Once upon a time, before the advent of Google and WebMD, medical information was dispensed by medical professionals in doctor’s offices. These were dark times, at least if you believe fans of the infamous “women’s health bible,” Our Bodies, Ourselves.
The book began life in the late 1960s as a glorified feminist health pamphlet, stapled together and passed around like samizdat by a group of self-described women’s liberation radicals in Boston. The booklet covered topics such as masturbation and postpartum depression as well as more standard fare like the female menstrual cycle. Not surprisingly for a document that emerged out of a consciousness-raising session, the anatomy lessons came with a heavy dose of ideology. The original text begins with an essay on “Women, Medicine, and Capitalism” that quotes Herbert Marcuse—“Health is a state defined by an elite”—and ponders “control and submission” and “alienation” in the doctor’s office.
Over the years, after Our Bodies, Ourselves was published as a trade book in 1973 (and went on to sell more than 4 million copies in more than 30 languages), some feminists griped that it had compromised its radical origins. Writing in the New York Times in 2005, Alexandra Jacobs took umbrage at a new edition of the book that included celebrity endorsements and nonjudgmental discussions of “vulva chic” and “Brazilian bikini waxes.” The old book “would have taken an outraged position toward such oppressive, patriarchal procedures,” she fumed.
But even a glitzy makeover couldn’t save this feminist bible. Bonnie Shepard, the board chair of the Our Bodies, Ourselves organization, recently issued an open letter announcing that the 2011 edition of the book, the most recent, will be the last.
“We came to the painful conclusion, after several years of struggling financially, that we don’t have the resources and infrastructure to continue our main programs using paid staff,” she wrote, suggesting that perhaps all that time the group spent attacking capitalism might have been more profitably spent on marketing. The group will become a nonprofit organization that plans to “advocate for women’s health and social justice.”
Several writers treated the news like a death in the family. “A book that helped a generation of women take the shame out of understanding their bodies, is quietly slipping away,” a writer for Quartz lamented.
Our Bodies, Ourselves might be dead, but the feminist approach to medical treatment survives. Just last month, the New York Times reviewed three new books that take on “the crisis in women’s health”; all three take a feminist approach to their subject. Likening the medical profession to a horde of patriarchal and nefarious mansplainers, the reviewer noted that the books “leave the reader galvanized.” The title of one of the books? Ask Me About My Uterus.
