Bodies of Knowledge: Sexuality Reproduction and Women's Health in the Second Wave

About this book

Throughout the 1970s and 80s women argued that unless they gained access to information about their own bodies there would be no equality. In Bodies of Knowledge Wendy Kline considers the ways in which ordinary women worked to position the female body at the center of womens liberation. As Kline shows the struggle to attain this knowledge unified women but also divided themaccording to race class sexuality or level of professionalization. Each of the five chapters of Bodies of Knowledge examines a distinct moment or setting of the womens movement in order to give life to the ideas expectations and pitfalls encountered by the advocates of womens health: the making of Our Bodies Ourselves (1973); the conflicts surrounding the training and practice of womens pelvic exams; the emergence of abortion as a feminist issue; the battles over contraceptive regulation at the 1983 Depo-Provera FDA hearings; and the rise of the profession of midwifery. Including an epilogue that considers the experiences of the daughters of 1970s feminists Bodies of Knowledge is an important contribution to the study of the bodiesthat marked the livesof feminisms second wave.