her foundation and how she taught other women about the speculum abortion technique. She is also an immigration lawyer in the Los Angeles area. Self-help movement The self-help movement started with the formation of self-help groups across the United States as a reaction to the experiences women had with gynecologists in the 1950s and 1960s. It a structural response to the absolute authority of doctors, the objectification of women's bodies in health care, and the increasing dehumanization of the practice and field of medicine. The women in these groups believed that women and their bodily experiences were the best knowledge holders of women's bodies. That was their central epistemological principle. Downer was one of the so-called "self-helpers." Self-help gynecology Self-Help gynecology was the basis of the movement's critique of the mystification of women's bodies and the monopoly of knowledge held by doctors. It was a consciousness-raising technique and involved the conceptualization of health and illness in a fundamentally different manner than the manner common at the time. Self-help gynecology was conceptualized as an ongoing, routine health care process. This had the effect of eliminating and/or minimizing the distinction between medical providers and experts, and the receivers and lay persons. Downer and the practice of self-help gynecology had many critics, including those from within feminism. Some feminists felt shocked and offended at Downer and Rothman's self-examination presentations. Other feminists worried this practice would take attention away from the other efforts of the women's health movement, such as legislative and judicial reform. Some were concerned that the self-help groups themselves were merely an outlet for women to air their grievances of mainstream medical institutions and did not involve any real change. There were also those who worried that self-help gynecology would lead to an overreliance on it and would cause women to neglecting to visit their physician when experiencing serious conditions. To this, activists argued that self-help gynecology could be used in conjunction with mainstream medicine. Significance to feminism Some scholars, such as Hannah Grace Dudley Shotwell, argue that self-help activists revolutionized women's healthcare by way of creating an entire system of alternative healthcare options. The movement gave activists the opportunity to gain "body-knowledge," which was self-representations of their own embodied experience. Activists were able to reconstruct negative cultural message of women's reproductive bodies, especially messages of female genitals and fluids that reinforced traditional sex roles. By understanding their own bodies through