Building a New Bodies

Our timeline, ourselves 1969: Twelve women, including Paula B. Doress-Worters, form the Boston Women's Health Book Collective to advocate for equality in women's health care. 1970: The Boston Women's Health Book Collective publishes a comprehensive seminar course book, Women and Their Bodies. Its table of contents, written in calligraphy, includes chapters on such then-controversial subjects as "women, medicine, and capitalism," abortion, venereal disease, sexuality, and birth control. 1973: Women and Their Bodies is retitled Our Bodies, Ourselves and is published commercially by Simon & Schuster. It costs $2.95. 1974: Our Bodies, Ourselves is translated into Italian. In the next two decades, Japanese, Spanish, French, Greek, Swedish, German, Hebrew, Dutch, Arabic, Telugu (an Indian dialect), and Russian editions will be published. 1975: The Boston Women's Health Book Collective cosponsors the Conference on Women and Health at Harvard Medical School. About 2500 women attend. It is the first of many conferences the organization will sponsor. Also, members of the collective attend the World Conference on Women, sponsored by the United Nations, in Copenhagen. 1976: Right-wing constituencies try to ban Our Bodies, Ourselves after the American Library Association picks it as a best book for young women. Censorship attempts will continue to dog the health reference well into the '80s. 1978: Ourselves and Our Children is published. 1980: Changing Bodies, Changing Lives, a health reference for teenage girls, debuts. 1981: The Moral Majority issues a letter encouraging a ban on Our Bodies, Ourselves. 1984: The New Our Bodies, Ourselves, the first major revision, hits bookstores. 1987: Ourselves Growing Older, a reference on the health concerns of aging women, debuts. 1994: A revised edition of Ourselves Growing Older is published. 1995: In conjunction with the fourth UN World Conference on Women, in Beijing, the Boston Women's Health Book Collective organizes and cosponsors five workshops on women's health. 1996: The New Our Bodies, Ourselves goes online; a 25th anniversary commemorative edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves is published. 1998: A major revision, Our Bodies, Ourselves for the New Century, is published. In addition to updated health information on HIV, sexuality, breast cancer, birth control, and reproductive technologies, this new volume includes discussion on how diversity issues affect women's health care. It costs $24.

A: We have a clinic discount. This is something we've done from the beginning, when the book was sold for less than a dollar. We were very concerned when we went to a commercial publisher that a lot of people would lose access, so we had written into our contract a discount for clinics that serve low-income women. The clinics can get the book for just a few dollars so that they can give it out to their patients. Q: In light of the discrimination complaint, are you worried the book's focus on diversity will be interpreted as hypocritical? A. No, not really. Just because there's a complaint doesn't mean there's any merit to it. We made a special effort to have the women of color who were on staff contribute to the book. We've drawn our writers from a diversity of leaders in the women's health movement. Becoming a more diverse society is a long process, and there are struggles along the way. People joined our organization believing that it is a true collective, even though we told them it's just our history. There's still a lingering dream that people will be able to have more say here than is actually possible. Things have been blamed on racism, but it's more about how the organization is evolving. It's growing pains. Q: The word collective does have a throwback feel to it. How does your organization see itself in 1998? A: The truth is that in order to sign a contract with a publisher, we had to be incorporated as a nonprofit corporation. So we had to pick a name and stick with it. But over time, we've become less and less a collective. We do have those collective ideals, though; I can't think of one chapter in the book that was written by just one person. It's more like a collaborative than a collective now. But it's hard. Our culture today is so bottom-line focused. The publishing company doesn't want to send pairs of us around to do the publicity, which at first we argued over. We're known as a collective, and if we talked together, this would give a sense to the public of how we work together. But we're working with a publishing company that's backed by a corporation that's been bought out by another corporation that's not even in the book business. It's tough, but if we still keep our ideal right in front of us, we can create a product we're happy with.

Q: Have you had to compromise your vision at all to adapt? A: Our vision for this book is very similar to the vision we had at the beginning. It's about understanding your body, understanding the changes your body's going through, and not leaving it up to someone else to interpret your experience for you. Q: How do you feel when you look at this newest edition? A: I think it's great! When we first started meeting in the '70s, we used to imagine that we would continue meeting for our whole lives, sitting in our rocking chairs having these meetings. [Laughs] And here it is, almost 30 years later, and we're not in rocking chairs, but we're still producing this book! And a lot of younger women have become involved to keep it fresh. It's exciting to see that the project will continue and take new forms. Q: It's interesting that the book includes a call to action in addition to presenting information. A: That's how we distinguish ourselves. Most of the major stresses in our lives we can't deal with alone. So we ended almost every chapter with information about hooking up with support groups and organizations that deal with a particular disease or issue. That way, we really encourage women to get involved and not to be in isolation. Q: What is the effect of racism on sexuality and health? A: It's hard for those of us who are white women to even comprehend how much impact racism can have on women of color. It can be life-threatening. A medical practitioner may have a perception of you and decide you are or you aren't the type of person who might have a certain disease, like HIV, simply because of the way you look. Q: Do you think it's taken longer for alternative medicine to reach the mainstream because many aspects of it, like midwifery, are woman-dominated? A: It probably had something to do with it in the beginning, but I think it's more that the medical society wants to keep control over the things that have traditionally been under its bailiwick. They don't want to see them farmed out to other groups unless their doctors can supervise it. They've brought midwives into urban centers where many women are uninsured, but it's always to fill in where there are not enough doctors. If a woman wanted to choose a midwife, who in fact may have a better track record with births than many doctors, it becomes a difficult thing to do because the doctors don't want to see that business go. Q: Was there a moment when you realized the impact this book could have on women? A: It happens all the time. Whenever I'm introduced to someone and say what I do, people will say, "Oh, that book really changed my life." But one of the most heartwarming letters was from a woman from California who wrote to us. She had sat down with the book and her three teenage daughters and talked about some of the material in it. It was the most open conversation they had ever had. Q: How far do you think we've come? A: We've come an enormous way. That's clear. When we started doing this project, there was an assumption that work was always secondary for women, that our partners' careers were more important, that we often didn't have choices about whether or when we should have children. Just the idea that we can have control over our reproductive lives through understanding our bodies is itself an enormous step forward. Q: How far do we have to go? A: There's an enormous way to go. I think our lives today are being controlled by technology and medicalization and the whole profit-and-loss mentality. There's a tendency to get pulled into it because we're made to believe that this is modern, this is progress. In the '70s, we had this perception that things were really unfair, that we didn't have an equal chance. We wanted to be made equal. Now I think we're being lulled into thinking that this is what equality is, that this is as good as it gets. But the fact is that it could be a lot better. If we felt entitled to understand where these ideas are coming from and examine them, we could really figure out what's best for women and get together with other women to make those changes. We still live in a sexist, patriarchal society. The problems may be a little more subtle, but we still have to be vigilant. Alicia Potter is a freelance writer living in Boston. She can be reached at apotter@tiac.net.

This article was reposted with permission from The Boston Pheonix and can be found in the Pheonix archives.

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