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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804773720 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/21/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 280 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
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Our Bodies, Ourselves and the Work of Writing
By Susan Wells
Stanford University Press
Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-6308-0
Chapter One
A Rage for Inscription
Our bodies, ourselves was written in the midst of rapid social change, and so it was written amid furious activity and protracted conflict. Its networks of writers condensed points of social activity and political controversy; they concentrated rhetorical resources generated by social movements. These movements shaped the writers of the collective; they encouraged an array of mental habits and writing practices that would make Our Bodies, Ourselves both novel and inevitable. Members of the collective also learned skills of analysis and research in higher education, which was opening to women. In the field of literacy studies, such institutional contexts for writing are called "literacy sponsors"; Deborah Brandt has defined them as "agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach and model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold, literacy-and gain advantage by it in some way." We are used to thinking of colleges and universities as sponsors of writing, but it may seem odd to think of the New Left and the women's movement in that way: insurgents of the 1960s and 1970s are imagined picking up guitars or picket signs, not typewriters. But both of these movements were deeply committed to writing and publication; together with higher education, they fostered habits of research, writing, and publication that made the composition of Our Bodies, Ourselves possible. Although the book was probably one of the most innovative, and certainly the most enduring, of the publication projects of the 1960s, it was not at all unique.
Higher education, the New Left, and the women's movement each offered distinct models of publicity. The New Left and the women's movement sometimes understood themselves as forming and addressing a universal public that included all possible significant individuals-a broad and undifferentiated mass of potential recruits. At other times, both movements saw themselves as constructing limited counterpublics, specialized groups bound together by texts and practices that expressed their opposition to the status quo. Higher education, especially for women, engaged in a great equalizing mission in the 1960s, so students were encouraged to see themselves as agents of profound social change, to put their education to use "in the world." Later, in the 1970s and 1980s, progressives in higher education continued the New Left's practice of critiquing conventional disciplines, including those related to medicine; they saw themselves as addressing communities of likeminded scholars and activists.
The Boston Women's Health Book Collective (BWHBC) organized networks of authorship in all three of these institutions, reorganizing their networks as social movements faltered or collapsed, reaching out to communities of clinical activists and patient advocates. This chapter shows how Our Bodies, Ourselves (OBOS) responded to sponsoring formations, considering the various writing practices and genres, forms of publication, and relations to the public sphere of the texts they fostered. Members of the collective had been formed by higher education and were eager to redeem the promise of their formation. The New Left fostered do-it-yourself publication processes; the genre of power-structure research, imported from the civil rights movement, offered a model for Our Bodies, Ourselves. The feminist conversational genre of consciousness-raising offered the collective a persuasive model of argument and a discourse register that mixed colloquial language with political analysis. In the particular local circumstances of Boston, the genre of the open letter, popular in the women's movement, offered a model of pointed, engaged, and expressive publication. These sponsors and practices supported, in contradictory and layered ways, the writing of individuals in the collective; here, I discuss the particular practices of Lucy Candib and Nancy Miriam Hawley. Sponsoring institutions also offered the collective a model of publication as a path to constructing a public and transforming public discussion.
Women learned about writing and research in higher education, which was opening to them in the 1960s, especially at the undergraduate level. Higher education had given women writing skills; social movements gave them a reason to write and confidence in the efficacy of writing. The movements with which many members of the collective were associated-the New Left, including the antiwar and student movements, and the women's movement-provided a rich array of inscription practices, many of them collaborative. Social movements incited their participants to write: leaflets, discussion questions, white papers, chapters, books, and more books. They also made it easy to imagine writing as significant for broad audiences, or even as a tool for changing how medicine was practiced.
Women and Higher Education in the 1960s
Undergraduate education, with all its complexities, was an island of relative equality for women during the 1960s, when women entered colleges in large numbers. The classroom, the library, and the laboratory would be open to them, while the boardroom, the operating theater, and the courtroom were not. This anomaly did not go unnoticed by either college women or their professors: the late 1960s were a period of intense reflection on women's education. Both the United Nations and the President's Commission on the Status of Women issued reports on women's education in 1964. Education for women was on the agenda of such groups as the Ohio Statewide Conference on the Changing Status of Women (1963), and the subject of university symposia at such institutions as the University of Wisconsin (1963), the American Council on Education (1963), the Mississippi State College for Women (1960), Southern Methodist University (1967), and the University of Michigan Center for Continuing Education of Women (1968). When the University of Chicago sponsored a conference on liberal arts education to celebrate its seventy-fifth anniversary (1966), the proceedings included a talk on "Education and the Contemporary Woman."
