What ‘Our Bodies, Ourselves’ can teach us about Campus Speech and Social Change

In April we learned that the editors of the feminist classic Our Bodies, Ourselves will suspend further print revisions — the 2011 edition will be the last. Though I hadn’t consulted the book in years, the news struck me with a sense of mournful nostalgia.

Our Bodies, Ourselves was first released in 1970 as a 193-page stapled pamphlet. These humble beginnings helped to spark a movement. The publication armed women with knowledge about their sexual and reproductive health. It took doctors off the pedestal. It set the expectation that medical advice should neither condescend nor shame. The book has been translated into 31 languages, reaching millions of women around the world. Information on women’s sexual and reproductive health is now so ubiquitous and accessible — at least to those of us living in places of relative freedom and prosperity — we no longer have to make a particularly special effort to obtain reliable information. It’s all right there at our fingertips. In many ways, we have Our Bodies, Ourselves to thank.

Reading up on the history of the book reminded me how tightly connected social progress is to speech freedoms and intellectual inquiry on the college and university campus. Our Bodies, Ourselves emerged from a 1969 workshop titled “Women and Their Bodies” held as part of a women’s liberation conference at Emmanuel College. Twelve of the women attending that workshop formed the group that would drive the project for nearly five decades.

The cultural change inspired by Our Bodies, Ourselves is emblematic of the culture shift we witnessed across college campuses in the latter half of the 20th century. Social movements favoring minority and women’s rights and opposing war moved college and university campuses toward a culture of radical openness. It is, in other words, not the least bit surprising that college and university campuses incubated the origin and early word-of-mouth success of Our Bodies, Ourselves. It was not formal sources of top-down authority that led to culture change. It evolved bottom-up, in a stew of feminist ideology, frustration, moral courage, and an abundance of intellectual freedom.

Fast forward to our present moment. The college campus is still the site of social critique aimed at advancing socially progressive causes. There is a difference though. In the last wave of campus radicalism, concentrated power and authority were seen as the problem. Today, top-down remedies are seen as the solution. Instead of radical openness aimed at dismantling authority, contemporary calls for restrictions on campus speech appeal to traditional sources of authority, such as the state and university administrations, to impose order. The appeal to authority for redress is an entirely different impulse that gave rise to Our Bodies, Ourselves. To foster frank discussion of women’s sexual health and sexual freedom, the editors of Our Bodies, Ourselves had to bypass authority, not appeal to it.

Perhaps this appeal to authority isn’t surprising. After all, a university organizational chart suggests that all the power, and therefore the ability to orchestrate positive change, rests with the university president. When students occupy the offices of university presidents and issue a list of demands, they are operating with this paradigm in mind, whether they recognize it or not. When we hear calls for institution-wide bans on hate speech or false speech, it’s likely some sort of campus speech oversight committee that people have in mind, again, imposing order from the top-down.

But we should be wary of top-down remedies like these. Language is tricky. An utterance or bit of text may or may not count as hate speech, for example, depending on context, tone, the speaker’s intent, audience, and so on. No rule can possibly cover all contingencies. The top-down approach will necessarily involve a great deal of discretionary judgment by the person or persons overseeing adjudication and enforcement of the speech restrictions. One need not be paranoid to be concerned that a speech oversight committee may attract those bent on using the committee’s authority to constrain political or ideological rivals, or that the committee itself may become a de facto tribunal to which “misbehaving” faculty will have to submit if they say anything controversial in or beyond the classroom. It doesn’t matter whether the ideological agenda comes from the conservative or progressive end of the spectrum. The danger is present either way. Handing this authority to an administrator will not alleviate such concerns, as doing so only concentrates power even further.

But what’s the alternative? Does this mean that there is no way to effectively govern campus speech without creating problems of concentrated power? In an age of shock speakers, it may be hard to see, but it is worth recognizing that most of the time a college or university community is able to curate out the worst, most-implausible ideas, without creating a single source of concentrated power. We do this through the ubiquitous practice of academic gatekeeping. In their choice of readings, topics for discussion, invitations of guest speakers, scholarly collaborators, and research topics, academics select content into and out of the classroom, public spaces within the university, and scholarly research. In other words, order is created from the bottom-up, primarily through faculty gatekeeping.

This form of bottom-up speech governance is not a panacea. In fact, we can be sure that well-intended academics will make mistakes. But this only underscores the value of not having a single source point of concentrated power over the process of speech governance. Since we can bet that people will make mistakes, it is better that the effects of error are constrained to the level of the local decision maker. If, in a bottom-up process, an individual faculty member gets it wrong, the harm is localized, and we leave open the possibility for correction. On the other hand, if an administrator or speech oversight committee with centralized power gets it wrong, the impact is campus-wide, and there is much less scope for further experimentation, learning, and course-correction.

Considering the current state of public discourse, it’s not a bad impulse to seek a better path than the one we are on. It is reasonable to be incensed when illiberal speakers cynically leverage the open environment of the university to advance racist, misogynist, homophobic, and xenophobic agendas. But it’s an odd thing if we turn to traditional sources of top-down power — the state, the university administration — to solve this problem for us. That’s not what the authors of Our Bodies, Ourselves did. In fact, they did exactly the opposite. They recognized that they had the power within their hands to dismantle a hierarchy of authority that was not working toward their interests. They changed the culture from the bottom-up. We can take a page from that history.