Our Bodies, Ourselves

First published in 1970, Our Bodies, Ourselves was one of the first books to provide women with comprehensive information about women's health, sexuality, and reproduction. It challenged the medical model by presenting information about women's health in the context of women's life experiences. Currently in its seventh edition, Our Bodies, Ourselves continues to provide state-of-the-art information about women's bodies from a feminist perspective.

Our Bodies, Ourselves was written by a Boston-based feminist nonprofit organization named after the book. The founders of Our Bodies Ourselves (OBOS) met while attending a panel on women and their bodies at a women's liberation conference in 1969. The women participating in the discussion quickly realized they had little solid information about women's bodies or women's health; at the same time, they shared similar dissatisfactions with the medical system. Given these realizations, some of the participants decided to keep meeting as a group and began researching women's health, sexuality, and reproduction. In order to conduct their research, they sneaked into medical libraries or borrowed library cards from medical students. They wrote up what they learned in a series of papers and met weekly to discuss what they had written.