Once they graduated, many college women faced barriers to further professional training or advancement. Both medical schools and law schools maintained restrictive quotas. Many other professions-journalism, architecture, investment, broadcasting, science, and engineering-discouraged or excluded women. Women were less likely to gain admission to graduate school than men. In 1970, women held 37 percent of the professional and technical jobs in the country, down from 45 percent in 1945. Nearly 20 percent of the working women who were college graduates were employed in clerical, sales, service, or factory jobs-as women's skills, levels of education, and breadth of literacy increased, job qualifications in traditionally feminine jobs were simply revised upward, with no corresponding benefit in pay or status.
The contradiction between women's success in higher education and their exclusion from the professions was pressing, especially at women's colleges. There, discussions of higher education for women could be urgent; a case in point was the Study Group on Women's Education at Radcliffe. Dr. Grete Bibring, a psychoanalyst on the Radcliffe faculty, led the group, which met from January 10 to May 2, 1966. Later that year she would write a report for Radcliffe Dean Mary Bunting about the "defeatist attitudes of Radcliffe students and their lack of opportunities." Fifteen women participated in the study group at one time or another. Among them was Lucy Candib, who was already preparing for medical school: she would work with the Boston Women's Health Book Collective on the first two editions of Our Bodies, Ourselves in 1970 and 1971. Other study group members included future attorneys, writers, and other professionals; the poet Rachel Hadas attended regularly, as did Marion Kilson, an anthropologist who would direct the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe from 1977 to 1980, and Margaret Kemeney, who is currently professor of surgery at the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine. But in 1966, such accomplishments were far in the future; the women in the study group were generally worried and uncertain. Bibring opened the group by conceding, "Obviously, we all have subjective doubts which make this process of education productive of problems. We seem to worry about the security of our education for us in the future ... with the addition of other elements which life will bring (i.e. a family)." The group met biweekly and made a careful record of their discussions about the purpose of education, their speculations about femininity, and their many expressions of insecurity. One member of the group reported that "once she left the college community she was alienated from society. She finds herself always on the defensive, being questioned on all sides." The study group grappled with the paradox of women's higher education in the 1960s: they were demonstrating, daily, their capacity for serious intellectual work, but it was not at all clear where they could do that work once they graduated. As Rachel Hadas put it during one group meeting, "How can we use our education if we don't keep on with it after our B.A.?" Since there was no obvious venue in which their skills could be used, women put their hard-won analytic capacities to work analyzing their own situation. They valued education: "Elizabeth said [education] produced greatness of heart." But they wondered how to use it: "Dr Bibring then asked why we were such angry young women."
By the late 1960s, these questions had both broadened and attenuated for many of its members: student movements raised questions about higher education in general, rather than women's participation in it. However, many women, including members of the collective, believed that education caused broad social change. All members of the collective remembered writing in college. Some members of the collective valued their classes in writing: Norma Swenson remembers fondly her workshop in writing poetry. Other writers, disengaged as they might have been from academic work, felt that they had learned something fundamentally useful. They had, for example, a new perspective on how stories change: "I knew from being a history major: History changes as different people write it." As a group, the collective were dauntingly literate. Wendy Coppedge Sanford, editor of most of the eight editions of Our Bodies, Ourselves, won the 1967 LeBaron Russell Briggs Prize for the best honors essay in English by a Harvard University senior; her Theater as Metaphor in Hamlet was published by Harvard University Press. They were at home in language. Planning an exhibit for a women's health fair, the collective considered showing pictures of "many, many cervices," deploying the Greek plural with colloquial ease. As the group moved into research for the book, its process became a hybrid of consciousness-raising and a graduate seminar: women researched papers in the Countway Library at Harvard Medical, wrote up what they found, and read these papers to the group; members responded with stories of their own experiences. Responsive to the sponsorship of the women's movement, they continued to use the forms and conventions of higher education.
