Our Country, Ourselves: Lessons From 1969
How 12 women changed women's healthcare
I wish we weren't fighting all the time to protect women's rights, to protect women's health. ~Hillary Rodham Clinton
In the face of historic events and a topsy-turvy political landscape, it can be easy to feel insignificant. Dwarfed by governments and hulking organizations, it’s easy to doubt our individual impact.
But the first step down the road to obeying in advance is thinking that your efforts are too small to matter. That you don’t have the expertise, or experience, or platform to make a difference – so why bother wasting the resources.
We’re going to need to fight that thought, friend.
So today I’d like to share a story.
It was 1969.
The women’s movement was brand new – and fledgling organizations like the National Organization for Women were just getting their footing. Women across the country started meeting in small (and large) groups, asking hard questions and sharing difficult stories about their lives, their hopes, and their fears.
It’s in that context that twelve women met at a women's health conference in Boston.
At the time, women’s health was a taboo subject. In 1969, there was no text to consult, no internet to search – and women weren’t encouraged to ask their physicians (or anyone else) even simple questions about their bodies and health.
In sharing stories with one another at the conference, these women discovered that they had similar experiences with male doctors’ condescension and dismissive attitudes. They set out to make a list of doctors they could recommend – physicians who respected them, listened to them, and gave them information.
They couldn’t think of a single doctor to recommend.
Their questions – and questions asked by other women like them – were going unanswered, their medical concerns dismissed.
So they decided to do something about it.
They wrote down all of the questions they had – all of the women’s health-related topics they felt they didn’t sufficiently understand and wanted to know more about. They split the subjects amongst themselves, and committed to researching topics they were passionate about, from abortion to pregnancy to postpartum depression. They shared what they learned with the group, and wrote papers putting their research into plain language.
They then compiled those papers into a course and a booklet to distribute to other women – thereby sharing the information they had learned. They called it Women and Their Bodies.
It was an underground sensation.
Spread mainly by word of mouth, over 250,000 copies were sold in 1971.
Those twelve women formed a non-profit, called the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, and began to revise and expand their initial text, which they published in 1973.
We now know it as the groundbreaking text, Our Bodies, Ourselves.
To say Our Bodies, Ourselves was revolutionary and empowering is an understatement. It tackled and demystified taboo subjects like sex and contraception and abortion at a time when women couldn’t own credit cards and the pill was only prescribed for married women. It featured frank, clear discussion and graphic diagrams of the female anatomy.
Before its release, women were in an information desert about their own physical health – and lacking the power that comes from knowledge. After its publication, women (and eventually their physicians) finally had a resource to consult.
That book allowed women to, in a very tangible way, retake their power and become part of a larger community. No longer locked in an information silo, readers wrote to the authors of Our Bodes, Ourselves – asking questions, offering suggestions, and expressing relief that they were no longer alone. Future iterations of the book took those suggestions under advisement, making everyday women true contributors to the effort.
Outside of its academic importance, the book inspired a grassroots women’s health movement that centered education and self-advocacy. Armed with better knowledge and the confidence that comes from it, women became active consumers of healthcare. The so-called Second Wave of feminism benefited tremendously, with active coalitions that focused on patients’ rights, disability rights, and reproductive rights.
Since its publication over fifty years ago, what started out as a joint project among 12 young women has sold millions of copies around the world, and has been printed in 31 languages and braille.
Did the 12 women who met at that conference in 1969 know that their joint project would change women’s conversations about and access to health care on a global scale?
Certainly not.
Did they have some specialized knowledge or expertise that made them uniquely qualified to tackle these issues?
No – besides having female anatomy, intellectual curiosity, and a passion for women’s health.
And that is what I think is most inspiring about them, and why I wanted to tell you this story. These were just twelve ordinary women who looked out upon the vastness of the American medical (and educational) system and the barriers of systemic societal misogyny – impermeable, hulking, immobile constants that made it very unlikely they’d have much impact individually.
And still, they plowed ahead.
They saw something that needed to be done, something they could do, something that could make a difference to some people, even if they couldn’t change everything.
And then they just got to work doing the thing.
In so many ways, the world is a better place for their work – even if there’s still a lot of work to be done.
A few years back, Hillary Clinton said I wish we weren't fighting all the time to protect women's rights, to protect women's health. She’s right – sometimes it feels like we’re on the front lines of a never-ending battle over the same ground.
At those points it can feel like doing anything at all is pointless. It’s too easy to dismiss our own efforts as “not enough” – especially if they don’t seem sufficient to change whole systems or make a dent in a machine.
