The Month That Started in Fury

How women’s health became a federal observance — and why we’re still
owed answers

By Kimberly Curtis | Founder, Future Focus Female | Certified Ayurvedic Life Coach · iPEC Energy
Leadership Coach · Perimenopause Protocol Designer

Every May, you’ll see the graphics. Soft pinks, gentle photography, hopeful messaging. National Women’s Health Week. National Women’s Health Month. Hashtags about prevention and self-care and prioritizing yourself.

What you don’t see is the story of how those graphics came to exist.
This is that story. And it doesn’t start in a wellness magazine. It starts in a federal building in 1977 — with a guideline that did something almost unbelievable in retrospect.

It banned most women from medical research

Not by accident. Not as oversight. By formal written federal guidance issued by the Food and Drug Administration.

And the consequences of that decision are still showing up in your bloodwork, your prescriptions, and your doctor’s appointments today.

The Ban

In 1977, the FDA issued a guideline excluding women of “childbearing potential” from Phase I and early Phase II clinical trials. The rationale was protection — specifically, protection from the kind of devastating birth defects caused by thalidomide, a sedative prescribed in Europe and Australia in the early 1960s that resulted in more than 10,000 infant deaths and birth defects.

The motivation was understandable. The execution was catastrophic.

Because the term “childbearing potential” was interpreted as broadly as possible. It didn’t mean pregnant women. It didn’t mean women trying to conceive. It meant any woman who was theoretically capable of becoming pregnant — which, in practice, meant nearly every premenopausal woman in America.

Single women were excluded. Women using contraception were excluded. Women whose partners had vasectomies were excluded. Women who were not sexually active were excluded. The New England Journal of Medicine later documented that researchers consistently interpreted the guideline more strictly than the FDA had even intended.

And so for sixteen years — from 1977 until the policy was reversed in 1993 — most women were systematically excluded from the studies that determined how drugs worked, what doses were safe, and what side effects to expect.

That meant the antidepressants women were prescribed had been studied on male physiology. The blood pressure medications. The sleep aids. The pain protocols. The cardiac drugs. The anxiety medications.

Tested on men. Approved for everyone. Handed to women by assumption.

The Contradiction Nobody Wants to Talk About

Here is the part that most awareness-month graphics will never put on a pastel infographic.

During those same sixteen years that women were banned from research to “protect” their reproductive potential — the pharmaceutical industry was actively prescribing hormonal medications to women, including adolescent girls, that had never been studied on female bodies in any meaningful way.

Hormonal birth control was prescribed to teenagers to “regulate” their cycles. To “smooth out” their hormones. To “manage” their acne. To make their periods more convenient.

I was one of those teenagers. Junior year of high school, 1990. Prescribed a synthetic hormone protocol designed to suppress the very biological architecture that was still developing in my body — and handed to me by a system that had simultaneously decided women were too biologically valuable to be included in the research that would tell us whether any of it was safe.

The same system that wouldn’t study us was prescribing to us

Read that sentence again. Slowly.

They wouldn’t research adult women’s drug responses because we might one day be pregnant. But they would prescribe synthetic hormones to a 16-year-old girl whose hormonal system was still under construction — and call it routine care.

That is not a contradiction the women’s health movement made up. That is the documented history of American medicine in the second half of the twentieth century.

How May Became Women’s Health Month

The fury that built up during those sixteen years didn’t come from inside the medical establishment. It didn’t come from a White House initiative or a pharmaceutical company task force.

It came from women.

It came from the Boston women who self-published “Our Bodies, Ourselves” in 1970 and passed it around like contraband because the information in it — basic anatomy, reproductive function, sexual health — wasn’t being offered anywhere else. It came from the National Women’s Health Network, founded in 1975, which began testifying before Congress about the patterns nobody else was naming. It came from women like Dr. Florence Haseltine, who in 1990 helped found the Society for the Advancement of Women’s Health Research after her own research grants on female-specific conditions kept getting buried.

Their pressure built. The 1985 Public Health Service Task Force on Women’s Health Issues released its first report. The first HHS Office on Women’s Health was established in 1991. The 1993 NIH Revitalization Act made the inclusion of women in federally funded research the law of the land. And in 1999, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services inaugurated National Women’s Health Week — a seven-day observance starting on Mother’s Day each May, eventually expanding into the broader Women’s Health Month we recognize today.

That observance you scroll past in your feed every May? It exists because women got loud enough that the federal government had to respond.

It was not given. It was demanded.

What It Achieved — And What It Didn’t

Twenty-six years after the 1993 reversal of the FDA ban, progress has been real. Women now participate in clinical trials. The NIH requires sex-specific data analysis. There are dedicated offices for women’s health research at the federal level. Some of the worst gaps have closed.

