The World Split Open

by Ruth Rosen

  In 1973, Bunch reemerged from this separatist period. The Furies had made important breakthroughs, but after a year, she reported, “the positive intensity of our interaction threatened to deteriorate into destructive cannibalism.” Still, she wanted heterosexual women to understand that “our time as lesbian feminist separatists . . . allowed us to develop both political insights and concrete projects that now aid women’s survival and strengths.” An original thinker with a strong flair for organizing, Bunch would emerge in the 1980s and 1990s as a leading organizer of the international movement to redefine women’s rights as “human rights.”81

  The gay-straight split fragmented “the sisterhood,” creating various kinds of hierarchies that excluded many women. The emphasis on sexual orientation scared away some women fearful of unfamiliar and unconventional relationships, as well as an alien alternative culture. On the other hand, the rise of lesbian feminism infused the movement with new ideas and theories that helped feminists—and later scholars—to consider the social and cultural construction of gender, as well as the biological nature of sex.82 Lesbian feminists also contributed a disproportionate amount of dedication and energy to the movement. They were the women who worked in the trenches, the women responsible for staffing the growing network of self-help institutions that crisscrossed the country. All over the country, lesbians sustained shelters for battered women, rape crisis hot lines, and health clinics used by women who wouldn’t have known the difference between NOW and The Furies, but welcomed the refuge and services that they received. Heterosexual women frequently found it difficult to integrate this mushrooming women’s culture into their jobs and families.

  During the 1980s, the role of lesbians became even more important, as they nurtured and sustained a growing women’s culture, which expanded to include a dizzying array of local bookstores, coffeehouses, musical festivals, summer camps, peace encampments, child care centers, women’s health centers, and centers for women’s studies. This women’s culture, which may have seemed apolitical to some feminists, in fact provided a much-needed political refuge for women who had previously hidden in closets, completely isolated from one another. Unlike ethnic or racial minorities, lesbian feminists began with no historically shared culture, except that of the bar. Through music, dance, art—as well as thousands of centers and institutes—lesbian feminists invented traditions and rituals that created a warm and hospitable environment for the many women just “coming out,” searching for support for themselves and often for their children.83

  The excavation of lesbian sexuality also unearthed one of this society’s best-kept secrets—what poet Adrienne Rich called in an influential essay the “compulsory heterosexuality” of American culture, the unquestioned assumption that everyone is heterosexual or should be. What if this “compulsory” pressure were removed? Rich thought that many more women would choose to love and live with other women. Most important, lesbians encouraged women to explore their own passion rather than to act out male-authored sexual scripts. By legitimizing sexual intimacy between women, they challenged the male sexual revolution and its simplistic vision of heterosexual promiscuity and offered an ideal of same-sex love among women.

  WOMEN’S BODIES AND THE REDISCOVERY OF DIFFERENCE

  Although the American women’s movement began by emphasizing women’s “sameness,” exposing the hidden injuries of sex refocused attention on those female experiences that made women unique. The women’s health movement, arguably one of the most important and successful accomplishments of second-wave feminism, emphasized the specific health concerns of women, and in the process helped feminists rediscover their “difference.”

  Generally treated as ignorant or hysterical patients, women had long suffered the medical establishment’s arrogant attitude toward their ailments. The experience could be humiliating, enraging, and, in the context of a developing women’s movement, induce visceral understanding of women’s secondary status. The journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, who had a Ph.D. in biology, recalled how her first pregnancy had altered her consciousness.

  I began to realize how much women had experienced humiliation or even injury in the medical system. I had a bad time with the doctor during my first pregnancy and that’s when I really became a feminist. . . . I became really furious dealing with sexism and the fact that I could not escape these bloody issues.84

  Even the new hippie “free clinics” that sprang up in the late 1960s treated women without the dignity they deserved. Would women doctors have thoughtlessly shoved a cold metallic speculum into another woman? Would feminist doctors have blithely told patients that the dilation of the cervix wouldn’t hurt? The woeful ignorance of the female biological experience sparked a campaign to train more women doctors, to reeducate male physicians, and to create a women-oriented health movement.

  That movement started rather modestly. In the spring of 1969, several women—most of whom had no medical training—participated in a small workshop on “women and their bodies” at a conference held in Boston. It didn’t take long for them to begin venting their anger toward “condescending, paternalistic, judgmental and non-informative physicians.” Rather than just rant and rave, they decided to enhance their own knowledge of the female body. Together, over that summer, they studied anatomy, physiology, sexuality, venereal disease, birth control, abortion, pregnancy, and childbirth. They analyzed medical institutions and the health care system as it then existed within the context of a capitalist economy. Armed with this knowledge, they began giving courses on women’s bodies in homes, day schools, nursery schools, and churches.

