Breasts, Blood, and the Royal V: Challenges of Revising Anatomy and Periods for the 2005 Edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves

Has our anatomy changed since 1998? What is new and different about menstruation? These are some of the challenging questions I faced as I set out last year to revise a chapter in the classic women's health book, Our Bodies, Ourselves (OBOS). Roughly 500 people, most of them women, participated in the revision of the book. Our roles ranged from writers, to editors, to photographers. My role was to be the primary reviser for the sexual anatomy, reproduction, and menstruation chapter. With the help of comments from pre-readers (who evaluated the 1998 chapter with an eye toward what should get rewritten or cut), my task was to update material from the 1998 edition of OBOS, to add new topics where relevant, and to cut out-of-date discussions. I received input from other women on many aspects of the chapter, including content and structure, topics, photographs, and references. Although I was its primary reviser, the finished chapter is a product of many women's work.

OBOS and Feminism for a Younger Generation

Always in my mind was one of the explicitly stated goals of the new edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves: to attract a younger audience while continuing to appeal to the readers loyal to OBOS across its previous editions. I immediately questioned the term "young women," wondering what it might mean to different people in different contexts. (I often wonder the same about the word "diversity.") The original generation of OBOS authors, now in their fifties and older, considers me a young women (I am 25), but when I think of "young women," I often think of women in their late teens and early twenties. How could my work appeal to this broader audience when I could not even define who that audience was?

One practical solution to the challenge of being completely overwhelmed was to take the chapter piece by piece. For example, I recognized that women may first approach the chapter for one section (such as menstruation). Thus, one goal of the revision was to attract readers to parts of the chapter that they might not originally have intended to visit. Another was to include first-person anecdotes (a defining characteristic of OBOS across all of its editions) from a variety of women. One comfort in this process was the recognition that I was not working alone. A team of pre-readers, post-readers, and editors was aware of these challenges and available to help. In the end, I did the best job I could with the skills, resources, advice, data, and people available to me.

Making the Cut

Some of the challenges in updating the book were common across many chapters, while other issues were topic- or chapter-specific. One overarching concern was to keep the chapter length relatively short, as the new book is smaller in both dimensions and number of pages compared to the 1998 edition. An accompanying web-based companion to the book accommodates extended discussions of material that were not included in-text, as well as longer lists of resources. Determining what to include in the book itself and what to post on the online companion was a particular challenge of the revising process. Pre-reader comments were especially helpful in pointing to material from the 1998 edition that might be cut from the book (and put online) in 2005. In the anatomy section of the chapter, an extended narrative of the self-guided tour (described below) is in the online companion rather than in-text. From the menstruation section, more detailed descriptions of the roles of the hormones involved in the menstrual cycle are in the online piece. In the 1998 edition, there was a long section on how to conduct menstrual massage. This now will appear online.

Restructuring Sexual Anatomy

A first addition to the female...