In Her Hands examines the various strategies women have utilized to fight for recognition as individuals vulnerable to and living with HIV/AIDS across multiple settings since the 1980s. Taking a new chronological and thematic approach to the study of the US epidemic, it explores five arenas of women’s AIDS activism: transmission and recognition, reproductive justice, safer sex campaigns for queer women, the carceral state, and HIV prevention and treatment. In so doing, it moves the historical understanding of women’s experiences of AIDS beyond their exclusion from the initial medical response and the role women played as the supporters of gay men. Asking how and on what terms women succeeded in securing state support, In Her Hands argues that women protesting the neglect of their health-care needs always risked encountering punitive intervention on behalf of the symbolic needs of fetuses and children – as well as wider society – deemed to need protecting from them.

Emma Day is a historian of the twentieth century United States specialising in the intersections between sexuality and gender and medicine and disease. She is currently working on a new project which examines the making of medical knowledge on the reproductive and non-reproductive body in the twentieth century US.