  By 1971, a group of these activists—now named the Boston Women’s Health Collective—had collected and published several versions of their notes and lectures, eventually called Women and Our Bodies, which quickly made its way across the country. In March of that year, some eight hundred women gathered in New York for the first Women’s Health Conference. Two years later, in 1973, when a much-expanded Our Bodies, Ourselves appeared as a book, feminists realized that they had created a full-blown health movement.85

  Health activists not only disseminated biological knowledge, they also questioned why doctors controlled women’s reproductive decisions. Only doctors could dispense the Pill or other contraception; only doctors could verify the need for a therapeutic abortion to save a woman’s life. Why did doctors, rather than women, have this power? Couldn’t women take back some control over their bodies? To teach women about their bodies, some activists began practicing “self-help gynecology.” On April 7, 1971, at Every Woman’s Bookstore in Los Angeles, Carol Downer inserted a speculum into her vagina and invited other women to observe her cervix. Five months later, a similar demonstration took place at a national meeting of NOW in Los Angeles. Within a year of Downer’s first self-exam, over two thousand women had attended such self-help women’s clinics.86

  On September 20, 1972, Los Angeles police arrested Downer for practicing medicine without a license. She had helped a woman insert a speculum and had suggested yogurt for a yeast infection. Although a jury acquitted her of all charges two months later, the incident outraged local feminists. One wrote:

  WHAT MAN WOULD BE PUT UNDER POLICE SURVEILLANCE FOR SIX MONTHS FOR LOOKING AT HIS PENIS? What man would have to spend $20,000 and two months in court for looking at the penis of his brother? This case is a clear cut version of the position of women in America—the lengths to which we must go and the obstacles which must be overcome to be FREE.87

  Downer had become a police target in part because she had challenged physicians’ control over women’s reproductive lives. She and other women had popularized a procedure called “menstrual extraction,” in which blood and any fertilized egg were withdrawn from a woman’s body before menstruation began, in order to prevent pregnancy. Since abortion was still illegal, authorities viewed her work as illegal as well as subversive.

  Some doctors bristled simply at the prospect of dealing with women who became active patients. A woman wh
o told her doctor that she had learned to examine herself with a speculum and a mirror and wished to watch his examination of her, described his reaction this way: “He looked at me as if I were a rare species of caterpillar. Like a little boy whose toy had been taken away, he said, ‘You had no business doing that!’ It really was scary to see what happened when his ‘omnipotence’ was threatened.”88

  Activists responded to such hostile attitudes by bringing note-taking “patient advocates” to medical appointments. For women just learning to stand up to male authority, having a friend take notes felt reassuring. But some doctors resisted. “On my next visit, Deb came with me,” ran a typical account. “When I introduced her and told the doctor that she wanted to watch the examination, he said that it was against his ethics. When we questioned him further as to what he meant, he said, ‘Look, dear, I just won’t do it.’ I was stunned.”89

  Challenging medical authority proved a brilliant strategy when it came to undermining the health profession’s control of childbirth and reproductive technology. Male doctors became proxy figures for all male authority. Rejecting the role of passive patient, women learned to be assertive, to ask tough questions, to do their own research, to insist on certain tests, to refuse others, and to demand that doctors take their ailments seriously. As a result, the women’s health movement sometimes turned women into feminists.

  The women’s health movement taught many Americans—not only feminists—to view themselves as medical consumers, rather than as passive patients. Decades later, journalist Sheryl Gay Stolberg wrote in the New York Times, “It was feminism, most experts agree, that changed . . . medical paternalism. The 1973 publication of Our Bodies, Ourselves by the Boston Women’s Health Collective was the turning point. This book taught women to distrust male doctors’ authority.”90

  The women’s health movement also helped introduce Americans to alternative medicine. In 1969, Joshua Horn, an English doctor enamored with the Chinese medical system, published a book titled Away with All Pests that compared the difference between Western and Eastern medicine. Inspired by Horn, as well as the “barefoot doctors” of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, some activists began to promote acupuncture, herbalism, and traditional Chinese medicine as treatments that they favorably compared with aggressive and interventionist Western methods.91 They also contrasted the dedication of China’s “barefoot doctors,” who treated poor peasants in an egalitarian fashion, with American doctors, who treated patients with the arrogant condescension of mandarins toward peasants.

  Perhaps most important of all, the authors of the 1973 edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves expressed no disdain for motherhood, and portrayed pregnancy and childbirth as “important feminist life-events” that need not be medicalized. Women, they argued, should be aware and alert, not drugged, while they were giving birth to their children. They described breast-feeding, discredited by the medical profession in the fifties, as “satisfying, sensual and fulfilling . . . a pleasant and relaxing way for both mother and baby to enjoy feeding and . . . an affirmation of our bodies.”92

  By the middle of the seventies, an important ideological shift had occurred within the movement. “Rather than considering women’s difference from men as a form of inadequacy and a source of inferiority,” the historian Hester Eisenstein has observed, “this view considered difference to be a source of pride and confidence.” The reasons for this dramatic shift, according to Eisenstein, were the development of women’s studies programs, consciousness-raising groups, and lesbian feminist theory, which took as the starting point women’s experience on their own terms. To these, I would add the women’s health movement, which, by emphasizing biological difference, greatly contributed to the celebration of motherhood and women’s distinct experiences.93 But valuing women’s difference only underscored a central paradox of feminism, namely, how to pursue equality while still honoring women’s difference from men.

