The Book
I am reading my friend’s copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves. First commercial edition, 1973. I am sixteen. All the girls are reading it.
Things I don’t understand, things I need, things I can’t have. It isn’t clear where I fit in, where the line is. (I hate the line.) Kind of included, kind of not, I kind of look the part. (I feel the part. Kind of.) I don’t know what they think of me and I don’t ask.
For now, it is enough that they let me be in their space. Well, it’s something.
After school I walk with her to the ‘mirror party’; at the door I hand her the book. I could maybe just wait?, but no: here is the line. She goes in. I am left outside. I go away.
Four decades later, Ninth Edition, and I am in the book too.
For those who were not young women during the 1970s, Our Bodies, Ourselves (OBOS) was (and is) both a practical guide to women’s bodies and a radical declaration of female independence.
In a world where male doctors owned childbirth, where mothers were often discouraged from nursing, where medical science was openly sceptical of the existence of a female orgasm, and women were kept largely ignorant of their own bodies, OBOS changed everything.
Beginning as a mimeographed pamphlet assembled by a few women at the end of the 1960s, OBOS was a proper book when it was picked up by a publisher in 1973 and made available to women generally. It ran like wildfire through the community of young women in more liberal areas. ‘Mirror parties’ were private gatherings of women who got together to learn about their own genitalia, usually working with a copy of OBOS. The freedom that had begun with available birth control was thus extended, as we began to reassert control over our bodies.
I read OBOS when I was 16 and still at school. It was at this point that I really, fully understood that I was excluded, and could never really be the girl that I had, until then, approximately been. OBOS was, in its way, more devastating than the beatings.
Never say ‘never’. Eventually I found a solution to my dilemma. I had had a vulva of my very own for twenty-two years in 2011 when, despite resistance from some quarters, trans women appeared in OBOS for the first time.
This is #8 in the Transitional Moments series.
#1: Livename, #7: Viennese Moment, #9: The Birth
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