Writing and the New Left
If higher education posed problems for women, the New Left and the emergent counterculture seemed to offer solutions. Many members of the collective were New Leftists, working in the civil rights, antiwar, and draft-resistance movements, although others came to the group with little political experience. Founders Paula Doress-Worters, Vilunya Diskin, Joan Ditzion, Nancy Miriam Hawley, Jane Pincus, and Pamela Berger had worked in civil rights, antiwar, and draft-resistance movements before the Emmanuel Conference. Norma Swenson and Judith Norsigian came to the group because of specific health interests in childbirth and nutrition, respectively, but they also had broad political interests and experience with other issues. What would work on the New Left have taught these collective members about writing? What forms of publication would they have seen? What models of producing, publishing, and disseminating writing did that movement sponsor?
The New Left survives in popular imagination as a stew of activities, barely distinguished from the counterculture, politically undefined and averse to disciplines such as writing and research. But the Left was deeply invested in reading and writing, producing alternative or underground papers, magazines, journals, position papers, broadsides, and leaflets. Producing these texts required both formal ingenuity and research skills, but they could be published casually and cheaply to reach broad readerships. Underground newspapers, for example, flourished. These weekly or biweekly tabloids sprung up in cities, towns, high schools, and army bases. The Underground Press Syndicate grew from twenty-five papers in 1966 to one hundred in 1968; by 1971, there were hundreds of papers. These papers combined investigative reporting, foreign news, political analysis, and cultural criticism. They were not necessarily friendly to women; in 1970, women took over the New York Rat to protest a pornography issue. But in the undergrounds, by hook or by crook, women learned to write quickly, to edit each other's work, to raise money, to do layout and pasteup, and to manage distribution.
Papers formed a national public for the Left. Linked by the Underground Press Syndicate and Liberation News Service, they freely reprinted articles produced in other cities. Since Lenin's What Is to Be Done? (1902), a newspaper had been the mark of a serious Left organization, but the underground press of the 1960s was not interested in that kind of coherence. (The quite different political newspapers of the 1970s, such as The Guardian and The Call, sometimes approximated it.) Underground papers might publish for a few issues, collapse, and re-form, but this ephemeral structure demonstrated that publication was within anyone's reach. The more established undergrounds assembled a staff, often working in a participatory, consensus-based structure. Papers that survived developed a core of a dozen or so people who sustained the paradoxes of leaderlessness, learning to write quickly, to edit, and to make decisions about the length and placement of articles. Writers of alternative papers generally described themselves as a collective, meaning that the group distrusted hierarchy and valued a fluid exchange of roles. The term was adapted by the Boston Women's Health Book Collective, who described their work process as "collective authorship," although the working relations among collective members and with external collaborators were much more textured and sustained than in the alternative press. The new technologies of photo offset printing made it easy and cheap to mock up the paper using typed copy, line drawings, color, press-on borders and headlines, hand-drawn typefaces, and photographs. The printed word, here, was not the property of experts, but available to anyone; the news was no longer sought out, consumed, or rejected, but produced close to home. In her memoir, With the Weathermen: the Personal Journal of a Revolutionary Woman, Susan Stern described her ambivalent relation to her group's ancient offset press:
It had several parts missing, among them the feeder, and one of the "sucking" mechanisms, so you had to push one of the feeder rollers into the ink manually, then run to the other end, and lift out the newly printed sheet. In time we all learned how to run the press, how to load it, ink it, fix it, where to buy supplies for it, and how to find used, inexpensive parts for it. The press was our lifeline.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Our Bodies, Ourselves and the Work of Writing by Susan Wells Copyright © 2010 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
List of Figures ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: Writing Our Bodies 1
1 A Rage for Inscription 15
2 A Different Kind of Writer 62
3 A Different Kind of Book 99
4 What Is This Body That We Read 134
5 Taking on Medicine 175
Postscript 209
Notes 215
Bibliography 243
Index 257