Health Book Collective Research Articles

Our Bodies, Ourselves Translated into Brazilian Portuguese: A Study of the Impacts on the Translators

ABSTRACT This paper aims to present the collaborative and volunteer translation project of the book Our Bodies, Ourselves into Brazilian Portuguese and to analyse the translators´ ontological narratives (Baker, 2006) about their experience. Through a partnership with two Brazilian universities and an NGO, the project establishes a dialogue with the feminist movement led by The Boston Women's Health Book Collective as well as with recent research on feminist translation theories and inclusive language. The analysis of authentic narratives provided by the students involved in the project allowed for the identification of recurring trends in the emotions they experienced while translating texts dealing with abortion and sexuality, among other sensitive topics. The perceived impact on the translators' lives is discussed with the support of theoretical frameworks addressing the performativity and subjectivity (Rajagopalan 2004; Robinson 2003; Pinto 2002) and the role of translators' emotions (Barrett 2017; Rojo López 2017; Hubscher- Davidson 2018). After almost three years of work, it is possible to conclude that the project went far beyond the translation process and represented a learning experience about the participants themselves, their bodies and health. For the students involved the translation was a political act that will, hopefully, make a difference in women's lives.

Loose Attitudes: Politics of Self-Knowledge in Our Bodies, Ourselves and The House of God.

Readers of Samuel Shem's medical satire The House of God (1978) have long worried about the bad attitude of his main characters: young male internal medicine trainees. This article examines the interns' atrocious affections, using the feminist classic Our Bodies, Ourselves (1973) as a counterweight to the masculinist perspective of House of God. These radically different critiques of United States medicine derive from a shared sociopolitical context and represent a historically specific response to the personal politics of sexual liberation and self-actualization in the 1970s. I show that Shem and the Boston Women's Health Book Collective share a rhetorical strategy of "loose expertise" grounded in embodied knowledge, which connects both texts to the radical social movements of the late 1960s. Loose expertise enables institutional critique by shifting the domain of knowledge away from traditional structures of authority, but inhibits intersectional critique by essentializing the individual subject position of the author. The article concludes by examining the relationship of both texts to the medical humanities.

Preface translation as a feminist and inclusive language usage action

This paper focuses on the translation of a collection of seventeen prefaces for different editions of the book Our Bodies, Ourselves (Chatterjee 2008/2020, translated by Nicolella, Oliveira et al.). The translation project is part of a collective and voluntary translation agreement made between the State University of Campinas, the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, and an NGO (Coletivo Feminista Sexualidade e Saúde) to translate and adapt to Brazilian Portuguese the widely known book Our Bodies, Ourselves (The Boston Women’s Health Book Collective 2011). Two points were discussed more thoroughly: first, the importance of paratexts (Genette 1987/1997) and paratranslation, especially the intersemiotic interpretation of the text and the image of the book cover (Yuste Frías 2022; 2021; 2011); and second, inclusive language use (Governo do Estado do Rio Grande do Sul 2014), considering that the masculine form is the standard in Portuguese while the translation project concerns a feminist book (Davis 2007). We present four examples of translations made by students with the support of CAT tools and revised considering a more inclusive language usage. In the final remarks, we will discuss that the translation project provided the integration between translation practice and theoretical discussions underlying this practice. We will also point out some challenges and discussions still ongoing in Brazil.

Muckraking Wonders: Jewish Journalist-Activists of the US Women's Health Movement, 1969–1990

