Feminist Review is giving TWO readers a chance to win a signed copy of Patricia Harman's The Blue Cotton Gown: A Midwife’s Memoir.
How to enter:
Leave a comment below (100 words or less) by July 31st telling us about your favorite book or film about women's reproductive health. It's really that simple! Winners will be announced on August 5th.
Make sure to include your name and an email address where we can contact you if you're a winner. This giveaway is open to all of our readers with a limit of one entry per person.
We can't wait to read your comments!
How to enter:
Leave a comment below (100 words or less) by July 31st telling us about your favorite book or film about women's reproductive health. It's really that simple! Winners will be announced on August 5th.
Make sure to include your name and an email address where we can contact you if you're a winner. This giveaway is open to all of our readers with a limit of one entry per person.
We can't wait to read your comments!
Poster from the Canadian Federation for Sexual Health
Congratulations to DaisyDeadhead, the winner of last month's contest!
14 comments:
My favorite book about women's reproductive health is S (a novel about the balkans) by Slavenka Drakulic. S, the narrator, became pregnant as a result of rape during the war. Her story was really touching, especially in the beginning when she had mixed feelings about the baby. It was her baby, she wanted to love it , but it brought back so many memories she wanted to forget. I love it because there is a thought-provoking moral dilemma.
I think the movie of that catagory would be the "If These Walls Could Talk" series about women's reproductive rights over a period of time and the differences in issues and so on.
elizabeth
I have to go with the classic Our Bodies, Ourselves by the Boston Women's Health Book Collective. This book does a great job of empowering women to know their bodies and to be informed participants in their own health, with consciousness of the politics of health.
I love Our Bodies, Our Selves because it covers such a vast amount of information in a clear, consise, and easy way to read. In fact, I have already used it to teach my own 8 year old daughter about her body and look forward to sharing more of the book with her as she grows. It's a classic reproductive health book that all females should read.
Sex, Lies and the Truth about Uterine Fibroids by Carla Dionne and Misinformed Consent -13 women share their stories about unnecessary hysterectomy are two very good books which helped me immensely as I was faced with a very difficult decision on whether or not to get a hysterectomy as the doctors suggested or find another way out. I got a lot of support and courage from these stories and hope other women will too.
Asha G
dend_15@yahoo.com
I have two equally favorite books and I can't decide between the two, so I suppose that I will write about both.
One book is 'The Handmaid's Tale', the classic dystopian book about women who are forced to be reproductive vessels for other families who don't have children.
The other book is called "Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present", which documents the history of how slaves and African Americans were used as experiments. Numerous women in slavery were used as guinea pigs by doctors (without anesthesia) in order to perfect what is now the obgyn industry.
My name is:
Miss Unconventional
thebossgoddess(at)yahoo(dot)com
"I Had an Abortion" which features my feminist hero Gloria Steinem. The documentary interviews women who have had abortions, many of whom had them when abortions were illegal. This was one of the movies that got me involved as a reproductive rights advocate.
“Fast Times at Ridgemont High” is an unsuspecting film about women’s reproductive rights. It is a coming of age comedy written (adapted from his novel) by Cameron Crowe. It is a story about a group of high school teenagers dealing with their burgeoning sexuality; testing the rules of sexual engagement between men and women; exploring the boundaries of love, and sexual and reproductive choices. In particular, it can be seen as a film about women’s assertion of their own sexuality and the harsh social and personal implications of that assertion.
"Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen" by Alix Kates Shulman. We are talking wow. Her character decided to, yes, make love to her boyfriend even though she wasn't going to marry him like she was supposed to. Instead, she left him for an unknown future. I remember the shock of liberation when I read it in the 1970s.
"Choosing You: Deciding To Have A Baby On My Own" by Alexandra Soiseth is my favourite book on this topic at the moment. It chronicles her sometimes funny, sometimes painful, sometimes joyful story of falling pregnant and giving birth without a partner. The autobiographical tone of a woman my age facing my issues pulls on the heart strings. A real and fresh story.
Call the Midwife: A True Story of The East End in the 1950s is, like The Blue Cotton Gown, written by a nurse who practiced as a midwife. Jennifer Worth worked in the dock areas of east London, making housecalls and attending women in labour, mostly homebirths. For me, it was interesting how continuity of care, minimal medical intervention, and homebirth, practices many would like to see become more available today, were standard issue to women living in poverty in these slums. Birth stories are always a great lens into the joys and pains of ordinary lives, and Worth details life in post-war London with a compassionate and intimate sketches, including very funny moments at the nunnery where she is housed.
I read "The Inner Quarters:
Marriage and Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period" by Patricia Buckley for our Asian History class in college. It was about the treatment of women as a property in marriage. It is most evident in the marital sexual issues that they face. They have no right to deny their husbands, and they have no say in their pregnancy. Since then I was very much preoccupied with books about ancient Asian cultures, especially focusing on tales about women, their domestic lives, sexual grievances, and how society treats them.
its.the.crazy.country.air(at)
gmail.com
Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale," like her other dystopian novels, pursues a current practice and policy to its ultimate, horrible conclusion. In the tale, theocracy and sterility lead to enslavement of "handmaids" for reproductive purposes. Offred (of Fred) is enslaved to a powerful couple, who make her engage in sex for the purpose of reproduction. When a baby is born, the slave mistress wife takes it immediately away. Handmaids then move on to reproduce for another couple. As we move toward theocratic control of women's reproduction, this might just be the future for the United States.
Others have mentioned it as well, but Our Bodies, Ourselves is still my favorite reproductive health book. I just haven't found a book (or film) that is so rich with information. It doesn't judge or make a decision for you, it simply lays out all of the medical information. I remember when I first went through most of it, I felt so empowered because I had learned so much. And I still go to my copy every once in a while when I want to learn more about a particular topic that has come up somewhere else.
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