The Women, Themselves

Our Bodies, Ourselves is the only book in my high school library that has ever been replaced because the first copy was worn out from overuse. When it first appeared on the shelves, it was passed around as a freak--a book that talked more frankly about women, to women, than any other book we had ever seen, and probably more frankly than we talked to outselves. That was in the early '70, when the media was still fascinated with the "bra-burning women's libbers," women with whom no one wanted to associate themselves no matter how much they agreed with the principle of feminism. Feminists were considered a little crazy then; no one quite took their ideas seriously.

But the women who wrote the book that has since become one of the classic works of the women's movement do not appear to be burning radicals; far from it. Between the ages of 25 and 41, most of the members of the Boston Women's Health Collective (they tend to refer to themselves as the Bodies, Ourselves group) are married and many have children. "Statements like not wanting to be a woman, not wanting to have any of the tradition attributes of women--like being able to have children--now seem a little superficial," Pamela C. Berger, one of the earliest members of the collective, says. "But people's choices now about child-bearing are a lot more reasoned. There are choices now; you don't have the kind of feeling that you are expected to have children and raise a family."

Only one of the 11 core writers of Our Bodies, Ourselves was trained in health care when the book got started, although some of the women have gotten into women's health counseling since they began to work with the group. The idea started seven years ago, when some of the women met at a workshop on women's health in Boston, and they realized none of them could rely on their doctors to really tell them what was going on in their bodies. The women's movement had only just begun to receive national publicity in 1969, and most of the members were already married, many say they were already beginning to fill the traditional women's role. But that first meeting blossomed into a desire to explore the area of women's health care, and the group started teaching an evening course at the YWCA.

"The women teaching the course discussed their sexuality in a way I'd never heard before," Wendy C. Sanford, who started attending about six months later, says. "I was amazed." Sanford says she heard about the session from a friend at a time when she was suffering severe post-partum depression--"something I didn't know existed before I started taking the course," she says now.

The classes at the YWCA were conducted much as the book is put together. Medical information was discussed only within the context of personal experience. "We checked everything the experts said against what we felt," Sanford, now a student at the Divinity School, says. Now that the women's movement has gotten going, maybe that isn't so striking. Back then, though, our method of teaching was really striking."

One of the results of their emphasis on personal input is that the group has had to maintain a delicate balance during its seven years, keeping its identity somewhere between a consciousness-raising group and an organization dedicated to gathering and disseminating material on women's health care. About the time Sanford joined the group, the women decided to publish the information around which the course was based, so that other women could share what they had discovered. But "it's terribly hard to maintain" the balance, Joan S. Ditzion, another member of the group, says. "Particularly now that our lives have gotten busier and more complex. If one side gets unbalanced, the group just doesn't work."

"Like any other group that works together closely, there are times that are difficult, in one individual's life. We work very slowly," Berger says, describing the process by which most of the book was written. Several women research the information for a chapter, one writes it up, shows it to the others for comments and criticism, and takes it back to work some more. "There'll be times when the people in New York are demanding we get something done by the next day, and we'll just have to say we can't do it, because someone's having problems in their life that we have to deal with first."

The women stress the supportive elements of the group; although they do not allow outsiders to attend their meetings, they tried hard to arrange a time when I could meet with at least two of them together. They were unable to do it, because they are all working on publicity for the new edition of Our Bodies, and have very little time to spare. But Sanford says that despite their busy professional lives, the group makes a concentrated effort to retain the group's cohesiveness. The collective meets weekly, she says, and the women take pains to give each member an evening where they are the center of attention. sometimes, she says, this attention takes the form of working out problems that the member has been bothered by within the group or her personal life, while with others it is simply an almost ritualistic expression of their feeling toward each other.

But the primary focus of the Bodies, Ourselves group remains Our Bodies, Ourselves. "There are times when if I'm feeling lousy and like nothing's going on in my life, I remember the book, and how much it means to people," Sanford says. "Like when we get letters from someone in the hills in Kentucky, saying 'I've never been able to talk to anyone about these things, and your book really meant a lot to me and here's an experience I had...'"

The group has received many letters like the one from Kentucky, and the second edition contains a lot of material they say was prompted by letters asking for information. "People treat us as if they'd known us for a long time," Berger says. "One letter came criticizing us--and rightly--for not having anything in any of our chapter about women who have their babies and have to give them up for adoption; but the tone of the letter was hurt, as if we were old friends who had let her down."

