In their groundbreaking pamphlet, Ehrenreich and English railed against a medical system that suppressed and sidelined women. Fifty years later, their radical anti-authoritarianism is increasingly powerless against—and sometimes even an accelerant for—the ongoing commodification of healthcare.
In 1970, the Boston Women's Health Book Collective published Our Bodies, Ourselves, a no-nonsense, common-speak booklet covering the fundamentals of women’s health from sexual identity, menstruation, pregnancy, abortion, birth and menopause. At the very same time, Barbara Ehrenreich—not yet an acclaimed author or honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, but already the holder of a doctorate in cell biology—became a feminist. The moment, she wrote in her 2014 book Natural Causes, arrived at a checkup a few weeks before the birth of her first child, when she asked her male obstetrician whether her cervix had begun to dilate. “Where did a nice girl like this learn to talk like that?” was the doctor’s response. In a separate interview, Ehrenreich described the ordeal of the birth itself, which had taken place at a free clinic in New York in a rush: “They induced my labor because it was late in the evening and the doctor wanted to go home,” she said. “I was enraged. The experience made me a feminist.”
A few years later, she channeled her fury over this treatment into Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers, a brief, biting pamphlet authored with fellow SUNY educator Deirdre English. Witches sketched a history of the repression and persecution of women lay healers, from the witch hunts of the Middle Ages to the rise of the male-dominated American medical establishment, explicating the exclusion of women from medicine not as the inevitable outcome of innate differences in ability between the sexes, but as the result of a series of historical power struggles in which male practitioners, primarily of the upper classes, had sought to secure their monopoly on the profession of medicine (and, by extension, their earnings). “The suppression of women health workers and the rise to dominance of male professionals was not a ‘natural’ process, resulting automatically from changes in medical science, nor was it the result of women’s failure to take on healing work,” Ehrenreich and English wrote. “It was an active takeover by male professionals.”
