Our Bodies, Ourselves is a book about women's health and sexuality. Written by members of the Boston Women's Health Book Collective, it was initially self-published in 1970 as a booklet called Women and Their Bodies: A Course. The first commercially published print edition came out in 1973 under the title Our Bodies, Ourselves: A Book by and for Women. The book, often referred to by the initials OBOS, was subsequently revised and expanded six times until the final print edition appeared in 2011. The early editions were groundbreaking in the way they encouraged women to understand and celebrate their sexuality, with sections on reproductive rights, lesbianism, sexual independence, and masturbation. The book offered graphic illustrations and frank talk on topics such as birth control, pregnancy, childbirth, venereal disease, postpartum depression, menopause, and abortion. The emphasis in OBOS on women's engagement with their own sexual desires stood in contrast to traditional notions of women as "passive and docile" and men as "active and aggressive" in sexual relationships. The expanded later editions also covered topics such as reproductive justice, violence against women, gender identity, and environmental health. OBOS has been translated and adapted by women's groups around the world and is available in 34 languages. Combined sales for all editions exceed four million copies. The New York Times called it "America's best-selling book on all aspects of women's health" and a "feminist classic".
History The women's health workshop that inspired OBOS was organized in spring of 1969 by Nancy Miriam Hawley. The workshop, titled "Women and Their Bodies", was part of a female liberation conference held at Boston's Emmanuel College. In a 2004 interview, Hawley recalled the state of women's health care at the time: "We weren't encouraged to ask questions, but to depend on the so-called experts. Not having a say in our own health care frustrated and angered us. We didn't have the information we needed, so we decided to find it on our own." The workshop attendees were a small group of college-educated women ranging in age from 23 to 39. They shared stories about the health issues they faced, and their frustrating interactions with doctors. In the months that followed, they met regularly and soon realized how little knowledge they had about their own anatomy. They resolved to obtain the knowledge themselves. The women, individually and in pairs, each took a topic to research and write about, for example, Wendy Sanford wrote about abortion, Jane Pincus and Ruth Bell about pregnancy, and Paula Doress and Esther Rome about postpartum depression. They read textbooks and medical journals; consulted with trusted medical authorities; and gradually assembled information in the form of course material. The group mimeographed what they wrote and used it as the basis for informal classes in women's health taught in the Boston area. The authors decided to consolidate their writeups into "an accessible format that could be shared and would serve as a model for women to learn about themselves, communicate their findings with doctors, and challenge the medical establishment to change and improve the care that women receive." The result was a 75-cent, 193-page stapled booklet called Women and Their Bodies: A Course. Published in 1970, in partnership with the New England Free Press (a New Left publishing firm), it became an "underground sensation", selling 250,000 copies in New England without any formal advertising. To meet growing demand, Women and Their Bodies was reprinted in 1971 under the name, Our Bodies, Our Selves: A Course by and for Women. As a result of the booklet's success, in 1972, the authors—now a core group of twelve women—formed the non-profit Boston Women's Health Book Collective (BWHBC) (rebranded the "Our Bodies Ourselves" collective in 2002) and prepared a mass-market print edition. The book was expanded to 276 pages; retitled Our Bodies, Ourselves: A Book by and for Women; and published by Simon & Schuster in March 1973. As a precondition of working with the publishing company, BWHBC members stipulated they must retain complete control of the book's contents, they must have a woman editor, and non-profit clinics must be able to purchase copies at a substantial discount. OBOS featured first-person stories from women, and tackled many topics then regarded as taboo. The book's publication is considered a foundational event in the women's health movement in the U.S. In the 1973 Preface, the authors cited four lessons learned during their research: (1) that it was important to supplement medical facts with personal experiences, how the latter could enrich knowledge of women's bodies; (2) that possessing basic information was liberating; it meant women were "better prepared to evaluate the institutions that are supposed to meet our health needs"; (3) that they were combating an ignorance which plagued women for centuries and "had one major consequence—pregnancy. Until very recently pregnancies were all but inevitable, biology was our destiny"; (4) that "body education is core education. Our bodies are the physical bases from which we move out into the world; ignorance, uncertainty—even, at worst, shame—about our physical selves create in us an alienation from ourselves that keeps us from being the whole people that we could be." The BWHBC was approached by women in other countries who wanted to translate OBOS. Dagmar Schultz brought a copy to Germany in the early 1970s, where it was translated and quickly had an impact; the first women's health center was founded in West Berlin in 1973 and still exists today. BWHBC members initiated the Spanish translation themselves, self-publishing Nuestros Cuerpos, Nuestras Vidas in 1977. But they soon recognized the limitations of verbatim translation, how "aspects of the book that were culturally appropriate for the original US readers did not always make sense in other contexts." In the 1980s, a BWHBC-affiliated group named Amigas Latinas en Accion pro-Salud began working on a new Spanish-language cultural adaptation of OBOS that would better reflect their experiences. It was published in 2000.
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