Because many of the areas the Bodies, Ourselves group deal with had never been fully explored by the people they refer to somewhat off-handedly as 'the' experts,' much of their research has to be done first-hand, through personal interviews and surveys. Berger describes putting together the chapter on aging that appears in the second edition. She sent out hundreds of questionnaires, she says, and she was amazed at the responses she received. Women between the ages of 20 and 40--women who are supposed to be at the height of their sexual activity--complained far more frequently of the traditional symptoms of menopause (hot and cold flushes, headaches and fatigue) than did women between 60 and 80. Medical experts don't even know which symptoms are the direct result of the hormonal change, and which are secondary. There are a lot of myths about aging that need further exploration, Berger says; and according to the philosophy of the Bodies, Ourselves group, if it's going to be examined seriously, it's going to have to be done by women.

The group seems to feel strongly that their work should be spread around to as many women as it can reach. The collective has taken the status of a non-profit organization, with profits from their book going back into other women's projects all over the country, projects in counselling and research as well as health care.

One of the problems with the way the women chose to present their information--a problem of which they say they are aware--is that the view point represented is largely white and middle class. Rather than trying to change their own outlook to fit their audience--Ditzion points out that that would be difficult, since the experiences they relate are so personal--the group has chosen to help other women work from their own backgrounds. Berger has gotten involved more deeply than the others in helping a group of Hispanic women put together a translation of Our Bodies for the Spanish community. Since many of their experiences and problems are very different from those of a white middle class American, the collective wants to reach them, those experiences have to be incorporated into the Spanish version and dealt with. The same kind of problem came up in the Japanese translation, although Berger says less was done to alter it--the chapter on being gay was simply removed to avoid offending anyone. The only thing the Boston Women's Health Collective holds on to in the foreign publications, is the right to insure that a group of feminists have control over the publication, and the Boston group retains the right to reject the cover if they feel it is not in keeping with their view of the book's purpose.

Our Bodies, Ourselves does not make any far-reaching political statement, but the women who wrote it seem at ease with that aspect of their work. "I really feel feminism is at the root of any radical change, because it gets right into the home, into the basic power relationships in society," Sanford says. "We're not just talking about women, but about both men and women." Issues like who takes care of the children and who does the dishes are now called into question. But she says sadly she doesn't see much change in the basic health care provided women; and from her perspective, that exemplifies a need for other changes in society that will have to accompany women's liberation. "What we really object to is the profit motive in medicine, which keeps doctors treating their knowledge as a kind of special secret, rather than sharing it with women," she says. "And that doesn't show many signs of disappearing."

Ditzion agrees with Sanford's present pessimism. "Part of the misinterpretation of the women's movement that has distressed me in the last few years is that women feel they have to be superwomen--that they have to be professionals, and still raise children and keep house," she says. "Part of the reason that's happening is that people are losing sight of the goal of changing society, of humanizing it."

But Pam Berger seems a little more optimistic. While it's true there is less public attention paid now to feminism than there once was, she says, a lot of women are working quietly on changing society, working for equal opportunity laws and welfare rights for unmarried mothers. "Women have moved out into very committed smaller nuclei, organizing through the community in which they live, in health care, schools, and so forth," she says. "They're not as raucous as they used to be, they're not doing anything the media could really pick up on. But at least they're presenting their material with a political perspective," she says. "And more and more women are going into professions, into law school and medicine; and when I was growing up, you wouldn't even be reared to consider those as options, unless you came from a really extraordinary family."

The media has turned its focus away from the women's movement in recent years, and the women themselves seem to have left the strident voices that characterized their initial protest against a male-dominated capitalist society behind. The Boston Women's Health Collective is thinking about putting together a book on parenting, and this time the women say they will include experiences from both men and women. But whatever happens to the group that wrote it, or to the feminist movement in general, the next copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves that gets put out on my high school library's shelves is likely to be worn out from overuse. Because, perhaps more than almost any other book published, it expresses a collective awareness of being women, a special perspective on women and their problems. More than most books that have been able to reach a wide audience, Our Bodies, Ourselves remains a book by women, for women.