Kathy Davis is a Senior Researcher at the Research Institute for History and Culture at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Her books include The Handbook of Gender and Women’s Studies (coedited with Mary Evans and Judith Lorber), Dubious Equalities and Embodied Differences: Cultural Studies on Cosmetic Surgery, and Embodied Practices: Feminist Perspectives on the Body.

THE MAKING of Our Bodies, Ourselves

HOW FEMINISM TRAVELS ACROSS BORDERSBy Kathy Davis

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2007 DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4045-4

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS……………………………………………………………………………………..ixINTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………………………..11 OBOS in the United States: The Enigma of a Feminist “Success Story”……………………………………..192 OBOS Abroad: From “Center” to “Periphery” and Back…………………………………………………….503 Between Empowerment and Bewitchment: The Myth of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective…………………854 Reclaiming Women’s Bodies: Colonialist Trope or Critical Epistemology?…………………………………..1205 Creating Feminist Subjects: The Reader and the Text……………………………………………………1426 Oppositional Translations and Imagined Communities: Adapting OBOS……………………………………….1697 Transnational Knowledges, Transnational Politics………………………………………………………197APPENDIX 1. Foreign-Language Editions of OBOS…………………………………………………………..214APPENDIX 2. Books Inspired by OBOS…………………………………………………………………….217APPENDIX 3. Translations and Adaptations of OBOS in Progress……………………………………………..218APPENDIX 4. Translations and Adaptations of OBOS Seeking Funds for Start-up………………………………..219NOTES………………………………………………………………………………………………221BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………………..253INDEX………………………………………………………………………………………………273

Chapter One

OBOS in the United States

THE ENIGMA OF A FEMINIST “SUCCESS STORY”

The scene is the summer cottage of one of the members of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. It is a sunny day in July 2000, and three of the founders of the collective have agreed to meet with me and talk about the book that played such an important part in their lives, as well as the lives of women all over the world. There is still plenty of food on the table after our delicious lunch, and our bathing suits are hanging out to dry on the deck after our swim in the lake. But we’re here to work. I am armed with my trusty tape recorder, and they immediately begin to spread out the different editions of OBOS on the floor.

It’s an impressive display. From the early papers (typed and stapled) to the first underground publication in 1970 to the most recent Our Bodies Ourselves for the New Century in 1998, there are seven different editions of the book. Then there are the additional books produced by members of the collective, Ourselves and Our Children (BWHBC 1978), Changing Bodies, Changing Lives (Bell et al. [1987, 1991] 1998), Ourselves Growing Older (Worters and Siegal 1987, 1994), and Sacrificing Ourselves for Love (Wegscheider and Rome 1996). And, last but not least, there is the first self-publication in Spanish for the United States, Nuestros Cuerpos, Nuestra Vidas (1977), along with some of the foreign editions of the book.

Three decades of OBOS were before my eyes. It’s clear at a glance just how much water has flowed under the bridge. The first edition looks like it should be in a sealed case in a library. The pages are yellowing and fragile newsprint with the title Women and Their Bodies: A Course, by the Boston Women’s Health Collective, written by hand. This first edition is a booklet of less than two hundred pages, just twelve chapters with one or two authors for each, and all for the unbelievable price of seventy-five cents. The cover features a photograph of two smiling Anglo-American women, one young and one old, bearing a banner that reads “Women Unite.” It’s the heyday of the women’s liberation movement.

In contrast, the 1998 edition is a tome of 780 pages, a glossy and somewhat intimidating reference book. It has not only grown in length, with twenty-seven chapters, but there are now three pages of contributors. The price has risen to twenty-four dollars. There are long lists of references and professional photographs. The title indicates that this is not just a course but a book for the future. The cover still has the original “Women Unite” photograph, but it has shrunk considerably and now is surrounded by many other photographs of individual women of different ages and ethnicities. One is pregnant, one has a baby at her breast, while others are gardening or engaged in sports. There are some photographs of friends together. One of the founders explains, somewhat ruefully, that the cover was supposed to project a kind of “family of man” without looking too much like “something my mother would read.”