Muckraking Wonders:Jewish Journalist-Activists of the US Women's Health Movement, 1969–1990 Jillian M. Hinderliter (bio) "Girlcott your gynecologist and save your uterus," women's health activist and journalist Barbara Seaman advised readers in 1972, "and if he tells you not to worry your pretty little head about something, pick up your pantyhose and RUN—to a doctor who'll take you seriously."1 Behind Seaman's humor was a key tenet of the women's health movement: the days of patient passivity were over. As the movement grew out of second-wave feminism in the late 1960s, American women demanded to be respected as health care consumers and critics of male-dominated medicine. Feminists challenged doctors' "political influence, their economic power, and their cultural authority," while calling on women to take an active role in demystifying their own bodies.2 In 1975, journalist Rose Kushner recounted her experience desperately seeking information after discovering a lump in her breast. "With appointments scheduled, a glimmer of plans made, books to read, at least I had my forefinger in my own destiny," she wrote in Breast Cancer: A Personal History and an Investigative Report. "I would be no slab of silly-putty to be manipulated helplessly by a pack of doctors."3 Kushner's pursuit of bodily autonomy was built on a foundation of proactive patienthood advanced in part by Seaman's work. As journalists-turned-activists, both Seaman and Kushner used the power of their writing and accessible platforms like newspapers and magazines to inform American patients about the tenets of the women's health movement. Their method and messaging had a long-term impact on the productivity and legacy of the health feminism. American Jewish women like Seaman and Kushner shaped health feminism in tone as well as in strategy as they used investigative journalism [End Page 371] to shape health care and national health policy. Their work helped build the rhetorical and political strategies of the cause throughout the 1970s and make inroads for health feminists with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and National Institutes of Health. By the 1980s, they helped the movement mature and address new women's health concerns and treatments. Gloria Steinem later characterized Seaman as the "first prophet of the women's health movement."4 Kushner redefined the role of the patient expert through her breast cancer activism and her activist techniques influenced generations of activists, including those working on HIV/AIDS.5 Polls from the 1970s suggest that Americans felt "a complicated mix of admiration for and resentment of the medical profession."6 This mix often played out in the press as activists, patients, and physicians voiced their perspectives on reforming American medicine. Directly engaging with Seaman and Kushner's Jewishness, despite their relatively secular lives, can enrich the history of the women's health movement. Inclusive and flexible, Jewishness as an analytical category allows historians to include a range of Jewish meaning, practice, and self-understanding. This essay argues that studying Seaman and Kushner's careers parallel to their life histories as American Jewish women offers an opportunity to interpret Jewish health activists both as feminists and as Jews. The women's health movement did not have to be a "Jewish" movement to be shaped by Jewish women's work and, by extension, Jewish women's personal frameworks of social justice. By the late 1970s, activists who applied feminist reform politics and critiques to medicine and health care began to identify as "health feminists." Avenues for reform included reframing the patient-practitioner relationship, promoting access to quality medical information, ensuring safe medical products and pharmaceuticals, and supporting women's increased access to medical schools.7 Jewish women embraced roles as self-help authors, journalists, scholar-activists, underground abortion providers, and clinic organizers. They were well-represented in the leadership [End Page 372] of national women's health organizations and in community-level initiatives. Eight of the twelve founders of the Boston Women's Health Book Collective, authors of groundbreaking health manual Our Bodies, Ourselves, were Jewish, as were four of the five founders of the National Women's Health Network, an advocacy organization cofounded by Seaman.8 Selecting Barbara...