It’s at those times that I hope you’ll think back to what 12 regular women were able to accomplish with a text that started as a stapled booklet. The millions of lives they touched directly with their words; the millions more they inspired to action; and the entire women’s healthcare movement that benefited from their spark.
All because they went to a conference in 1969.
Let’s get to work.
Image credit: OurBodiesOurselves.org
Actions for the Week of December 17, 2024
Here’s the part where – if you are so inclined – we roll up our sleeves and engage in what I like to call Action Therapy. In each Tuesday post I share a few “small things” – usually a Small Thing to Read, a Small Event to Attend, and a Small Call to Make or Action to Take. You can tuck these actions into your week with ease – and know that you’re doing something today to make tomorrow better.
Small Event to Attend: TODAY Joy In Civic Life
Democracy Notes is hosting an event today that sounds especially relevant to our season: Joy to the (Civic) World: The Role of Fun and Joy in Civic Life.
From the event description: Participating in civic life doesn't need to feel like eating your spinach. Yes, it's important. But it can be both important and fun and joyful. In small towns and big cities across the country, leaders are redefining what it means to participate in civic life, injecting fun, joy, and celebration into their work and strengthening the social fabric of their communities in the process.
The Connective Tissue and Democracy Notes newsletters are hosting an interactive panel celebrating and highlighting practical strategies to make civic life fun and joyful. The panel will be moderated by Richard Young, Founder of CivicLex, and will feature three place-based facilitators of civic good times: - Ash Hanson, Creative Executive Officer of the Department of Public Transformation and Founder of PlaceBase Productions - Nathalia Benitez-Perez, Director of Boston's Office of Civic Organizing and the Boston Block Party Initiative - Evan Weissman, Founder of Warm Cookies of the Revolution.
This practical, interactive, and (dare we say) fun event will occur today, Tuesday, December 17th at 2PM ET.
Register here: https://virginia.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwuf--oqzwrHtEZBPjAyjppZclbUo99hC5_#/registration
A Small Thing to Read: Democracy Journal’s Democracy Symposium Trump 2.0: Learning the Hard Lessons
So, this reading recommendation is a collection of articles – which I know is stretching the definition of “small thing to read.” But the editors of Democracy asked some incredibly smart thinkers and political analysts to examine our new world, and compiled the results into a symposium of sorts.
Each of the articles is fascinating, and a worthy read. It’s as if they are chapters in the next important book of our lives, and I thought you’d want to see them collectively as well as individually.
AND with the holiday season upon us, we’ve got fewer opportunities for action than is typical. So it’s a good time to sit down with some smart essays and get our thinking and strategy straight.
Check it out here: https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/75/trump-2-0-learning-the-hard-lessons/
Small Action to Take: Telehealth
I hate to give a repeat action, but this is the LAST week that Congress is in session, so it’s urgent for us to support an extension of current telehealth coverage. To recap, as it stands, Medicare coverage for telehealth services will expire at the end of the year.
You read that right. You can read more about it in Forbes or Mother Jones – but the long and the short of it is unless Congress acts, Medicare will no longer cover most telehealth beginning in 2025. This impacts all of us whether we’re covered by Medicare or not because private insurers often follow what Medicare does.
So let’s get out our phones for a super quick call to your Congressperson and your Senators.
Find their contact info here:
Representative: https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative
Senators: https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm
Sample Script:
Hi, I'm a constituent calling from [zip]. My name is _______.
I’m hearing that Medicare coverage for telehealth is set to expire at the end of the year unless Congress acts. Telehealth is really important to patients like me, and I’m calling to urge the Congressmember to do everything possible to extend coverage. Thanks.
Thanks for reading, friend – I’m glad to see you! While I don’t put anything behind a paywall, this is a reader-supported publication. Because of the support of nearly 100 (!!) paid subscribers I’m able to dedicate time and resources to researching and writing posts like this. (Plus, your support truly means a lot to me personally.) Thanks in advance.
I had the pleasure of meeting one of these women at the conclusion of a conference a few years ago. Yes, she was still at it, still interested in people’s well-being, even though she’s retired. Don’t have her name, just remember that lucky, accidental meeting.
When she said she was one of the authors of OBO, I was thrilled. All I could really say was, “thank you”.
This history fleshes out the story, the time before major publication. So thank you to you, also.
I will never forget the first time I read Our Bodies, Ourselves. I was in college and my friends and I finally learned what we needed to know about our bodies. There was no other source of accurate information at the time.