  Feminists also began to question the safety and rationale for particular medical practices and procedures. Already in 1969, Barbara Seaman began questioning the routine use of the Pill in The Doctors’ Case Against the Pill. In her 1972 book Women and Madness, Phyllis Chesler questioned the psychiatric treatment of angry or depressed women and attacked the practice of prescribing tranquilizers to such women, but not to men in similar conditions. In 1975, in Breast Cancer: A Personal History and Investigative Report, Rose Kushner challenged doctors’ routine recommendation for radical mastectomies whenever breast cancer was detected. Others began to challenge the suspiciously high incidence of cesarean deliveries and of hysterectomies.94

  In the early seventies, Pat Cody, an economist by training and a longtime activist in Berkeley, began to question the long-term effects of a drug called diethylstilbestrol (DES), which doctors had given her and many other women in the postwar period to prevent miscarriages. One of the many unsung heroines of the movement, Pat Cody convened a group of women around the proverbial kitchen table, where most women’s movements have begun, to figure out what to do. After careful research and organizing, Cody created a grassroots organization called the DES Information Group, which, based on its suspicions that DES had created a cohort of children particularly susceptible to a variety of cancers, began to lobby the government for research and to raise funds to educate the public. By 1975, Cody’s group published a pamphlet titled Women Under Thirty, Read This! And, by 1979, they created DES Action, an international organization that publicized the need for medical monitoring of all children born to DES mothers.95 In such small ways did many American feminists take a personal concern, research, study, and name it, and create an international awareness of some injury, in this case a drug that could harm the sons and daughters of DES mothers.

  By the end of the 1970s, a loosely connected women’s health network stretched from Boston to Los Angeles, with local, national, and even international organizations that monitored health policies aimed at women. In addition to challenging mainstream medicine, introducing the public to alternative medicine, and demanding women’s right to their own bodies, the women’s health movement created a relatively rare opportunity for cross-class and interracial activism.

  Most of the original health advocates were college-educated, middle-class, and white: women’s liberation activists, nurses, a few women doctors, and research scientists, all of whom saw their greatest problem as a lack of information rather than access to medical care, which was the barrier faced by poor women. In the seventies, for the first time, poor and minority women—supported by government training programs—began entering these programs as aides to work in women’s health clinics. Together these women from different worlds created community-based local women’s health clinics.96

  Instead of focusing narrowly on the right of women to have abortions, these women tried to educate the public about the broader issue of “reproductive rights.” At a socialist-feminist conference in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in 1975, Helen Rodriguez-Trias, a health activist, addressed the sterilization abuse of poor women, which inspired the formation of the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse, the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse, the Reproductive Rights National Network, and other groups around the country.

  Together, these activists helped make visible what an indifferent white middle-class population refused to see—the fact that poor women on welfare were often pressured to be sterilized if they wanted government-paid abortions. Reproductive rights meant that women not only had the right to abortion, but also the right to have children. The pioneering work of these groups eventually created a constituency for and shaped the agenda of the National Women’s Health Network, formed in 1975, a national organization dedicated to advancing the health of women of all classes and races. The Health Network flourished and, by the nineties, became a highly respected and authoritative watchdog organization, evaluating treatments, research trials, and government health policies.

  The impact of the women’s health movement is hard to exaggerate. T
wo examples will perhaps offer some idea of its global reach. In 1986, I met with a small group of women in a barrio located on the outskirts of Managua in Nicaragua. With great pride, they showed me their single tattered copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves, translated into Spanish. I asked how the book had affected their lives. “We know what to ask from our doctors and our husbands,” one woman responded with a mischievous grin. Another woman said she now understood her own anatomy, as well as what to expect during childbirth and lactation. Eventually, Our Bodies, Ourselves appeared in dozens of languages, providing reproductive, contraceptive, sexual, and medical information to women all over the globe.97

  That same year, American women health activists began creating advocacy groups for women with breast cancer. Besides forming support groups, they also offered patients social services and research information on new treatments. By the early 1990s, they successfully lobbied Congress to provide more funds for breast cancer research.

  Unsurprisingly, the women who politicized breast cancer were middle-aged women, veteran feminists of the women’s movement who had embraced, two decades earlier, the political dimensions of “private” health matters. They showed how few resources were spent on breast cancer research; they lobbied for preventive care, as well as new treatments, and, in the process, turned a shameful taboo into a highly politicized disease. In 1988, I discovered this just-emerging movement when I had a biopsy for a suspicious breast lump. In a journal, I recorded my experience:

  As I slowly climb out of the fog of anesthesia, I see my surgeon’s face, grief-stricken and sorrowful. He grips my hand tightly, tells me he’s sorry, it is malignant. Everything goes out of focus. Through a fog of confusion, I feel the firm grip of a nurse’s hand. She gently whispers, “You’ll get through this, but make sure you join a women’s support group.” She has no idea who I am. She doesn’t know how central feminism is to my life. She doesn’t know that I have spent two decades active in the women’s movement. She doesn’t know that I have devoted my career to writing and teaching women’s history. What I helped create now returns to comfort me in my moment of greatest need. The circle remains unbroken. Amazingly, a surge of pleasure softens my anguish.98