This chapter explores the trajectory that OBOS took from the first edition in 1970 to the latest edition in 2005. I draw on interviews and group discussions with members of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, as well as excerpts from the various editions of the book, in order to show how OBOS changed in content, form, and political message over a period of more than three decades. Situating these changes in the shifting social, cultural, and political landscape of the book’s production and reception, I address the question of how a popular book on women’s health, written for and by laywomen, could become such a long-standing success within the United States.

The Early Years

“It’s hard to say where the beginning starts,” says Nancy Miriam Hawley, but “probably in the early spring of 1969.” It was a time of activism (the civil rights movement, draft resistance, student protests) and a budding counterculture. The women’s liberation movement had just begun. Hawley was involved in organizing one of the first women’s liberation conferences in Boston at Emmanuel College. There were workshops on different issues-everything from women and work to self defense-and her workshop was entitled Women and Their Bodies.

“It was a very exhilarating workshop,” Paula Doress-Worters remembers. They talked about sexuality, abortion, birth control, and childbirth. Everyone had a “doctor story”-that is, a tale about male physicians who were sexist, paternalistic, judgmental, or simply unable to provide the information that women needed.

The group decided to continue meeting. The first plan was to assemble a list of “good doctors.” However, every time someone suggested the name of a doctor, another woman would have something negative to report. The list dwindled until they finally decided that if they were not to be at the mercy of these doctors they would just have to get information about their bodies themselves.

By the fall of 1969, they were meeting regularly. The group at this point was very fluid, with women bringing their friends or sisters. Many heard about the group by word of mouth. Because, unlike today, there was so little information available on women’s health, they began doing the research themselves. It was often difficult to even get into medical libraries and sometimes involved the clandestine borrowing of library cards from bona fide medical students.

We started to write little bits of experiences down, and little fragments of knowledge down, and if you were lucky or smart or something, you’d go to a library and maybe find a book on something you were writing about, but that was very rare. There wasn’t that much information anywhere. Then you’d bring back whatever you could glean to the group; you’d tell people what you’d found and they’d say, “Oh, that’s fine but what about this experience?” Or “This happened to me” or “This is the way my husband felt about me when I was pregnant.” So you would just basically write down what everybody said. I think because a lot of us were college-trained, we ended up writing things down.

They met weekly to discuss their findings, adding questions and personal experiences from women in the group. It wasn’t until 1970 that they decided they were ready to offer a course on what they had discovered. The term course is misleading to our modern ears, suggesting a teacher imparting information to a captive audience. In contrast, these courses were more like consciousness-raising groups. Women would do research on different subjects, write it up, mimeograph it, and hand it out in the group. They quickly abandoned the idea of trying to read the papers as everyone was impatient to talk. They would go around in a circle, with each woman telling her story. If the topic was menstruation, women would talk about when they first got their period, experiences with menstruation, what it was like to have terrible cramps and “have a doctor pat you on the head and say, “Just wait until you have babies; it’ll be fine then.” Under the motto “the personal is political,” they attempted to develop a political awareness about economic and social systems that make women sick or influence the kind of health care available to them. They asked political questions about every topic: “Why hasn’t anyone done research on this? Why is so much research done on men’s heart problems when there is nothing on women’s menstrual cramps or bladder infections?”

Wendy Sanford remembers her first experience attending one of these courses with a friend: “We drove over there together, we found the room at MIT, and we walked into this huge lounge of fifty women talking about sex. I was just flabbergasted and really shy, and they were talking about masturbation, which was a word that I never heard said out loud … much less the words clitoris and orgasm. I mean, those were all words that I had never heard said out loud. And it was … I listened. I didn’t say anything. I listened.”

Two women who had attended the course and worked at the New England Free Press (a small movement publisher) came up with the idea of publishing the papers. The group rewrote their papers, adding the responses from women who had participated in the course, and handed them over to the publisher under the title Women and Their Bodies: A Course by and for Women. It became an overnight sensation, selling 250,000 copies in the first year. Women were reading it as far away as Seattle and New Mexico. The New England Free Press published two editions in 1970 and 1971, the latter under the title Our Bodies, Ourselves.

The chapters were short, ranging from five pages on anatomy to twenty-four pages on childbirth. Other topics were sexuality, venereal disease, birth control, abortion, postpartum, myths about women, and medicine and capitalism. The book reflected the interests of the authors, who were young, white, college-educated women, many of whom were raising small children.