Toxic Shock: A Social History by Sharra L. Vostral

Reviewed by: Toxic Shock: A Social History by Sharra L. Vostral Donna J. Drucker (bio) Toxic Shock: A Social History By Sharra L. Vostral. New York: New York University Press, 2018. Pp. 227. Sharra L. Vostral begins Toxic Shock: A Social History with a vivid description of her experience learning about this syndrome as an American teenager in 1982. The public health concerns about contracting a sudden illness from (and possibly dying from) tampon use were broadcast extensively on television, in newspapers and magazines, and on product labels. As a teenager in California in the early 1990s, this reviewer also remembers these widespread but vague warnings about sudden death due to toxic [End Page 1261] shock syndrome (TSS) from overlong tampon use. From so few documented cases nationwide, how did TSS rise to such prominence in the United States' public health and safety discourse? Vostral addresses that and many other questions in the first book-length history of the syndrome. Vostral's central argument is that "TSS was a paradigm shift in the way that illness manifests because the supposedly inert tampon interacted with a common bacterium (Staphylococcus aureus) to cause sickness in otherwise healthy women" (p. 2). She explores this argument from five perspectives that comprise the book's five roughly chronological central chapters: the material, technological history of tampons and S. aureus; medicine and epidemiology; communication and journalism; law and lawsuits; and policy and politics. The narrative begins with a history of tampons as material technologies. It focuses on how synthetic superabsorbent materials (like those in Rely, the Procter & Gamble tampon that became the focus of TSS investigations) provide an environment where they and the bacteria act together to produce conditions where TSS can occur. The next chapter describes how scientists, physicians, and policymakers identified, traced, and publicized TSS from the late 1970s onward (chapter 2). The book also traces media attention to TSS, Procter & Gamble's withdrawal of Rely tampons from the market, and U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) efforts to require warning inserts in tampon boxes under a Ronald Reagan administration hostile to federal regulation. Chapter four centers on a lawsuit brought against Procter & Gamble by the family of a woman who died from TSS after using Rely tampons. Vostral then examines the efforts of an uneasily aligned task force made up of consumer advocates, feminist health activists from the Boston Women's Health Book Collective, Procter & Gamble representatives, and FDA Bureau of Medical Devices staff members. In early 1982, they were charged with developing standard guidelines for tampon absorbency, but they ultimately produced nothing. By 1990, the FDA Federal Register published standard absorbency ranges for different tampon sizes, though there is still no federal requirement to list tampon ingredients on the box or guidelines on how long tampons should be worn. The book's primary theoretical contribution is in the first chapter, where Vostral introduces the concept of biocatalytic technology. Biocatalytic technologies "are not primarily dangerous to humans but have the potential to catalyze microbial activity that may result in harm because of their use" (p. 38). Intriguing and potentially useful as this analytic is, it largely disappears from the rest of the book until the conclusion, when the narrative turns to the policy-oriented, legal, and activist elements of TSS's history. There is consequently a disconnect between the first chapter of the book, which develops this analytic and its potential for identifying bacteria as "a nonhuman unintended user . . . able to exploit the technology," and the remaining four chapters (p. 22). The tampon users, activists, lawyers, [End Page 1262] litigants, scientists, and policymakers in the final four chapters focus on the tampons themselves and pay little attention to S. aureus as an actor. Toxic Shock joins a wider literature of social and technological histories of menstruation and menstrual products. These include Vostral's own Under Wraps (Lexington Books, 2009); Lara Freidenfelds's The Modern Period (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Janice Delaney, Mary Jane Lupton, and Emily Toth's The Curse (University of Illinois Press, 1976/ 1988); and Sara Read's Menstruation and the Female Body in Early Modern England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Vostral proves the argument that TSS changed scientific understandings of...

Toward a collective rhetoric rooted in choice: Consciousness raising in the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective’s Ourselves and Our Children

ABSTRACTContemporary feminists struggle over “choice.” A central demand of the second wave, some feminists insist on the continued significance of choice to their activism and theorizing; others are critical of the term, arguing that an emphasis on choice diverts attention from political issues and blames women for the oppressions they experience. The tension at the root of this debate is echoed in feminist theorizing about consciousness raising. In her germinal essay “The Rhetoric of Women’s Liberation: An Oxymoron,” Campbell argues that through consciousness raising, feminists illuminated the political underpinnings of women’s personal problems and prompted collective activism aimed at finding structural solutions to those problems, all the while affirming the centrality of choice to women’s lives. What Campbell left unstated, however, is how a process based in choice will promote a political, collective response. In this essay, I offer an analysis of the 1978 volume Ourselves and Our Children, arguing that the consciousness raising modeled therein illuminates broad patterns of political oppression, urges a collective response to those oppressions, and embraces choice. Based in a recognition of the synecdochic nature of the “personal is political” adage, this analysis offers insights into feminist debates over choice and resolves a lacuna in theorizing about consciousness raising.

Toxic Shock Syndrome, Tampon Absorbency, and Feminist Science

Tampon-associated toxic shock syndrome (TSS) has disproportionately affected women, and specifically, menstruators. By 1980, the Centers for Disease Control recommended that women limit their use of superabsorbent tampons since the risk for TSS increased with greater levels of absorption. However, women had no way of following this advice since products did not have consistent absorbency labels. A standard to set absorptive capacity as well as nomenclature was required, and the consensus process to do so was governed by ASTM (American Society for Testing and Materials). Esther Rome from the Boston Women's Health Book Collective participated as a consumer representative, and solicited feminist scientist Nancy Reame to help generate data on their behalf. Importantly, they rejected the use of blue saline and "blue goo" as a menstrual fluid in the syngyna—the synthetic vagina simulacrum lab instrument—to test tampon absorbency, and insisted upon heparinized blood instead. They challenged the process by which a standard is established, the method by which variables are controlled, and the erasure of menstrual fluid from tests about tampon absorbency. The feminist science yielded both usable and valid outcomes, with results that challenged the design of the experiment upon which standards were to be based.

Sex and the Me Decade: Sex and Dating Advice Literature of the 1970s

Sex and the Me Decade:Sex and Dating Advice Literature of the 1970s Anna E. Ward (bio) In an article published in 1976 in New York magazine, author and journalist Tom Wolfe declared the arrival of the “Me Decade,” arguing, “The old alchemical dream was changing base metals into gold. The new alchemical dream is: changing one’s personality—remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self … and observing, studying, and doting on it” (1988, 143). Wolfe highlights sex and sexuality as a key component of this “new alchemical dream,” and indeed, the 1970s saw a solidification of self-help and therapeutic approaches to sex and sexuality aimed at self-exploration and personal transformation. This solidification is particularly noticeable within the booming dating and sex advice literature market of the 1970s. In stark contrast to earlier iterations of this genre, these texts helped establish a market for individually oriented relationship and sex guides that encourage the notion that sex is a constitutive part of identity formation and a critical element of self-awareness. Given the considerable scholarly attention paid to the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s in the United States, the 1970s is often treated as merely an extension of the previous decade, or as a dramatic and unfortunate reversal of gains made in the 60s. This lack of attention to the specificity of the 1970s is troubling for two reasons. First, the 1970s was a decade of profound shifts in the terrain of sexual and gender politics in the U.S., including the two landmark Supreme Court cases Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972) and Roe v. Wade (1973); the publication of William Masters and Virginia Johnson’s Human Sexual Inadequacy (1970), Shere Hite’s The Hite Report: A Nationwide Report on Female Sexuality (1976), Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex (1972), and the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective’s Women and Their Bodies: A Course (1970); [End Page 120] and the release of Deep Throat (1972). The decade was also marked by high-profile battles over the Equal Rights Amendment and sexual orientation antidiscrimination legislation; both issues generated considerable steam for what would become a powerful force in U.S. politics—the religious right and its insistent invocation of sexual and gender politics as wedge issues in the American political landscape. Second, the 1970s was a vitally important decade for specifically feminist and lesbian and gay inquiry into sex and sexual politics, in which both domains (and their overlaps) exerted considerable pressure on popular sexual discourse. To ignore the 1970s as a distinct era of sexual thought in the U.S. is to miss an opportunity to understand the legacies of feminist and queer activism and scholarship and their continuing import for contemporary sexual politics. Revisiting the 1970s as feminist scholars may help illuminate contemporary struggles around sex and their feminist and queer implications. If the 1970s tends to be overlooked more generally, the role of dating and sex advice literature of this era, in particular, is grossly underexamined within feminist and sexuality studies, garnering significantly less attention than early- and mid-twentieth-century marriage manuals. While sales figures alone cannot help us gauge the impact these manuals had on people’s sexual behavior, the impressive circulation of texts like Comfort’s The Joy of Sex, for example, suggests that this literature struck a cultural nerve. The purchase and circulation of texts such as Comfort’s is, in and of itself, a behavior that warrants scholarly attention, particularly given that these texts had to be acquired in brick-and-mortar shops. The acquisition of guides such as these suggests a public increasingly interested in pursuing sexual knowledge, and titillation, beyond the bounds of traditional sexual and gender norms. In this essay, I first trace a brief history of sex advice literature in the U.S., demonstrating that the 1970s literature marks a distinct shift in tone, audience, and content from the literature of earlier decades. I then examine sex and relationship advice literature of the 1970s, considering mass-market literature alongside feminist writings on sexuality during the decade in order to unearth the connections between the two domains. By closely examining 1970s dating and sex advice literature...

“Write a Chapter and Change the World” How the Boston Women's Health Book Collective Transformed Women's Health Then—and Now

Working together informally, the core group of women who would later form the Boston Women's Health Book Collective wrote a book that would become the bible of women's health, selling more than 4 million copies. They also created an organization that would carry their mission forward. From the first newsprint edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves, which became an underground sensation, to the brand new book, Our Bodies, Ourselves: Pregnancy and Birth, released in March 2008, the group has educated women and men, critiqued the medical system, examined inequalities based on gender, race, sexual orientation, class, and other categories, and urged readers to move from individual self-help to collective action promoting social policies that support the health of women and communities.

Response

Response Gannit Ankori When Emily Culpepper's Period Piece was first screened in Harvard Divinity School's (HDS) Sperry lecture hall thirty-two years ago, I don't believe a single person in the audience could have foreseen that a Museum of Menstruation would be established on the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s.1 Or that by 2006, the visual art included in the museum's virtual collection—for example, Von Taylor's The Star-Tamponed Banner, a composition composed of 286 tampons—would provoke giggles rather than shock or embarrassment.2 [End Page 140] The existence of a Museum of Menstruation and additional related (and more profoundly significant) developments would not have been possible without Emily Culpepper and her peers. Their pathbreaking intellectual and creative work in the early 1970s broke the menstruation taboo and the conspiracy of silence that shrouded the sights and sounds related to so-called bleeding wombs. When I first heard about Period Piece in Ann Braude's inspirational convocation address in fall 2005, I rushed over to Andover Harvard Theological Library to look up Emily Culpepper's Master of Divinity thesis.3 As an art historian, immersed in what I term "visual epistemology," I felt compelled to verify my intuitive understanding that at a certain point in her academic studies, HDS student Emily Culpepper realized that words sometimes simply are not enough. A bold confrontation with menstrual blood required a different medium. Colors were needed, hence her thesis title, "Menstruation Mantra: Red, Crimson, Sienna, Scarlet." In order to break a taboo—you must show the forbidden sight, expose what previously had been covered up in shame. Culpepper's thesis reflected a double movement: a shift from deconstruction to reconstruction, and from the textual to the visual. She began by examining what canonical religious texts had to say about menstruation. However, as Braude cogently observed, "concluding that she could spend the rest of her life analyzing negative attitudes toward menstruation, Culpepper decided to explore the subject from a positive point of view."4 Her effort to re-vision menstruation as a positive experience entailed using visual amalgamations of body language and the language of art. Hence, she created a film, Period Piece, and a series of ten drawings based on the sensations evoked by the sight of her cervix during menstruation, which she called "Menstruation Yantras."5 It seems to me that only visual images had the power to expose and valorize what had previously been deemed unworthy of representation—the "unshowable" vagina, body hair, genitalia, and menstrual blood. In the brief time that has been allotted to me I would like to consider Period Piece as a period piece, that is, to view it within the context of the 1970s women's movement and more specifically to link it to the pioneering phase of feminist art. Know Thyself—nosce te ipsum—was a prevalent motto promoting the study of the human body and its anatomical intricacies by male artists throughout the [End Page 141] centuries.6 From the very beginning, feminist activists understood that to "know thyself" entailed the exploration of their own female bodies. In 1970, here in Boston, the Women's Health Book Collective published the first of numerous editions of the book Our Bodies, Ourselves.7 The cervical self-examination that Culpepper documented in her film became a paradigm for self-knowledge and empowerment. In art historical terms—the female body had been constructed as a passive object following specific conventions.8 These conventions regulated what could or could not be shown, what was worthy or unworthy of representation.9 Thus, breasts were often the focal point of countless artistic compositions; the vagina, in contrast, was a forbidden sight. Hair upon the head was considered alluring, beautiful; pubic hair or hairy legs were a no-no. The blood of Christ or of martyrs was holy; menstrual blood was a strict taboo.10 Period Piece shows the body of a subject viewing herself. The mirror in the film...

As Patients and Healers: The History of Women and Medicine

The history of women and medicine in the United States over two centuries is not easily contained in a brief essay. To cover the years from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century, we have selected three case studies from three different points in time that illustrate the broad outlines of the story of women and medicine: Mar tha Ballard, a rural midwife who practiced from 1785 to 1812; Elizabeth Blackwell, who, in 1849, became the first American woman to graduate from a regular medical college; and the Boston Women's Health Book Collective, publishers in 1973 of Our Bodies, Ourselves, the popular medical guide for women. These and other stories from the history of women and medicine are often used to explore changing pat terns of health and illness or developments in American health care professions; for teachers of general U.S. survey courses, however, these stories may at first appear far removed from the broad themes of American social and political history usu ally addressed in these courses. Here, we want to connect the history of women and medicine to some of those themes?the growing authority of experts; the chang ing role of the state; the significance of race and class; and, of course, the Ufe ex periences of women and the extension of women's sphere.

Including Every Woman: The All-Embracing "We" of Our Bodies, Ourselves

Including Every Woman:The All-Embracing "We" of Our Bodies, Ourselves Zobeida E. Bonilla (bio) As tone and voice editor of the eighth edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves (OBOS), my task was to read the draft chapters for inclusive language and content, bearing in mind issues such as cultural and ethnic diversity, socioeconomic class, demographic cohorts, religion and belief systems, health traditions, gender and sexual orientation, and disability. Keeping in perspective that it is a gigantic effort to present the gamut of health needs and concerns of ALL women in a single book, I commenced my encounter with the "all-embracing we"—the idea of a "we" that is inclusive—in the personal stories, viewpoints, and health information presented throughout the book. From "Environmental and Occupational Health" to "Abortion," from "Childbirth" to "Midlife and Menopause," my task was to ensure that a variety of voices were represented and that the chapters' language was sensitive to the multiplicity of health issues of women from disparate backgrounds. Before I could read the draft chapters in the upcoming eighth edition of OBOS for this purpose, it seemed important to learn how the "all-embracing we" had changed over time to determine what would be new and distinct in this edition. The eighth edition of OBOS is the second time that this influential book on women's health includes a tone and voice editor on its team (which included about 500 writers, readers, and editors for this edition). A tone and voice editor was part of the team for the first time during the production of the 1998 edition of OBOS (Whelan and Sanford 2003). The idea of having a tone and voice editor emerged from "the need to bring in diverse viewpoints and voices" and the desire for the "revision/update to include and be shaped by the voices of a wider range of communities" (Whelan and Sanford 2003a, 5). This report is divided into two main sections. The first section provides a brief review of changes in the "we" from the 1970s to the late 1990s and OBOS's struggle for inclusiveness. The second section describes the issues I faced in dealing with representation of different women through the use of pronouns, the construction of the other, the incorporation of personal experiences, and the presentation of medical information. [End Page 175] Including Every Woman: The Centrality of the "We" and the Struggle for Inclusiveness The use of the word "we"in OBOS has been a fundamental feature of the book, which has given OBOS an accessible and caring tone and a more inviting and embracing voice (Whelan and Sanford 2003a). In the early 1970s the title of the book underwent an initial transformation from Women and Their Bodies to Women and Our Bodies, then changed to Our Bodies, Ourselves (Kahn 1995). This change in the title suggests a shift toward a more inclusive "we" with women placed at the center of knowledge about their own health and bodies. These initial changes in the title of the book were directly related to the original authors' reflection and discussions about their individual encounters with the medical system, their personal knowledge about their bodies, and their frustrations with health care settings where they were treated in a "condescending, paternalistic, judgmental, and uninformative" way (Norsigian et al. 1999, 35; Norsigian 1998). The editions of OBOS in the early 1970s remained focused for the most part on a "we" that was composed of young, educated, middle-class, white women: "We are white, our ages range from 24 to 40, most of us are from middle-class backgrounds and have had at least some college education, and some of us have professional degrees. We are white middle-class women, and as such can describe only what life has been for us" (BWHBC 1973, cited in Morgan 2002, 17). Although the original "we" did not directly include women of color, women with disabilities, or older women, for example, throughout the various editions of OBOS the Boston Women's Health Book Collective (hereafter referred to as the Collective) has struggled to reach a more embracing we: [L]ike many groups initially formed by white women, we have struggled against society...

Theorizing a Coalition-Engendered Education: The Case Of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective’s Body Education

Concurring with Cunningham’s assessment of the need for a counterhegemonic vision of critical pedagogy in adult education thought and practice, this article theorizes a coalition-engendered education as a specific type of emancipatory pedagogy common in North America. Examining the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective’s body education as an exemplar of coalitionengendered education, this article compares and contrasts coalition-engendered education with the more familiar Freirean critical pedagogy, drawing important implications for both the theory and practice of adult education.

WOMEN AND HEALTH: POWER, TECHNOLOGY, INEQUALITY, AND CONFLICT IN A GENDERED WORLD

WOMEN AND HEALTH: POWER, TECHNOLOGY, INEQUALITY, AND CONFLICT IN A GENDERED WORLD

Reclaiming Our Bodies for Ourselves

MOIRA RICHARDS reviews Our Bodies, Ourselves and Sacrificing Ourselves for Love (Why Women Compromise Health and Self-Esteem…and How to stop) both published by the Boston Women's Health Book Collective

Re‐claiming bodies of knowledge: An exploration of the relationship between feminist theorizing and feminine style in the rhetoric of the Boston women's health book collective

This essay offers a rhetorical critique of the five editions of the Boston Women's Health Book Collective's [BWHBC] Our Bodies, Ourselves. The author argues that the BWHBC's books are grounded in an epistemology that privileges women's personal experiences, enabling the collective to participate in and encourage the continuing development of feminist approaches to women's health‐care needs. Moreover, the author argues that collective member's use of “feminine style” in their texts follows necessarily from their epistemological assumptions.

Scriptures for a Generation: What We Were Reading in the '60s

At the heart of Scriptures for a Generation are dozens of detailed entries discussing individual writers and the particular importance of their texts - bona fide '60s classics ranging from The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five to Carlos Casteneda's The Teachings of Don Juan and the Boston Women's Health Book Collective's Our Bodies, Ourselves. Represented as well are such works of revered elders as Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf and Henry David Thoreau's Walden. Beidler's coverage also extends to works of the early '70s that are clearly textual and spiritual extensions of the '60s: the Portola Institute's Last Whole Earth Catalog, Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and others. An overview of reading and writing as both a product and prime mover of '60s culture precedes the main section. In his conclusion Beidler highlights the most notable efforts to document and interpret the era.

Our Bodies, Ourselves: The Egyptian Women's Health Book Collective

Our Bodies, Ourselves: The Egyptian Women's Health Book Collective

BOOK REVIEWS

Book reveiwed in this article: Neurology of Pregnancy Second edition by James O. Donaldson. W. B. Saunders Co. Prenatal Diagnosis in Obstetric Practice edited by M. J. Whittle & J. M. Connor. Human Papillomavirus and Cervical Cancer (IARC Scientific Publications No. 94) edited by N. Munoz, F. X. Bosch & O. M. Jensen. Human Sexuality and its Problems by John Bancroft. Pathology of the Uterine Cervix, Vagina and Vulva (Vol. 21 in the series Major Problems in Pathology) edited by Yao S. Fu & James W. Reagan. Books received some of which may be reviewed at a later date Ovarian Cancer. Biological and Therapeutic Challenges edited by F. Sharp, W. P. Mason, R. E. Leake. Aids in Gynecology (Clinical Practice of Gynecology, Volume 1 No. 1) edited by Newton G. Osborne. Baillieres Clinical Obstetrics and Gynaecology. Dysfunctional Uterine Bleeding and Menorrhagia. Volume 3/Number 2, June 1989, edited by J. O. Drife. Oxford Reviews of Reproductive Biology Volume II 1989 edited by S. R. Milligan. Turner Syndrome edited by Ron G. Rosenfeld & Melvin M. Grumbach. Legal Principles and Practice in Obstetrics and Gynecology Volume 1 editedby Max Borten & Emanuel A. Friedman. Acyclovir Therapy for Herpesvirus Infections edited by David A. Baker. Benign Disorders and Diseases of the Breast: Concepts and Clinical Management by L. E. Hughes, R. E. Mansel & D. J. T. Webster. The New Our Bodies and Ourselves The Boston Women's Health Book Collective. British edition by Angela Phillips & Jill Rakusen. Menopause by Derek Llewllyn‐Jones & Suzanne Abraham. Incontinence by R. C. L. Feneley, J. G. Malone Lee & S. L. R. Stanton. Feminism and Epistemology: Approaches to Research in Women and Politics (Women and Politics Vol. 7 No. 3) editedby Maria J. Falco. Proceedings and Symposia Menopause: Evaluation, Treatment, and Health Concerns (Progress in Clinical and Biological Research Volume 320) Proceedings of a National Institute of Health Symposium held in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1988, editedby Charles B. Hammond, Florence P. Haseltine, Isaac Schiff. Alan R. Liss Intrauterine Growth Retardation Nestle Nutrition Workshop Series Volume 18 editedby Jacques Senterrc.

The Politics of Childbirth: The Re-Emergence of Midwifery in Arizona

Interviews with 27 licensed lay midwives in Arizona demonstrate the continuing macroand micro-political struggles over definitions and control of childbirth. Physicians define childbirth as a potentially pathological process requiring active medical intervention. They also continue to regard lay midwives as dangerously unqualified and home birth as unnecessarily risky despite state licensure of midwives who attend home births. On the other hand, midwives define childbirth as a safe, normal process in most cases, and see physician opposition as self-serving and misinformed. They also stress the advantages of their holistic, family-centered care. Although state licensure gives lay midwives some protection from legal risks, physicians' continuing dominance in the health care arena has powerful, adverse consequences for both midwives and their clients. A cornerstone of the feminist health movement is the belief that women must take charge of their own health care if they are to liberate themselves from men's control (Boston Women's Health Book Collective, 1984; Corea, 1985; Ruzek, 1978). The male-dominated medical profession has maintained control over women by defining menstruation, menopause, childbirth, and other female physiological processes as dangerous and pathological - requiring medical treatment. Contrary to this definition, feminists argue that these processes and the wide variation in women's experience of them are normal, while many routine medical procedures that physicians use to treat women's health care problems either endanger women's health or are simply unnecessary. For example, they view the historical use of medical practices such as ovariotomy and clitoridectomy to treat hysteria, frigidity, and masturbation, as well as recent restrictions on birth control and abortion, and denial or imposition of sterilization, as helping men to maintain their dominance over women (Barker-Benfield, 1976; Corea, 1985; Ehrenreich and English, 1973; Gordon, 1976; Koumjian, 1981). Moreover, they see the current rates of cesarean sections, hysterectomies, and mastectomies -rates which are unnecessarily high (Dicker et al., 1982; Mueller, 1985; Roos, 1984; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1981)- as further evidence that physicians neither understand nor have sympathy for women's health problems, and that they do not exercise sufficient caution in subjecting women to new or radical treatment regimens. Feminists are not alone in their opposition to standard practices of the male-dominated medical profession. Both feminist and non-feminist women are united in their concern over the widespread medicalization and medical control of childbirth. Both groups fear that routinized medical intervention may do more harm than good to women and their babies. Additionally, non-feminists fear that such medicalization and medical control pose a threat to family bonding and the family's control over decision-making. They criticize hospital procedures which isolate women in labor from their families, separate newborns and their mothers, and discourage breast-feeding (see for example, the journals Birth and Mothering). The recent re-emergence of lay midwifery in the United States is one example of how women are attempting to regain control over their own health care by demedicalizing the childbirth process. A number of excellent historical analyses of midwifery exist (e.g., Devitt, 1979a,b;