Our Bodies Ourselves Mourns Feminist Champion Gloria Steinem (1934-2026)

Gloria Steinem lit the way. We are thankful for her consequential feminist life, including her staunch support for feminist health justice around the world. She was generous to Our Bodies Ourselves in particular. She stood in solidarity with us many times, reflecting publicly on how much we mattered to feminism and to herself personally. "OBOS taught me that women are the owners of our own bodies," she proudly proclaimed.

She served on the Our Bodies Ourselves Advisory Board and supported OBOS through a financially challenging time in its history. In 2017, for instance, she co-hosted an OBOS benefit in New York City, with OBOS co-founder Judy Norsigian and longtime OBOS collaborator and filmmaker Carol Ciancutti, at Ciancutti's home.

 Interviewed by The New York Times in 2015 about "the best books about feminism ever written," Steinem included "Our Bodies, Ourselves" on her short list, in the company of feminist icons Robin Morgan, Barbara Smith, Gloria Anzaldua, and Cherríe Moraga.

Steinem also wrote a passionate, personal preface for the 25th anniversary edition of "Our Bodies, Ourselves," available in its entirety below.

"When the group that was to become the Boston Women's Health Book Collective first met in 1969, I was working as a political columnist for New York  magazine. I  was  also white and thirty-five years old and had become middle-class courtesy of going to college. In other words, I was part of that small demographic slice of people most likely to get the best health care information. As a journalist, I was even in a position to research what I didn't know.

Yet what "best" meant in those largely prefeminist days was whatever limited information the medical establishment considered appropriatefor patients in general and for women in particular. As a result, I assumed that my body needed attention only when it didn't work, and that the large portions  of animal  fat,  refined  sugar,  hormones and chemicals in our recommended diets couldn't  be  too  dangerous  or  they  wouldn't  be there. Like the third or so of American women who had abortions even when they were illegal, I believed that if I needed an abortion, I had no choice but to risk my life and safety in a criminal underworld. After having one abortion and to avoid taking this risk a second time, I followed the "best" medical advice and took the high-dose contraceptive pill for a decade. In addition to such self destructive  acts, I had many habits  based on unchallenged beliefs: for instance, that binging on sugar was okay as long as my weight was normal, that only heart attack-prone men had to worry about cholesterol or cardiovascular fitness, and that male violence was inevitable and could only be avoided by female caution.

All these conditions of life seemed to be the price for being female. So did submitting our female bodies to doctors who were over 90 percent male (though childbearing meant that women used the health care system about 30 percent more than men did), and lying feet up like a dying bug in the common gynecological position (a horizontal pose so uniform that even women giving birth were forced to do so against gravity).

I often tell these personal observations because trusting, comparing and compiling our own experience is the revolutionary act taught to us by the Boston Women's Health Book Collective-as it is by feminism in all areas of life. Only remembering a prefeminist time of even greater disempowerment will allow us to see how revolutionary and prescient the message of twenty-five years ago really was. If women with the most resources had to endure ignorance, humiliation  and a lack of empathy for female bodies (plus such special punishments as the mysteriously high rate of hysterectomies among women who could afford them), then those with fewer resources risked punishments that were far more lethal (for instance, higher mortality rates for breast cancer due to late discovery among poor women).

Much has changed in this past quarter century of a forceful and populist women's health movement, from increased mental health and life expectancy among women to the increased confidence and influence of women health consumers. Though there are still unacceptable differentials by race, class, age, sexuality and ability, the lives of the female half of America have been touched in a way that shows us how lifesaving a raised consciousness and collective activism can be. Indeed, the  lives of men, too, have been improved and perhaps lengthened by such  female-led  reforms as labeling drugs with information about side effects (a cause advanced by protests against the contraceptive pill) and counselors who accompany a patient through procedures (an innovation pioneered by abortion clinics).

Nonetheless, there are still life-threatening reasons to keep learning from one another's experience, and to increase our activism. A medical and sexual double  standard still tries to convince us that  males, whether as doctors or lovers, know more about  women's bodies than women do. Everyone from profiteering polluters to the beauty police still sends us to the medical establishment for unnecessary fixing. Drug companies still have more profit motive and government support for discovering expensive "cures" than for instituting already known, inexpensive preventions. The few still get better health care than the many.

But we now know that we can topple hierarchies by starting with our bodies. After all, male-dominant, racist and other unjust systems must control female bodies as the most basic means of production, the means of reproduction, in order to "own" children through systems of legitimacy, to decide how many workers and soldiers the nation needs, and to maintain the degree of race (and class) "purity" that keeps hierarchical systems going. Whether we are insisting on good nutrition when we are pregnant or safe abortions when we choose not to be pregnant, whether we're exposing male violence as a major health danger or exposing household chemicals as carcinogens, whether we're  exercising  our  sexual  rights or using our health consumer rights, we are taking control of our own bodies--and freedom.

Any and all of these acts make us part of the women's health movement. It is worldwide--as is Our Bodies, Ourselves. From its heretical beginnings, this book has been adapted and adopted by women in many different countries and cultures. It is now available in more than fourteen  languages-and still growing. Within these pages, you will find the voice of a women's health movement that is based on shared experience. Listen to it--and add your own."

Gloria Steinem