Table of Contents
HIS OWN WHERE
June Jordan
Introduced by Sapphire
WOMEN WHO KILL
Ann Jones
With a new introduction by the author
Great feminist books of the past fifty years dont fade away.
They become Contemporary Classics.
Introduction to the Second Edition: The Backstory
WITHES, MIXWIVES & NURSES(WMN) IS A DOCUMENT from the second wave of feminism in the United States. Rereading it forty years later, we find it startling in its assertiveness and sweep and, for the most part, surprisingly accurate, given the paucity of materials we originally had to work with. At the same time, we also cringe a little at what read now like overstatements and overly militant ways of stating things. A lot has changed in forty years, both historically and in our approach to scholarship, so we have to remind ourselves that WMN was written in a blaze of anger and indignation. If some of the sources of our anger now seem quaint, this is only because of works like WMN and the movement it came out of.
By the early 1970s feminists were becoming aware of a variety of ways women were abused or treated unjustly by the medical system. As health care professionals, women were largely confined to subordinate roles as nurses and aides. As consumers of care, we found ourselves subject to both insensitive and hazardous treatment: unnecessary hysterectomies, over-medicated childbirth, insufficiently tested contraceptives, involuntary sterilizations, and the almost universal condescension of male doctors.
We were not supposed to know anything about our own bodies or to participate in decision-making about our own care. As girls, the women of our generation had grown up thinking of their reproductive organs as the unmentionable region down there. In the Ladies Home Journal, which many of our mothers read, the medical advice column was entitled Tell Me, Doctor. Women who asked too many questions or insisted, for example, on natural childbirth, frequently found themselves labeled, right in their medical records, as uncooperative or neurotic. Serious complaints were likely to be dismissed as psychosomatic and attributed to womens assumed suggestibility. In the standard surgical protocol for breast cancer treatment, the patient was biopsied and then, if the result was positive, rushed into a radical mastectomy without ever being wakened from anesthesia to discuss her options.
One of our first projects in the emerging womens health movement was to confront womens ignorance of their own bodies. In Boston, a group of feminists had launched a series of Know Your Body courses aimed at the general publicthe core of which became the groundbreaking book Our Bodies, Ourselves in 1970and we helped put together a similar course in New York City. A small group of us got together and studied medical textbooks to prepare presentations on such topics as the menstrual cycle, pregnancy, and menopause. Today of course, anyone can learn about these things in high school courses, by reading womens magazines, or just by googling. But at the time, women packed our evening classes, eager for whatever information we had to offer.
We were beginning to suspect that women had not always, in all circumstances, been so disempowered with respect to their own bodies and care. After all, medical technology and the medical profession that monopolized it were relatively recent historical developments, and yet somehow our female ancestors had, however imperfectly, negotiated the challenges of the female life cycle. Having met as teachers at a new branch of the State University of New York, the College at Old Westburywhich was devoted at the time to nontraditional students, usually in their twenties or older, for the most part black and Hispanicwe had an opportunity to satisfy our curiosity. The campus was then a hotbed of political debate over class, race, gender, and identity politics, with Florence Howe, who went on to launch the Feminist Press, working to develop what was one of the first womens studies programs in the nation. Encouraged by her and other colleagues, we created a course on womens health, which gave us an excuse to read up on the history of women and medicine.
There was not a lot to read at the time, the entire genre of books on Women and... having yet to be invented. Sometimes, in conventional histories of American medicine, we found tantalizing references to a time when women predominated as healersbut only as an indication of how primitive American medicine had been before the rise of the modern medical profession. What kept us going was the powerful reinforcement we were getting from our students, many of them practical nurses seeking RN degrees, who often brought with them memories and experiences of female healing traditions: we had midwives from the Caribbean, baffled by the then near nonexistence of midwifery in this country, women from European immigrant backgrounds who could recall grandmothers who practiced lay healing arts, and African Americans who carried memories of an autonomous black midwifery tradition in the American south.
Sometime in 1972and we are both hazy on exactly whenwe were invited to attend a small conference on womens health held in rural Pennsylvania. This, it seemed, was our chance to test our emerging hypotheses on an audience of activists and a few fledgling scholars. We no longer possess the mimeographed outline of our findings that we took to the conference, but the central idea was that the medical profession as we knew it (still over 90 percent male) had replaced and driven out a much older tradition of female lay healing, including both midwifery and a range of healing skills, while closing medical education to women. In other words, the ignorance and disempowerment of women that we confronted in the 1970s were not longstanding conditions, but were the result of a prolonged power struggle that had taken place in America in the early nineteenth century, well before the rise of scientific medicine. We traced a similar power struggle in Europe back to the early modern era and, inspired in part by the wonderfully iconoclastic Thomas Szasz, we looked at how female lay healers of the same era were frequently targeted as witches.
The response to our presentation was sufficiently enthusiastic to warrant some sort of publication. But what? Neither of us had any access to the mainstream media. Nor were we interested in seeking a book contract. We wanted to publish our findings in a form that would be cheap, accessible, and engaging for exactly the kind of women who had been our students at the College at Old Westbury, and this meant neither a book nor a magazine article. The decision we made, which now seems to us somewhat extraordinary, was to self-publish our results in booklet form. By self-publishing, we maintained control over the content, including the choice of illustrations and we had an inexpensive product that could easily be passed from hand to hand. We called our little vanity press Glass Mountain Pamphlets, referring to an obstaclelike sexismthat we might not yet be able to smash but could at least see through. Its headquarters was the house we shared with three other adults and Barbaras children.
