Bodies of Knowledge: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Women’s Health in the Second Wave (review)

Does a woman’s body determine her identity, her destiny? Or does that view compromise the political fight for equal status? Which holds more value for historians and reformers—a woman’s physical and emotional experience or scientific data?

Historian and University of Cincinnati associate professor Wendy Kline enters these contested waters with her second book, Bodies of Knowledge: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Women’s Health in the Second Wave. Kline reveals the tensions between doing history and attempting reform from either the bodily perspective or the political—or both. Focusing on 1970s women’s health advocacy in the United States in the areas of self-help, pelvic instruction, abortion, birth control, and midwifery, the book uncovers problems and successes within each effort. The evidence in Bodies of Knowledge shocks, amuses, and infuriates but, above all, educates the reader.

Kline mined pertinent archives, including unprocessed papers in the Sophia Smith Collection of Smith College and records of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the Schlesinger Library, the National Library of Medicine, and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, among others. Interviewing advocates and studying their papers, as yet un-archived, offered rich resources. Kline also solicited responses from women who had read early editions of the self-help book Our Bodies, Our Selves: A Book By and For Women.¹ Assisted by George Mason University’s Center for History and the New Media, she set up an online questionnaire asking women to describe their reactions to this landmark text.

The 275 responses included such comments as “It felt biblical” and “I . . . felt a shift in my worldview” (pp. 9–10). Kline weaves these insights into the first chapter of Bodies of Knowledge, along with other readers’ feedback and recollections of the collective’s members. This chapter illuminates the ways that readers of Our Bodies, speaking from their experience, helped transform later versions of the book to address a broader audience and include diverse perspectives. The author also reveals the book’s “seeds of division” (p. 5).

Kline takes a similar tack in the other four chapters: exploring the background of the issue or movement, explaining its substance and import, and evaluating its impact on women’s health and/or activism. Her second chapter involves terrifying depictions of male medical students learning how to perform pelvic exams using models—models made of plastic, living flesh, or anesthetized living flesh. Feminists in Boston and elsewhere got involved in “pelvic teaching programs” as models, or “talking pelvises,” to educate students but felt exploited in the end, Kline says (p. 52). Challenging the balance of power in the exam room, these women still found themselves with their feet in the stirrups. The author reminds us that “the powerful link between masculinity and medicine” (p. 56) held strong in this era. She notes that as recently as the early 2000s, the medical profession practiced pelvic exams on anesthetized “models,” often without the women’s consent (p. 62).

In chapter 3, Kline mentions pelvic exams, but these are self-exams, performed to raise self-awareness. The members of Jane, a group of Chicago advocates who provided abortion referrals and abortions before the procedure was legal, used a mirror to show each patient her cervix after the procedure. They held this experience, “learning from the uterus out,” as critical to building feminist consciousness (p. 75).

The last two chapters of Bodies of Knowledge focus broadly on tensions between nature and science. Chapter 4 details the 1983 U.S. Federal Drug Administration’s Public Board of Inquiry on the safety of Depo-Provera, a contraceptive given by injection. The National Women’s Health Network gathered damning testimony from Depo-Provera users, Kline notes, but decided not to bring the emotional stories into court in favor of scientific evidence. Chapter 5 explores “Choices in Childbirth”: Midwife or...