It’s important to remember that these first editions were not a book but course material to be used in a group for discussion. They were never considered a finished product…. For example, the 1971 edition begins with a note: “We want to add chapters on menopause and getting older and attitudes to children … would you like to make suggestions, write up your own experience, or otherwise work on the course? Please write us. The course is what all of us make of it.”… It was very open and forward looking. There was a sense of “there’s always another way to look at it.” It’s paradoxical that the material later became a book to be read alone by a woman in her own room.

These first editions of OBOS were very much a product of the political climate of the late sixties. In character with the times, there was a strong emphasis on sexuality and reproduction. Abortion was still illegal; birth control was unsafe and not always available. Feminists were beginning to take a critical look at what the so-called sexual revolution meant for women. Primarily white, middle-class, college-educated women, they assumed that other women would share their experiences and interests-a stance that would come back to haunt them as differences among women became an issue of concern both within the women’s movement and among feminist scholars. The book was not only liberally spiced with phrases such as “we as women,” but it treated issues that later would prove to be complex and contested in a deceptively matter-of-fact fashion. For example, in 1971 they wrote that “probably the most insidious mistruth about abortion is that of the so-called post-abortion guilt feelings” (BWHBC 1971, 70a), failing to anticipate the personal and normative objections that were to fuel the massive antiabortion movement just a few years later. They also took a straightforwardly oppositional stance toward medicine, adopting the anticapitalist jargon of social movements of the era. The enemy was identified as the capitalist health care system, which was decried as “no more dedicated to improving the people’s health than … General Motors [is] … to improving people’s public transportation” (136).

Feminist Best Seller

By the fall of 1971, the group was receiving letters from women from all over the country who had things to add. The members of the group realized that they needed to update the book. At the same time, they were being wooed by commercial publishers. As one member put it, “It was a total shock, really … it was like ‘Oh, my. What do we do now?’ It was very controversial to be thinking about going with a ‘capitalist pig publisher.'” After “hours and hours of soul-searching discussions” about whether they would be “selling out,” they decided that being able to get the book out quickly to more women in more places had priority. They finally decided to give their book to Simon and Schuster, explaining their decision to their readers in the last New England Free Press edition (accompanied by an accusing rejoinder from the New England Free Press). They consulted a lawyer, who helped them negotiate a contract that proved to be nothing short of phenomenal-even by today’s standards. They had complete editorial control over the content of the book, as well as the right to veto any photographs they did not like. They insisted on a clause that allowed clinics serving women to get bulk discounts on all copies of OBOS. And, finally, the contract included a simultaneous Spanish translation, which would be distributed in the United States. It was in the wake of negotiating this contract that the BWHBC was officially formed from the core group of twelve women, which had crystallized from the fluid membership of the first years. The BWHBC became a legal corporation and did not take on any new members until the nineties.

The first commercial edition of OBOS appeared in 1973 and was revised and updated in 1976 and 1979. It was an immediate success, selling nearly 2.5 million copies by 1976. The increased public exposure of the book brought laudatory reviews nationwide and positive responses from readers, educators, and physicians, some of whom even suggested that it be included in the medical curriculum. It appeared on the New York Times best seller list in 1976 and 1977. The Chronicle of Higher Education listed it as fifth in 1973 and fourth in 1974 on its list of best-selling books on U.S. college campuses. In 1976, it was named one of the ten all-time best books for young people by the American Library Association. Paradoxically, the popularity of the book went hand in hand with censorship attacks on the part of New Right groups such as Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum and Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. Jerry Falwell, in particular, launched a crusade against OBOS, trying to have it banned in libraries on the grounds that it was obscene, antifamily, and anti-Christian.

The commercial OBOS maintained the familiar cover with the two women, one young and one older, shown holding a “Women Unite” banner above their heads-an image that was to become the book’s logo. However, any mention of the book being a “course for women” had vanished. It was typeset with professional photographs and drawings. It gained volume, increasing from 275 pages in 1973 to nearly 400 pages by 1979. Chapters were longer and ended with long lists of references, which had been missing in the early versions when information was a scarce commodity. The list of women (and some men) that helped with the book grew, and their names appeared in long lists at the beginning of each edition.

(Continues…)

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