Bodies of Knowledge

Throughout the 1970s and '80s, women argued that unless they gained access to information about their own bodies, there would be no equality. InBodies of Knowledge,Wendy Kline considers the ways in which ordinary women worked to position the female body at the center of women's 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 ofBodies of Knowledgeexamines a distinct moment or setting of the women's movement in order to give life to the ideas, expectations, and pitfalls encountered by the advocates of women's health: the making ofOur Bodies, Ourselves(1973); the conflicts surrounding the training and practice of women's 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 Knowledgeis an important contribution to the study of the bodiesthat marked the livesof feminism's second wave.

Wendy Kline is associate professor of history at the University of Cincinnati She is the author of Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom.