In 1970, a group of women calling themselves the Boston Women’s Health Collective published a 200-page pamphlet entitled ‘Women and their Bodies: A Course’. Hand-typed and self-illustrated, it was a reaction to the lack of care and information they felt women were given in regards to their own health. With chapters on anatomy, sexuality, birth control, pregnancy and abortion, it is not just an educational manual, but a critique of the inadequacies of a capitalistic healthcare system which prioritises profits over the wellbeing of the women it supposedly treats.
Designed as a living document, ‘meant to be used by our sisters to increase consciousness about ourselves as women, to build our movement, to begin to struggle collectively for adequate healthcare, and in many other ways they can be useful to you,’(4) it is ‘a tool which stimulates discussion and action, which allows for new ideas and for change.’(4) The booklet isn’t just supposed to be a factual resource: it is material to incite conversation ‘about how we felt about our bodies, how we felt about ourselves, how we could become more autonomous human beings, how we could act together on our collective knowledge to change the health care system for women and for all people.’(4)
Reading ‘Women and Their Bodies’ 50 years after its publication is an insightful yet disconcerting exercise. It includes information about how to contact your local Planned Parenthood, how to access different birth control kits and IUDs. It looks at how women patients are treated by doctors, about medical, sexual and social objectification. About many women’s alienation from their own bodies, about the shame we are made to feel about those bodies, especially when those bodies are considered to have ‘gone wrong.’ It talks about masturbation, orgasms, homosexuality, fantasies, STIs and abortions – all subjects which are still often considered taboo today. It is a testament to the importance of collective work, and the power of women gathering to self-educate beyond the systematic educational systems which do not serve our needs.
Yet it also proves how stunted our current medical system is. Very little has changed in the intervening years since the booklet’s publication. Despite better sex education in schools, a greater acceptance and legalisation of abortion and birth control, despite sexual liberation generally being more tolerated and celebrated in society, and openly discussed in shows like Netflix’s Sex Education, we are stuck. ‘At first a birth control pill, Provera, was developed for men, but it drained a man’s ability to have an erection as well as acting as an antidote to the potency of the sperm-producing cells,’ the booklet states. ‘Now researchers are working on a sperm capacitation pill in Sweden and California. It may be available in 2-3 years.’(70)
To emphasise, this was written in 1970. It is now 2021, and there is no male contraceptive pill commercially available. A BBC news article published in 2019 reported that a birth control pill for men had passed initial human safety tests – but that it could still take a decade to bring it to market. Why has it taken over half a century to achieve so little progress? Well, if we consider the collective’s view: ‘the fact that there is no effective, safe, and esthetically pleasing birth control method serves to maintain the dependent-submissive relationship women have vis-a-vis men.’ We are stuck.
In a commencement speech for the 1996 class of Wellesly College in America, the screenwriter and essayist Nora Ephron told the group of graduating women, ‘Don't underestimate how much antagonism there is toward women and how many people wish we could turn the clock back. One of the things people always say to you if you get upset is, don't take it personally, but listen hard to what's going on and, please, I beg you, take it personally. Understand [...] any move to limit abortion rights is an attack on you—whether or not you believe in abortion. The fact that Clarence Thomas is sitting on the Supreme Court today is an attack on you.’
The publication of Women and Their Bodies in 1970 was a response to an ongoing attack on women – and it’s an attack that hasn’t ceased. In 2021, the US state of Texas brought in Senate Bill 8, or the ‘Texas Heartbeat Act’. This not only delegalised abortion beyond six weeks of pregnancy (before many women even know that they are pregnant), but made it a criminal offence to ‘aid and abet’ an abortion, with a $10,000 reward offered to those willing to report the criminal action of female agency. Women’s freedom comes with a fee.
‘Health is a state defined by an elite.’(6) As women, the collective writes, ‘we have not had power to determine medical priorities; they are determined by the corporate medical industry and academic research. We have learned that we are not to blame for choosing a bad doctor or not having the money to even choose.’ And then comes the feminist, anti-capitalist, anti-racist rallying cry: ‘We as women are redefining competence: a doctor who behaves in a male chauvinist way is not competent, even if he has medical skills. We have decided that health can no longer be defined by an elite group of white, upper middle class men. It must be defined by us, the women who need the most health care, in a way that meets the needs of all our sisters and brothers.’(6)
To respond to Nora Ephron – why should we take this personally? Because, in the words of the collective, ‘what are our bodies? First, they are us. We do not inhabit them - we are them (as well as mind). This realization should lead to anger at those people who have subtly persuaded us to look upon our bodies (ourselves) as no more than commodities to be given in return for favors.’(9) As women, they say, ‘knowledge of our reproductive organs is vital to overcome objectification. We have been ignorant of how our bodies function and this enables males, particularly professionals, to play upon us for money and experiments, and to intimidate us in doctors’ offices and clinics of every kind.’(10)
Lesser discussed - perhaps by its very nature - are the attacks on women by omission. The fact that a lot of the information contained within the booklet, fifty years later, is news to many millennial and Gen Z women, should be seen as attack on women via the inadequacy of general education, not just in England or America, but across the world. We are kept in the dark about our own bodies, and thereby rendered powerless in crucial aspects of our lives. Girls not being taught about their own genitalia is an attack by omission. Not being told about the realities of pregnancy and childbirth; not being educated about the legal ramifications of marriage and child rearing if those relationships go wrong; not being given the support or practical help to leave damaging partnerships, these are no less attacks on the women in the world than the 137 women who are murdered every day by a partner or family member. (UNDOC, 2018)
When we’re not armed with information about our own lives and our own bodies; when we are deliberately shut out of classrooms and boardrooms; when we are told to get back in the kitchen or forced into the bedroom; when we are segregated through romantic isolation and gaslighted by the medical establishment, these are attacks on our being which makes us more vulnerable to ending up murdered. This isn’t a false equivocation. Silence breeds shame and shame is an ideal environment in which to inflict violence. Violence loves the shamed, the insecure, the self-doubting. Education cannot protect you from violence, but knowledge does make it far harder for violence to sink its teeth in, to take root.
Ignorance begets pain. This is not to say that women’s lack of knowledge about ourselves causes the violence that has been metered out upon our bodies and beings, time and time again. It is to say that without knowledge, without empowering ourselves within our bodies, we cannot hope to break the ties that bind us. Ignorance leaves us vulnerable – and knowledge is one way we can arm ourselves against the attacks metered out on our bodies from men, from medics, from the world at large. Women learning about their own bodies is not just important for us to understand how they work, but to arm ourselves against a world which does its best to destroy those bodies which have birthed every person here.
Maybe it comes from a deep human sense of self-hatred. Maybe it comes from religion and power and societal norms. Maybe the roots of misogyny have spread their tendrils so far that no single cause can be attributed - but in common with all is not just a hatred of the female body, but a fear of women claiming ownership of their own selves. This is what the miseducation and stifling of knowledge comes down to. By understanding your body, you are able to be closer to knowing yourself, and when you know yourself, you begin to know what you will and won’t stand for - and that’s how revolutions happen. ‘Once we have some basic information about how our bodies work by talking and learning together and spreading the correct information, we need not be at the total mercy of men who are telling us what we feel when we don’t or what we don’t feel when we do (it’s all in our minds!)’(10)
We have not moved so far in history that we are safe. But we are talking. And we are better placed to make our voices heard, and however much it feels like it’s two steps forward and one step back, progress is being made in teaching, and arming, women about their bodies.
Works Cited
Astor, Maggie. “Here's What the Texas Abortion Law Says.” The New York Times, 9 September 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/article/abortion-law-texas.html. Accessed 12 January 2022.
Boston Women's Health Collective. Women and their Bodies: A Course. 1970, Boston. Our Bodies Our Selves, https://www.ourbodiesourselves.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Women-and-Their-Bodies-1970.pdf.
Ephron, Nora. 1996 Commencement Speech. 1996, https://www.wellesley.edu/events/commencement/archives/1996commencement.
Roberts, Michelle. “Male pill - why are we still waiting?” BBC, 26 March 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/health-47691567. Accessed 12 January 2022.
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. “Global Study on Homicide: Gender-related killing of women and girls.” United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2018, p. 64, https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/GSH2018/GSH18_Gender-related_killing_of_women_and_girls.pdf.
Written for the publication Treating/Treated/Loving/Loved by the Amsterdam-based action-focused artist collective ‘Cranberry Juice’
Rebecca Took is a freelance writer from England, now based in the Netherlands. After graduating from the University of Oxford, she completed an MA in Literary Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her interest in women’s health spans from the personal into the socio-political. After witnessing and experiencing how the male-dominated medical industry repeatedly and systematically fails women, she developed an interest in researching the gender pain gap and looking at how healthcare perpetuates gender, race and class inequality.