VOLUME 30 , NUMBER 5 May 1999

Women's health exhibit draws on psychology

Exhibit, now in Baltimore, will tour 10 cities.

By Patrick A. McGuire
Monitor staff

An APA psychologist and a sociologist were key advisers to the first of its kind national exhibit on women's health, which opened in March in Baltimore, and will tour 10 cities in the next five years.

Psychologist Gwendolyn P. Keita, PhD, APA's associate executive director of the Public Interest Directorate and director of women's programs, and Anne Kasper, PhD, a senior scientist with APA's Div. 9 (Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues), lent their expertise to the creation of "The Changing Face of Women's Health." The $3.2 million exhibit was spearheaded by the Maryland Science Center on behalf of the National Health Sciences Consortium, an organization of science centers across the United States.

Covering 3,000 square feet, the exhibit was four years in the making and offers an interactive approach to understanding the dramatic changes that have taken place in women's health in the past 50 years.

Visitors, for example, can look through magnifying glasses at bones to see how osteoporosis thins and weakens a woman's skeletal structure. They are able to detect lumps in actual breast models used by doctors and nurses in training programs. And men are encouraged to try on a prosthesis made up to simulate the weight gain a pregnant woman undergoes.

In addition, videos show women discussing aspects of diseases they have endured. Still other displays offer the latest information on topics such as heart disease, stress and depression.

"Gwen and Anne were really helpful to us in advising on different aspects of health issues with mental health implications and the appropriate way to talk about them," says Stephanie Ratcliffe, director of exhibits at the Maryland Science Center. "In the end, we gave them the entire script to review. They really understood the task at hand."

Keita and Kasper say they were pleased that the Maryland Science Center did not take a more limited biomedical approach to the exhibit. They agreed on the importance of showing the psychosocial and behavioral factors that affect women's health, and of taking a life-span perspective--both of which are reflected in the exhibit.

"They have addressed some major issues in a sensitive way and they seem successful in their objective of making this an exhibit for and about 'all' women," says Keita, noting that women of color are included throughout the exhibit.

"Women's health issues were largely ignored until the late 1980s," she says, "when women scientists, working with women legislators began to bring attention to the fact that women were often excluded from clinical research, and to the lack of information available on women's health."

Since then, she says, "There really have been some major advances. So an exhibit that deals with women's health would be a natural next step. Still, the exhibit is a very pleasant surprise."

Kasper says that she is heartened that women's health has drawn such interest from the public and the scientific community that such an exhibit is possible.

"Less than two decades ago," she says, "women's health was buried in privacy and left to a woman and her physician."

The exhibit, focusing on prevention, detection, risk, control and resources, will be in Baltimore until August. Between October 1999 and August 2003, it will be in Atlanta, New York, Portland, Ore., San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles.

For more information, visit the
exhibit's web site at www.whealth.org.

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