1970s
1980s
A01=Wendy Kline
abortion
academic
activism
Author_Wendy Kline
autonomy
birth control
Category=JBSF1
Category=JBSF11
Category=VFDW
childbirth
class
contraceptive
court
dep provera
discrimination
doctor
eq_bestseller
eq_health-lifestyle
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
fda
feminism
health
historical
history
legal
liberation
pelvic exam
pregnancy
race
regulation
reproductive
scholarly
second wave
sex
sexuality
wellness
womens movement
Product details
- ISBN 9780226443058
- Weight: 482g
- Dimensions: 17 x 24mm
- Publication Date: 15 Oct 2010
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Throughout the 1970s and '80s, women argued that unless they gained access to information about their own bodies, there would be no equality. In "Bodies 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 them - according to race, class, sexuality, or level of professionalization. Each of the five chapters of Bodies of Knowledge examines 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 of Our Bodies, Ourselves; 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 Knowledge" is an important contribution to the study of the bodies - that marked the lives - of 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.
