Item #39175 OUR BODIES OUR SELVES: A Course By and For Women.
OUR BODIES OUR SELVES: A Course By and For Women.
OUR BODIES OUR SELVES: A Course By and For Women.
OUR BODIES OUR SELVES: A Course By and For Women.
OUR BODIES OUR SELVES: A Course By and For Women.
OUR BODIES OUR SELVES: A Course By and For Women.

74.

OUR BODIES OUR SELVES: A Course By and For Women.

Boston, Mass.: Boston Women's Health Course Collective/New England Free Press, April 1971. First edition thus. 4to. Illustrated wrps. Three gatherings of newsprint, side-stapled. 136pp. Illustrated throughout with photographs, drawings and diagrams. The second printing of 'Women and Their Bodies', and the first with the title 'Our Bodies, Our Selves', a change intended by its authors to emphasise women taking full ownership of their bodies.

The book was the first of its kind to be written by women, for women, and contains eleven sections devoted to various aspects of women's health and sexuality. Under headings such as Anatomy and Physiology, Some Myths About Women, Venereal Disease, Birth Control, Abortion (then illegal in most American states), Pregnancy, Prepared Childbirth, and Women, Medicine and Capitalism, it features factual information along with first-person stories, "meant to be used by our sisters to increase consciousness about ourselves as women."

The book's origins began at a women's conference held at Emmanuel College in Boston in May 1969, and the realisation by several of those who attended that "there were no 'good' doctors and we had to learn for ourselves." Following one of the workshops, called 'Women and Their Bodies', a group of around a dozen women coalesced to discuss their bodies, their lives, sexuality and relationships, and together they founded the Boston Women's Health Course Collective. In December 1970 the collective produced and circulated a book named after the workshop, and a second printing, re-titled 'Our Bodies, Our Selves', featuring the same cover photograph and identical contents, followed in April 1971. Reprinted at least eight times, it became an underground success and led to the first commercial, expanded edition, published by Simon & Schuster in 1973. Since then it has been regularly updated, reproduced in 33 languages and sold millions of copies. In 2012 The Library of Congress recognised its huge influence by including this 1971 edition in their exhibition, Books That Shaped America.

Newsprint paper slightly age-toned and wrappers slightly spotted, o/w a Very Good plus copy of this radical manual for female self-empowerment.

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