History of the women’s movement: Fight against the “gods in white”

My body belongs to me” and “The private is political” are well-known slogans of the Second Women’s Movement. As a current within these organizations in the wake of “68”, the women’s health movement in the Federal Republic of Germany fundamentally questioned and changed the relationship between doctors and patients. Instead of the “gods in white”, whose instructions you had to follow to the letter for the benefit of your own health, the activists demanded interaction on an equal level or acquired medical knowledge themselves.

Despite these successes and although thousands of people were active in initiatives, congresses, centers and newspaper projects in the 1970s and 1980s, this activism has largely been forgotten. The sociologist Susanne Boehm has now written in her dissertation “The Women’s Health Movement. Criticism as a political issue” interviewed former activists of the Berlin Feminist Women’s Health Center (FFGZ) in order to understand the movement’s criticism of medicine and healthcare as well as its internal work processes. The center emerged from the counseling and self-examination structures of the West Berlin Women’s Center and still exists today.

Liberation and provocation

When the Second Women’s Movement emerged, abortion was illegal, the pill was only available to married women, childcare was largely a private matter and there was hardly any education about one’s own body and sexuality. In this situation, the collective acquisition of this knowledge and the organization of independent initiatives was groundbreaking and revolutionary. Emerging from the student movement of the 1960s and the campaigns against Abortion Paragraph 218 since the early 1970s, the women’s health movement wanted to parry the patriarchal attacks on women and girls and empower them to make their own decisions.

Self-determination and knowledge about one’s own body were seen as a way of liberation from patriarchal constraints.

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Self-determination and knowledge about one’s own body were seen as a way of liberation from patriarchal constraints. Contrary to what the words “self” and “own” suggest, this was not intended as an individual but as a collective liberation process. Unimaginable today (again), masses of women met in small groups to gain a better understanding of themselves and the causes of their physical symptoms through an exchange about their everyday lives and their health problems. According to the activists’ analysis, the shame of those involved should also be reduced and body norms and power relations should become understandable and vulnerable.

Abortion counseling and vaginal self-examinations also took place in groups, writes Boehm: “The techniques of vaginal self-examination caused controversy as a political issue. A self-examination in which women looked at and felt their own abdomen broke down all shame boundaries and taboos surrounding physicality at the time, both for regular social narratives and for interested women’s activists who heard about gynecological self-help for the first time. For the activists of the FFGZ, the potential this explosiveness contained is all the more relevant.” In the interviews you can feel the tremendous liberation and provocation that lay there – and still does to this day – when women and FLINTA undress together, exchange their experiences with their own bodies and with doctors and not only within themselves, but also with others look inside.

Missed opportunity

Especially today, in a time of escalating health crises, in which the pressure to abolish the abortion ban is rising again and participation of patients in individual health decisions, unimaginable in the 1970s and 80s, has become normal, a look back at the movement discussions of was extremely interesting and profitable at the time. With such a major research desideratum, such a study would have to read like an exciting story with unexpected news appearing on every page. But «The women’s health movement. “Criticism as a political issue” is unfortunately neither exciting in terms of content nor theoretically worthwhile. Rather, Boehm manages to retell already known factors about the movement in a lengthy and repetitive manner. In the meantime, even the very keen reader is wondering how often one and the same piece of information can be included in detail in a dissertation (which has already been shortened for publication). The answer is: very often.

When the activists tell interesting and relevant events in the interviews, Boehm hardly or not includes them in her interpretive analysis, but rather uses the opportunity almost every time to explain again what she has already talked about several times, clearly and in great detail; for example, the connection between concepts of the US women’s health movement and those of its German sisters. This would be unfortunate even for a non-fiction book – for a dissertation, the core of which was supposed to be the exploration of new knowledge, it is completely unsuccessful.

One cannot expect sensational theoretical findings from a scientific work that primarily uses interviews as sources and grounded theory methodology as a method. But why the author relies almost exclusively on Michel Foucault in her theoretical references and almost completely ignores the feminist theory of the time remains her secret. Central concepts of feminist politics, without which certain developments cannot be understood and which continue to lead to serious disputes today, are only passing mentioned and neither elaborated nor analytically embedded. For example, radical feminism, which is fundamental to the movement and is still influential today – and which is problematic in transphobic feminist movements – which attributes social inequality to the inequality between two genders, is not even remotely explained. The understanding of female bodies as occupied, colonized territories in ecofeminism has led to adventurous assumptions in the women’s health movement, such as the rejection of established medical procedures, understood as “male”.

Relevance in the present

The women’s health movement is indeed under-researched, but presenting the comparatively well-documented areas of early activism as a research derivative does not necessarily make one’s own academic work more relevant. Boehm writes that it is unfortunate that “there has so far been little attention in historical survey works on the new women’s movement in the Federal Republic of Germany and the women’s health movement Brot u. Rosen was laid out as a central precursor group”. However, this remains an unfounded claim, as the group in question and their book “Women’s Handbook No. 1” is basically the first thing you come across when you start reading into the women’s health movement and early second-wave abortion activism.

During the Corona pandemic and in view of the mobilizations of those who trivialize Corona, the question increasingly arose as to whether and how alternative health initiatives have contributed to anti-science, esotericism and belief in conspiracy. The bitter disputes between queer feminism and difference feminism today can also be traced back to the beginnings of the movement in their essentialist ideas about “men” who should be kept out of women’s spaces. There are references to both topic areas relevant to the present in the interviews conducted by Boehm, which the author unfortunately leaves unused.

Susanne Boehm: «The women’s health movement. Criticism as a political issue”, transcript 2024, 402 pp., br., 45€, available online as open access.