Women’s liberation’s impact on bodies was probably strongest not in struggling against harm but in
working for health. Our Bodies, Ourselves, first published in 1971, inaugurated a sea change in women’s
knowledge of their own bodies. Its major impact was not in communicating information but in promoting
new attitudes—that women should learn about their bodies and should face health questions with the
understanding that they need not defer to physicians or other moral authorities in making decisions. Out of
this first publication and countless local projects arose the National Women’s Health Network, now
almost forty years old and thriving. One aspect of this influence was the geometric increase in female
doctors as women flooded the medical schools, partly out of desire to practice medicine in a woman-
friendly way. (In 1905, 4 percent of physicians were women, and that number was virtually unchanged
until 1970; in 2011, women were 48.3 percent of med school graduates.) The movement forced changes in
medical research, making it no longer acceptable to study only male diseases or use only male subjects in
drug testing. The women’s movement particularly transformed childbirth, through insisting on women’s
choices about where, when, and how to deliver babies and—perhaps surprising to many—winning a
difficult battle to include fathers in childbirth, in or out of hospitals.
Discrimination in health care is by no means gone. Females earn less than male physicians, are less
often promoted, and are less often appointed to medical school professorial or leadership positions.
Female physicians cluster in lower-status fields of medicine—such as pediatrics—not so much because
these fields require less expertise as because they reflect political values, e.g., that caring for children
and women is less prestigious than caring for men. Female patients, particularly poor ones, frequently
receive less aggressive treatment when they need it. With these problems continuing, it is hardly
surprising that in the 1970s some feminists wanted to reject mainstream medicine altogether. Some
learned to do their own cervical examinations, and many experimented with holistic, nonstandard
practices, from herbal medicines to rejecting vaccination.
Two issues divided feminists in the 1970s and 1980s: pornography and sex work, especially
prostitution. The disagreements show once again that there is no single feminist analysis or program. The
pornography issue provoked an angry, name-calling conflict, the “sex wars,” at a 1982 conference at
Barnard College, which aimed to generate feminist discussion about sexuality (outside the pro- and anti-
abortion framework that so dominated the public discourse). Organized in the provocative spirit of the
early women’s liberation movement by feminists who adopted what came to be called a “pro-sex” line,
the conference included speakers who opposed the censorship of pornography (on the basis of a civil
liberties principle of free speech and because they doubted that porn was any more insulting or dangerous
to women than nonsexual media that depicted women in subordinate roles), criticized a stream of prudery
within the women’s movement, and affirmed a human right to sexual pleasure. Even more controversial,
the conference included Gayle Rubin and Pat Califia, who defended S-M (sadomasochist role-playing)
sex.
Providing a platform for these defenders of pornography infuriated another stream of the women’s
movement. Anti-pornography activists, such as Andrea Dworkin, attacked the conference as promoting
patriarchal values and convinced Barnard College to confiscate the conference program on the grounds
that it contained some pro-sex statements as well as conference information. These feminists considered
pornography to be inevitably coercive, exploitive, and denigrating toward women. “Male sexual
aggression is the unifying thematic and behavioral reality of male sexuality,” Dworkin wrote.
“Pornography is the essential sexuality of male power: of hate, of ownership, of hierarchy; of sadism, of
dominance.”^37 A Dworkin ally, law professor Catharine MacKinnon, who had earlier been key in
expanding federal anti-discrimination laws to include sexual harassment, wrote model bills that
criminalized pornography by defining it as a violation of the civil rights of women, a form of sex