A feminist health center is an independent, not-for-profit, alternative medical facility that primarily provides gynecological health care. Many feminist health centers were founded in the 1970s as part of the women's health movement in the United States. These centers were founded with the purposes of challenging the medicalization of health care, providing an alternative to mainstream health facilities, and increasing access to gynecological information and services for all women, regardless of race, class, sexual orientation, or insurance coverage. History Feminist health centers emerged as a part of the women's health movement in the 1970s. The women's health movement grew out of social movements of the 1960s, including the New Left, the Civil Rights Movement, and dissatisfaction with the delivery of women's health care. Members of the women's health movement saw health care as a highly politicized issue and wanted to challenge the racism, classism, and sexism they saw in professionalized medicine. In her history of the women's health movement, feminist anthropologist Sandra Morgen notes, “Feminist clinics never accounted for the majority of women’s health movement groups. But […] they were vanguard organizations that were fertile soils for many of the movement’s innovations.” Feminist health centers were intended as a challenge to the way mainstream health care was delivered. 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. The philosophy of self-help was practiced in feminist health centers by the teaching of cervical self-exam, and also by creating a more collaborative relationship between the health care provider (who was not necessarily a physician) and patient. The Federation of Feminist Women's Health Centers, an organized, nationwide group of feminist health centers, published self-help books such as "How To Stay Out of the Gynecologist's Office." These books went further than expanding women's knowledge about their own bodies by additionally enabling women to treat some common infections, such as UTIs and yeast infections, with home remedies. Health activists decried the “doctor knows best” model of care, noting that the professionalization of medical care had excluded women as both providers and consumers of medical care. The body of scholarship that emerged from the women's health movement underscores the fact that, historically, women had been health care providers for millennia. It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that women were pushed out of medicine by increasingly