Our Bodies, Ourselves

The book began at a women's liberation conference at Emmanuel College in Boston in May 1969, where one workshop was called "Women and Their Bodies." Several women who met there wrote a questionnaire about how women felt about their bodies and their doctors. Deciding they would have to learn for themselves, they met weekly, reading textbooks, questioning medically trained people and comparing their own experiences. They first called themselves the Doctor's Group.

Each member took a topic: anatomy, sexuality, venereal disease, birth control, abortion, pregnancy, prepared childbirth, the weeks after birth, and how hospitals and medical institutions worked. By the fall they were teaching the papers as a course to other women in the movement. Women who took the course joined in rewriting the papers for print, and nineteen women signed the introduction to the printed version by name, among them Nancy Hawley, Wendy Sanford, Jane Pincus, Esther Rome and Paula Doress.

New England Free Press in Boston issued Women and Their Bodies in December 1970: 5,000 copies on newsprint, stapled, at 75 cents. The chapters described doctors' attitudes toward women patients as often condescending, and the birth control chapter told readers that only 1 percent of American women could get a legal abortion and that illegal abortion was the commonest cause of maternal death in the country. A shorter edition came out in April 1971 under the title Our Bodies, Ourselves, and its price was cut in stages to 30 cents. By January 1973 the press had 225,000 copies in print.

To sign a contract with Simon & Schuster the group incorporated in 1972 as the Boston Women's Health Book Collective, and the first commercial edition appeared in 1973. A revised edition of 1976 became a national bestseller. The organization counts nine U.S. print editions over forty years, the last in 2011. The organization took the name Our Bodies Ourselves in 2002, and by June 2025 resources based on the book had been produced in 34 languages.