel, E. Lackerbauer, N. Six, and B. U. Stetina, looks at chronic illness from a European vantage point. The contribution sets out how long-term conditions are understood and managed across that context.

Terry A. Cronan and Silvia M. Bigatti stay with chronic illness but turn to specifics, examining the psychological and physical profiles of women who live with osteoarthritis and with fibromyalgia. The pairing lets them draw out what these two conditions share and where they diverge.

Bigatti returns, this time with Christina Wagner, to write about breast cancer and the psychosocial fallout it carries. Their focus widens past the patient to take in families, treating the diagnosis as something that reaches everyone in the household.

Elfriede Greimel, with F. Peintinger, I. Cegnar, E. Pongratz, and I. Thiel, raises a methodological question that matters for care: when we measure the quality of life of women with gynecological cancer, how closely do proxy ratings match what the women report about themselves? The gap between the two tells us something about whose judgment we are really recording.

Margaret W. Matlin traces reproductive life from menarche to menopause and picks apart the misconceptions that cling to each stage. Her piece reads as a correction, clearing away assumptions that have long been treated as fact.

Roswith Roth closes with sexual and reproductive life, weighing gender equality in reproductive health across Western Europe and the United States. The comparison asks how far equality in this area has actually traveled in two parts of the world that often assume they lead.