The Book, Itself

The preface to Our Bodies, Ourselvesconcludes, "Learning to understand, accept, and be responsible for our physical selves, we are freed from some of these preoccupations and can start to use our untapped energies. Our image of ourselves is on a firmer base, we can be better friends and better lovers, better people more self-confident, more autonomous, stronger and more whole." The second commercial edition of the book retains that original perspective: it focuses on health care for women, stressing preventive methods, and anything extra is incidental to the information the book offers--though essential to its character.

More than 50 per cent of the new edition is new, either in one of several additional chapters or included in one of the old ones. A major share of the additional material is taken up by an expanded section on checking for breast cancer and other material whose exclusion left an obvious gap in the first edition. Other additions are made in response to letters the Boston Women's Health Collective received after their first edition was published, so that the new version speaks directly to more specific medical needs than did the original.

Like the first edition, this one opens with the chapter on "Our Changing Sense of Self." Although it seems less revolutionary now that it did in the early '70s, this section, like the "Sexuality" chapter, still grabs the women who read it for the first time. Throughout the book, women find experiences included in the presentation similar to their own, a feeling another woman has expressed that coincides with one they could not themselves express. There's a lot of information here, too, about where to look for medical advice if you're not satisfied with their informal presentation.

One of the failures of this book is that it does not go beyond women, their bodies and themselves. Perhaps it is obvious only because the book is relied upon so heavily in the women's movement, but there is a need for some discussion of what women's liberation means for men, and what a change in male-female relationships could imply for the social structure at large. The middle class bias that is present in most areas of the modern feminist movement is just as obvious here.

But this is perhaps an unfair gripe about a book that is already huge. Perhaps asking the women who wrote it to include any more is going too far. It's hard to describe the way most of the women I know who have read it feel about Our Bodies, Ourselves: that it speaks to them alone, that it has had a great influence on how they view both the world and themselves. It's hard to ask more of anything.