Almost seven years ago, when I was diagnosed as BRCA1+, meaning I have a genetic mutation that gives me a high risk of breast and ovarian cancers, I knew I would eventually have my ovaries removed in an attempt to prevent the cancer that killed my mother and great-grandmother. But my BRCA1+ diagnosis came when my third baby was just a few months old, and I would go on to have one more baby. I wanted my kids to be just a little older and more independent before I faced this surgery and recovery. Ultimately, I had a hysterectomy/oophorectomy the month I turned 35 in October 2022.

While I anticipated the surgery for years and met with specialists and underwent bi-annual cancer screenings, it wasn’t until about six months before the surgery that I started actively seeking information about menopause and surgical menopause. The task proved more difficult than I expected given that half of the world’s population undergoes menopause.

My surgery prep overlapped with the early stages of working on the book I am co-editing with Heather Sundahl for Exponent II’s 50^th anniversary. For this project I was (and continue to be) reading through the backlog of ExII issues, interviewing ExII founding mothers and volunteers from over the years, digging through archives, and doing background reading and research. I thought these two projects—the Exponent book and my surgery prep—were unrelated. I was wrong. In the weeks leading up to my surgery, my projects converged.  

My research led me to read Inside the Second Wave of Feminism: Boston Female Liberation, 1968-1972 by Nancy Rosenstock. I was fascinated by the stories of women who had taken part in the group Boston Female Liberation, also known as Cell 16, at the same time that Mormon women in Boston began gathering for consciousness-raising at the home of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. In the introduction to the 1971 “Pink” issue of Dialogue, a collaborative project that emerged from these meetings, Claudia Bushman wrote, “Although we sometimes refer to ourselves as the L.D.S. cell of Women’s Lib, we claim no affiliation with any of those militant bodies and some of us are so straight as to be shocked by their antics. We do read their literature with interest.” Now I, too, was reading the work of Boston feminists of that era with interest—including the L.D.S cell, Cell 16, and other groups, such as the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective.

The Boston Women’s Health Book Collective began as a health seminar called “Women and Their Bodies” organized in 1969 by Nancy Miriam Hawley at Boston’s Emmanuel College. Women gathered who felt they didn’t have the health information they needed about their own bodies, so they decided to research and write about it themselves. Their first publication in 1970 by the New England Free Press was a 30-cent booklet of the same name as their seminar. It sold over 250,000 copies. The women went on to form a collective and in 1973, published the book Our Bodies, Ourselves. It has gone through multiple revisions, editions, and updates, selling millions of copies. The June 2021 paperback issue that I own clocks in at 927 pages and purports to be, “America’s Bestselling Book on Women’s Health.”

As I was learning about the feminist work of teaching women about their own bodies, I met with my gynecological oncologist to discuss and schedule my upcoming surgery. I asked the office staff if they had any resources or recommendations about surgical menopause to give me, and I was shocked when they said they didn’t have any in-office literature or book recommendations. This was the office of the specialist surgeon who, via cancer treatment or surgery, routinely put women into chemical or surgical menopause. Confident I had just asked the wrong person, I called back a few weeks later to ask about resources and was told that they didn’t have resources they routinely recommended, but they might be able to find something to email me. I never received such an email. While I had high confidence in the capabilities of my surgeon who had come recommended by other doctors I trust, her office had no resources about menopause or surgical menopause. I was on my own.

It was this kind of lack of essential information on women’s health and sexual function that led women in Boston to organize, research, write, and publish about women’s health. And while the larger book Our Bodies, Ourselves has a section on menopause, they also have a book, Our Bodies, Ourselves: Menopause.

During my surgery recovery, I watched the documentary A Moment in Her Story: Stories from the Boston Women’s Movement by Catherine Russo, which covers in part the founding of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. The conversations in the “Women and Their Bodies” seminar included topics of sexuality, masturbation, orgasm, and reproductive anatomy (structure) and physiology (function). In 1970, a meeting of this group was recorded on video (and included in the documentary), which shows women using speculums for cervical self-exams. Speculum inserted into the vagina, the women would use a mirror to view their own cervix and internal strictures or those of a willing friend. Women wanted to understand their self-health, their bodies, and what they could do with that knowledge. Our Bodies, Ourselves still contains information about how to get a speculum to perform a cervical self-exam. I had heard of women in consciousness-raising groups using hand-held mirrors to view their own external genitalia, but using a speculum to perform a self-exam of internal structures was a new idea to me. Or rather, an almost new idea.

I first heard about using speculums for self-exams in an interview with Judy Dushku, one of Exponent II’s founding mothers. She was early in her career as a professor of government and comparative politics at Suffolk University in Boston when the women’s moment was picking up steam. Understanding the importance of the topic, she invited a woman to come to speak to her class about women’s health. When the speaker introduced the topic of women’s self-exams and brought out a bag of speculums and mirrors, Judy began to panic and could see some of her students were getting ready to leave. Judy intervened and said, “Don’t worry, no one is going to insist that you try to do this, for the first time even, right here.” The speaker pivoted, indicating she was simply showing the students the instruments to talk about how to do the exams, and then handed out some disposable speculums for students to try at home if they wanted. She told the students how to use mirrors to get the best angles to view their crotches while lying down.

Crisis averted, the students got to learn more about their bodies and had the option to perform a self-exam in private if they wanted without pressure to do so in public under questionable consent. After class, the speaker confided that she had planned to ask if anyone wanted to demonstrate. Decades later, Judy reflected that she had been outspoken in those days, but the speaker effectively called her bluff about her willingness to participate in self-exams—or encourage her students to do so—in a public setting. As a former college instructor myself, I can appreciate the predicament.

With the launch of this new blog series, Menopause and Me, my personal life and Exponent work converge again. My hope is to facilitate sharing personal stories, resources, and art that explore various facets of menopause. I am early on in my own menopause experience, so I am grateful for those who have sent their stories and shared their experiences. If you missed the deadline for the launch of this series but have something to share, send it to me at KatieOnTheBlog at gmail dot com.

Providing information for women and gender minorities about their own bodies was a feminist issue in the early 1970s. It still is today.