But here’s what the awareness graphics still don’t tell you.

Only about 11 percent of the annual NIH budget goes toward women’s health research. Lab reference ranges — the “normal” values your doctor uses to determine whether you’re healthy — were largely established on male-dominant study populations and have never been comprehensively re-evaluated for female physiology across the lifespan. Heart disease in women still presents differently than in men, is still under-diagnosed, and is still treated with protocols developed primarily on male cardiovascular data.

Perimenopause — the decade-long hormonal transition that affects every woman who lives long enough to experience it — remains one of the most under-researched, under-taught, and under-treated phases in the entire arc of human medicine. Most medical schools dedicate a few hours of curriculum to it. Most physicians cannot accurately describe its full symptom range. Most women navigate it by trial and error and Google searches and the wisdom of friends who got there a few years ahead of them.

Hashimoto’s. Hypothyroidism. Adrenal depletion. Postpartum depression. Autoimmune conditions that disproportionately affect women. PMDD. Endometriosis — still taking an average of seven to ten years to diagnose. The list of conditions where the research is thin, the treatments are reactive, and the lived experience of women is still being dismissed as anxiety or stress or hormonal complaint is long enough to fill its own book.

Why This Matters Right Now

If you are a woman reading this in May 2026, here is what I want you to understand.

The pastel awareness graphics are not the story. The story is the fury that came before the awareness was even legally possible. The story is about the women who refused to disappear into a system that was content to dose them with drugs it had never studied. The story is about the mothers and grandmothers who wrote the textbook the medical establishment refused to write — and the daughters and granddaughters who are still living with the consequences of those sixteen lost years.

If you have ever sat in a doctor’s office and been told your symptoms are “just stress” — there is a historical reason that pattern persists, and it is not your imagination.

If you have ever been prescribed a medication and been surprised by side effects nobody warned you about — there is a documented reason your dose may not have been calibrated to your physiology.

If you are navigating perimenopause right now and feeling like the medical system you trusted for decades suddenly has nothing useful to offer you — that is not a failure of your communication or your resilience. It is the predictable downstream consequence of a research gap that began in 1977 and is only now, slowly, being addressed.

You are not crazy. You are not weak. You are not failing. You are walking through a system that was built without you in mind.

And that is exactly why I built Future Focus Female. Not because the medical system is irredeemable — it is not. But because the gap between what science currently knows about female physiology and what women actually need to thrive is wider than any pastel graphic will ever admit.

Ayurveda offers a 5,000-year-old framework that has been studying female-specific physiology continuously, generation after generation, with no FDA ban, no research exclusion, no “childbearing potential” caveat. Modern functional medicine is finally catching up to questions that traditional systems have been answering for millennia. The keto-Ayurvedic approach I teach is not a rejection of Western medicine — it is a refusal to wait for Western medicine to finish researching us before we start living well.

This series — “Why Women Are Still Waiting” — is going to walk you through, piece by piece, the specific places where the gaps are still real. Birth control prescribed without proper research. Perimenopause as the decade the system skips. Lab reference ranges that were never built for you. The anatomy research that still hasn’t been done.

Each piece will name the gap. And each piece will offer you a way through.

Because the women who came before us didn’t fight for a federal observance. They fought for our right to actually understand our own bodies.

That fight isn’t over. It just changed clothes.

Coming Next in This Series

Blog 2 — “They Called It Protection” — drops Friday, May 22. The story of hormonal birth control, the contradiction of “protecting” women by banning research while prescribing synthetic hormones to adolescents, and what every woman who took the pill before 1993 deserves to know about what she was actually given.

Blogs 3, 4, and 5 will follow through June and July, covering perimenopause as the medical decade skipped, lab reference ranges that were never built on female physiology, and the anatomy research gap that still hasn’t been closed.

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With fury and with hope,
Kimberly

Disclaimer

The information shared in this article is for educational and informational purposes only. Kimberly Curtis is a Certified Ayurvedic Life Coach, Yoga Instructor, iPEC Energy Leadership Coach, Culinary Chef (Dublin), Somatic Coach (in certification), Integrative Wellness Educator, and Perimenopause Protocol Designer. She is not a licensed medical professional, and nothing in this article should be construed as medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, or a substitute for consultation with a qualified healthcare provider. Always consult your physician or another qualified health professional regarding any medical conditions, medications, or health concerns. Historical references and statistical data cited in this article are drawn from publicly available sources, including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office on Women’s Health, and peer-reviewed medical journals.