Table of Contents
HIS OWN WHERE
June Jordan
Introduced by Sapphire
WOMEN WHO KILL
Ann Jones
With a new introduction by the author
WITCHES, MIDWIVES & NURSES
Barbara Ehrenreich & Deirdre English
Second Edition
Great feminist books of the past fifty years dont fade away.
They become Contemporary Classics.
Introduction
SUSAN FALUDI
A STORY FROM THE 70s: A YOUNG WOMAN GOES TO see a gynecologist. She is seeking contraceptives. The doctor questions why she needs them. She thinks this is patronizing and none of his business. Im going to college, is all she will say. He frowns, not used to obstinate behavior from female patients. Finally, seeing she is not to be dissuaded, he says that if she must use birth control, he will put her on the pill. No, she insists. She doesnt trust the high estrogen levelsshes read the research, newly unearthed by women health activists, about the heightened risk of strokes, heart attacks, blood clots. Oh, thats just a bunch of feminist hysteria, he says. No it isnt, she says, crossing her arms. I want a diaphragm. She gets it. Some years later, the data compiled by feminist hysterics proves to be scientific and overwhelming. The pills manufacturers, convinced of the dangers, reduce the estrogen dose by a third.
The young woman, of course, is me, and this story serves as full disclosure. I cant write a preface to one of the early and essential texts of the 70s womens health movement without admitting the bias of my personal gratitude. And I cant read Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre Englishs Complaints and Disorders without being consumed all over again with excitement about the era these pages recall: a time when feminists challenged a male medical establishment that had for so long withheld information and told women how to think and feel about their bodies; a time when women collectively reframed the questions, re-examined the history, reassessed the data, and reinforced each others efforts to change the system; a time when a critical mass of women came to understand that seeing and thinking for themselves was fundamental to their liberation. As Deirdre English says of the book she and Ehrenreich self-published and shipped out in Barbaras childrens old Pampers boxes in the early 70s, The most important moral point is: women defining their own needs, not having their needs constructed by the political interests of anyone elsemen, doctors, psychiatrists, the state, the Tea Party, anything but women themselves.
Complaints and Disorders is a profound act of independent and historical investigation. Its two authors were posing questions no one had asked, inspecting archives no one had read, and charting a terrain no one had mapped. The revelations their work yielded remain central to feminist analysis and contemporary womens self-understanding. Ehrenreich and English were drilling down through cultural sedimentary layers to bedrock. They wanted to know how we got from there to here: What is the nature of the relationship between women and their doctors and why is it that way? How has the medical world come to define femininity in a particular fashion? How did doctors become the ber-guardians of sexist ideology?
In writing this, we have tried to see beyond our own experiences (and anger), they wrote, and to understand medical sexism as a social force helping to shape the options and social roles of all women. That is, they looked to the connective tissue between individual women and social institutions and between our present condition and our Victorian past. And what they uncovered was a long hidden history shaped by complex social, political, and economic dynamics. They found the crucial prequel to the troubling tale of modern women and modern medicine.
With the ascendancy of a male medical establishment in the second half of the nineteenth century, physicians took over the role of the clergy, regulating womens reproduction and thereby defining women as the compromised, defective sex. While the church fathers justified their control over women with the contention that the weaker sex naturally lacked morals, the medical men rested their case on womens natural lack of health. Medicines prime contribution to sexist ideology, Ehrenreich and English emphasized, has been to describe women as sick, and as potentially sickening to men. The new scientific terms were in no way an improvement over the old moral basis for control. Quite the contrary. The fading of the last vestiges of religious moralism from scientific ideology has made it all the more mystifying, all the more effective as a potential tool for domination.
Ehrenreich and English saw their work as a starting pointthey were looking to open a much larger inquiry, conducted by other women who were, likewise, framing their own questions, thinking for themselves. We trust that you take what we have done not as a final statement but as an invitation to go much further, they wrote, addressing their readers directly with a refreshing openness. And in the years to follow, many feminist investigators and researchers took up the call, limning the untold story of womens health. Scholars of womens historyparticularly those who came out of the school of social history pursued from the ground upwould push deeper into the thickets of Victorian womens experience and return with the trophies of original research and catalyzing insight. Carroll Smith-Rosenbergs Disorderly Conduct, which explored Victorian womens efforts to resist the medical and cultural straitjackets of their times, and Elaine Showalters The Female Malady, a feminist examination of the history of psychiatry from Victorian to modern times, are just two notable examples of many such works that emerged in the course of the70s and80s. (As is Ehrenreich and Englishs For Her Own Good, their wonderfully witty and classic chronicle of the two-hundred-year history of medical, psychiatric, and parenting advice literature directed at American women.)
But my other emotion in rereading Complaints and Disorders is melancholy. Because it is this very kind of workhistorical, real-world, accessible, driven by a concern for womens conditions and a desire to change them, seeking to inspire other feminist researchersthat has suffered in the shift to a more abstract and abstruse approach to gender studies. Ehrenreich and English were widening the lens to investigate an entire social systemits history, its mechanisms, its consequences. More and more, though, gender studies, constrained by the demands of academic life and the vogues of a postmodern age, has narrowed the aperture, making increasingly pinched arguments stripped of material reality, and sometimes comprehensible only to the scholastic circle that knows the rarified code.
Ehrenreich and English wrote to be understood by the largest world of women possiblethey were not appealing to a tenure committee. Their prose is full of urgency, passion, and, at the same time, utter respect for the complicated and contradictory historical channels they were navigating. It was important to them to be as clear and honest and true to their findings as possible, because they knew it was important to the lives of real women, to the society they lived in and its prospects for change. They were committed both to social justice and historical integrity, and intent on compromising neither.
