40 Years In, "Our Bodies, Ourselves" is Still Revolutionary in its Treatment of Women's Health

 It's 1969 and East Coast to West, there are marches and teach-ins and sit-ins and rallies. People are taking to the streets, gathering in church basements, walking out of classrooms to protest the war in Vietnam, demand civil rights, and press feminist agendas.

Everywhere, women's power symbols are popping up: on the Boardwalk at Atlantic City, where a sheep is crowned Miss America while Bert Parks croons to pageant goers inside the Convention Center; at the University of Washington student Hub, where Bernadine Dohrn, National Secretary of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) joins a roster of Seattle peace and justice activists to discuss the “woman question”; in Chicago, where hundreds of women from leftist organizations and causes gather and found the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union.

In Boston on May 4th that year, some 500 women make their way to the Fenway neighborhood for a conference in the red brick halls of Emmanuel College, then, as at its founding by the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, an all-female institution. In 1999, activist and author Susan Brownmiller would write about a performance she saw that day in which members of the radical separatist feminist group, Cell 16,  publicly cut off their hair to protest male domination.  Nancy Miriam Hawley, whose work with the SDS had led her to help organize the conference, later characterized the milieu and the women who were drawn to Emmanuel to talk about women's rights: “Many of us were involved in other movements for liberation – the New Left or civil rights or the antiwar movement. When the women’s movement came along, it hit home, because it was addressing our oppression as women, which we hadn’t identified before.” 

Hawley, who would go on to work for years as a clinical social worker, group therapist, and organizational consultant, served at the conference as the leader of a workshop.  She recalled, “A number of us were particularly concerned about health issues because as young women, were having our first babies, and birth control and childbirth were prominent issues for us.” 

Indeed, the conference galvanized the attendees, some of whom soon formed the socialist women's organization Bread and Roses, which in 1971 opened the Women's Center in Cambridge, still running today.  And many of those who attended Hawley's workshop kept in touch.  They continued to meet to talk about their experiences with doctors and childbirth, pregnancy and sex, finding that all of them had struggled with bad advice or ignorance or ill treatment or indifference at the hands of the medical establishment. In their words, “We discovered there were no 'good' doctors and we had to learn for ourselves.”

So they devised a survey and administered it to as many women as they could. They began doing their own research, consulting medical texts and journals. They interviewed willing physicians and nurses. The process was energizing. “We were excited and our excitement was powerful. We wanted to share our excitement and the material we were learning with our sisters. We saw ourselves differently and our lives began to change,” they wrote.

The sharing of the “excitement and the material” took the form of 193 pages of typewritten text, grainy photos, and hand-drawn illustrations reproduced by mimeograph. Roughly lettered on the cover was, "Women and Their Bodies, a course," and, down at the bottom "75¢".   The introduction closed with “We want all your ideas, comments, suggestions, criticisms, etc.  Power to our sisters!!”  and was signed, “Nancy Hawley, Wilma Diskin, Jane Pincus, Abby Schwarz, Esther Rome, Betsy Sable, Paula Doress, Jane de Long, Ginger Goldner, Nancy London, Barbara Perkins, Ruth Bell, Wendy Sanford, Pam Berger, Wendy Martz, Lucy Candib, Joan Ditzion, Carol Driscoll, Nancy Mann, and all the other women who took the course and read the papers.”   The table of contents, rendered in a neat italic hand, bore the helpful notation: “For a notebook: punch holes in the wide margins and slit the binding thread and back of each booklet with a razor blade.”