The articles began to pop up almost immediately after Nov. 8, speaking to readers in a tone of grave concern, like a dear friend comforting you after a breakup or the death of a loved one. Podcast hosts and media personalities (Slate staff included) shared their own coping methods for perilous times.
“Get off social media,” they implored. “Round up your favorite girlfriends and hit some bars, slam some chasers, and take your rage out on some truly regrettable karaoke.” “Give yourself a makeover like you’re seven years old and at a sleepover.”
It’s not that “self-care”—as the concept of consciously tending to one’s own well-being has become known—was invented during the election season. But in 2016, self-care officially crossed over into the mainstream. It was the new chicken soup for the progressive soul. The week after the election, Americans Googled the term almost twice as often as they ever had in years past. Many of them simply wondered, “What is this thing?” Months later, others still wondered where it came from.
Self-care originally caught on as a medical concept. Doctors have long discussed it as a way for patients to treat themselves and exercise healthy habits, most often under the guidance of a health professional. Prior to the late 1960s and early 1970s, these patients were usually mentally ill and elderly people who required long-term care and otherwise had little autonomy.
Later, academics began to look for ways for workers in more high-risk and emotionally daunting professions—trauma therapists, social workers, EMTs, and so on—to combat stress brought on by the job. The belief driving this work was that one cannot adequately take on the problems of others without taking care of oneself (by reading for pleasure or taking the occasional vacation, for instance)—a sentiment you still hear from activists today. And that applied not just to physical welfare but to mental and emotional health.
It wasn’t until the rise of the women’s movement and the civil rights movement that self-care became a political act. Women and people of color viewed controlling their health as a corrective to the failures of a white, patriarchal medical system to properly tend to their needs.
As Jennifer Nelson wrote in her book, More Than Medicine: A History of the Feminist Women’s Health Movement, a push to redefine health care beyond just treatment of the individual body gained steam within various movements in the ’60s. Activists saw that poverty was correlated with poor health, and they argued that in order to dismantle hierarchies based upon race, gender, class, and sexual orientation, those groups must be able to live healthy lives. In turn, living healthily “required the involvement of individuals and communities in their own health promotion.”
