Editorial Women’s Health Across the Life Span: Contributions From Nursing Science

The demystification of women’s bodies was the cornerstone of the popular women’s health movement of the 1960s in the United States. Yet, despite early efforts to respond to this call for action, such as the Boston Women’s Health Book Collec-tive’s publication of Our Bodies Ourselves (1973), the scien-tific community was slow to respond to women’s need for information about their unique physiology. The National Insti-tutes of Health’s (NIH) Office of Research on Women’s Health (ORWH), for example, was not established until 1990. Nursing science was an exception to the scientific commu-nity’s early lack of attention to women’s health: By the time the OWHR published its first NIH Women’s Health Research Agenda (ORWH, 1991), women’s health research within nur-sing science was well established, reflecting an integrative view of women’s bodies coupled with a feminist critique of th