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42 Because Deb’s engagement with menstrual activism is nearly as old as the movement itself, I asked her to explain what led her to swim against the mainstream and embrace “alternative menstruation” beginning in the mid-1970s and continuing through the early 1980s. I remember we were getting into organic foods and healthy alternatives in cosmetics, with natural lotions and toothpastes, et cetera. There were a lot of feminist and holistic health books coming out right then, it was the height of the women’s movement in ways, and Our Bodies, Ourselves was just out, and we would read books and magazines for sale at the co-ops. One of the books I bought there was Hygieia. I read in Hygieia we should not hide our blood in shame and told my girlfriend about it. She agreed it was feminist for us not to hide our blood in shame. Also, toxic shock syndrome had just hit, and women were afraid. 1 The dawn of the feminist health movement, growing interest in natural products inspired by the environmental movement, and an outbreak of a littleunderstood and frightening infection led to Deb’s transformation. She was not alone. Beginning in the 1970s, increasing numbers of women began to question the safety of menstrual products and, more fundamentally, the social construction of menstruation as little more than a shameful process. They cultivated a critical menstrual consciousness. As some feminists reclaimed menstruation, refusing to remain silent about a crucial women’s health issue, they joined in coalition with consumer rights advocates and environmentalists and pressed the government and FemCare industry to attend to safety and, to a lesser degree, environmental sustainability. The Emergence of Menstrual Activism c h a p t e r 3 R the emergence of menstrual activism 43 The Women’s Health Movement and Its Central Resource The women’s health movement, the mother of menstrual activism, became “a recognizable force of social change along with the reemergence of the feminist movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s.”2 Into the 1980s, the women’s health movement provided significant resistance to standard medical practice, namely the promise of scientific objectivity, the economic abuse of patients, and the norms of the doctor-patient relationship. Key to the movement is the foundational assumption that under the dominant medical system, women have lacked control over their bodies and therefore their health. In this view, the medical system , designed and serviced primarily by men, ignores women’s unique bodily experiences and thus fails to provide women-centered care. Many see abortion, which emerged as a key feminist issue in the late 1960s, as the lightning rod for contemporary women’s health activism.3 Indeed, the late 1960s and early 1970s were a heady time for abortion rights activists. In 1969 a group of Chicago women formed Jane, an underground abortion counseling service that later became an abortion service provider.4 In 1970 attorneys Linda Coffee and Sarah Weddington filed a suit on behalf of “Jane Roe.” The suit made its way to the Supreme Court, and in 1973 the ruling in the historic Roe v. Wade case declared abortion a fundamental right. In 1971, women’s health activist Lorraine Rothman began promoting menstrual or period extraction using a crude device. She invented and patented the Del-Em to manually extract the contents of the uterus when a woman anticipates her menses, or up until approximately eight weeks from the first day of her last menstrual period. Some women used the Del-Em to abort very early pregnancies. As these examples represent , feminists were committed to securing access to abortion for women in need. They argued, as reproductive rights activists do today, that the right to choose if, when, and how to become a mother is fundamental to a woman’s quality of life and, more generally, to her capacity to act in her own best interest. Other aspects of women’s health were coming to the fore at this time as well. Pioneering women’s health activist Barbara Seaman published her groundbreaking The Doctor’s Case against the Pill in 1969, a watershed moment for the generation of activists that emerged in the 1970s. The book linked oral contraceptives to cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and stroke and exposed the unethical use of poor women of color as testing subjects for contraception research. The resulting congressional hearings in 1970 led to an FDA mandate that all birth-control pills carry warning labels...

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