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Reviewed by:
  • Bodies of Knowledge: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Women’s Health in the Second Wave by Wendy Kline
  • Jane Gerhard
Bodies of Knowledge: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Women’s Health in the Second Wave. By Wendy Kline. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Pp. 200. $22.50 (paper).

Wendy Kline’s new book on the women’s health movement of the 1970s and 1980s offers a detailed portrait of feminist activism through five case studies: the book Our Bodies, Ourselves; pelvic exam instruction; abortion; Depo-Provera; and childbirth. Kline’s trope is “body knowledge,” a feminist intervention to elevate women’s experiences as embodied subjects into a basis for medical knowledge. This approach emerged from “difference feminism,” a shorthand for an early phase of seventies feminism where activists dreamed of unity among women forged through a shared female identity. In the health movement, this translated into a range of actions and organizations that hoped to “position the female body at the center of women’s liberation” and to “think through the body rather than around it” (2). At its most optimistic, the feminist health movement “challenged, [End Page 342] expanded, and reinvented constructions of the female body” (3). Not only should women have access to information about their bodies, but they should also help create knowledge about women’s bodies, build women-friendly spaces for women to receive unbiased treatment, and establish relationships that allowed for a less hierarchical approach to treatment.

At the same time, and somewhat paradoxically, Kline also argues against the historic effectiveness of the health movement. In the early 1970s activists prioritized reframing women’s body knowledge into valuable, patient-centered knowledge as a strategy for social change; by the 1980s and 1990s, activists had prioritized translating women’s health concerns into tangible approaches for medical providers as a strategy of bringing lasting change to the medical establishment. Increasingly, health feminists went to medical school, made alliances with doctors, and worked with the system to address issues of women’s health. For Kline, this integration of feminist challenges into spaces no longer controlled by women or feminists marks the end of the movement’s “potentially revolutionary” challenge. After the 1980s activists “became a more traditional kind of expert” whose credentials were listed after their names rather than coming from any “authentic experience” as women. By the new millennium, Kline glumly concludes, women’s body knowledge had “accomplished just the opposite of what 1970s feminism hoped for.” Rather than expand and enhance “knowledge and power and create a collective consciousness,” body knowledge “continues to restrict and contain women,” leaving “daughters of feminism” with more questions than answers (160–61). This assessment, however, flies in the face of the evidence Kline marshals about the impact the women’s health movement had on American medicine.

Kline’s history begins with the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective (BWHBC) and their game-changing book, Our Bodies, Ourselves, first published in 1971 and going strong some forty years later around the world. Our Bodies, Ourselves “legitimized the notion of experiential knowledge as a central component of health” as well as embodied the contradiction and complexities that would “stymie” the burgeoning women’s health movement—the singularity of being female and the plurality of individual experience of womanhood. Despite this deep ideological flaw in seventies feminist thought, the BWHBC launched a powerful movement to include women’s experiences of their bodies into medical settings. By 1974 twelve hundred women’s groups provided health services to women, an astounding accomplishment in a short period of time. Letters to the collective from readers show a robust dialogue about the information presented in a book readers embraced—or hoped to embrace—as their own. Kline highlights issues of sterilization, lesbianism, and pregnancy termination to show the impact readers had on subsequent editions. The letters “challenge us to consider the role of ordinary women in shaping the development of the women’s health movement” (39). At its most fundamental it inspired many [End Page 343] women to take greater initiative in their interactions with doctors; for hosts of others it offered a glimpse of new kinds of work or activism.

From this beginning, the women’s health...

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