The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminism Travels Across Borders

“[A] smart, sensitive, hopeful book. . . . [A] brilliant defense of the Second Wave premise that sisterhood really is global.”     -- Rebecca Walker, Bookforum Researcher and writer Kathy Davis's new book, The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminism Travels Across Borders, tells the stories behind the many foreign language adaptations of Our Bodies, Ourselves.  Published in October 2007 by Duke University Press, the book is based on interviews with founders of the BWHBC, responses to the book from international readers, and discussions with translators from Latin America, Egypt, Thailand, China, Eastern Europe, and Francophone Africa.

You can find out more about the book at Kathy Davis's website and at the Duke University website. You can also download the concluding chapter of the book, Transnational Knowledges, Transnational Politics, as well as Feminist Body/Politics as World Traveller: Translating Our Bodies Ourselves, an earlier article by Davis on the same topic.

The book has garnered numerous awards, including the 2008 American Sociological Association Section Sex and Gender Distinguished Book Award, the 2008 Eileen Basker Memorial Prize, presented by the Society of Medical Anthropology, and the 2009 Joan Kelly Memorial Prize, from the American Historical Association

Congratulations, Kathy!

A note from the founders of the BWHBC:

Kathy Davis’s excellent and prize-winning book, The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminism Travels Across Borders, contains the main historical record of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective written to date.  Perhaps inevitably with a project of such scope, the book contains some errors related to key aspects of the group’s history.
 
We wanted to use the website to share our corrections and suggested changes. To do so, we've created a priority list of changes that the Founders of the BWHBC feel are the most significant to understanding what our group has done and cared about over the past four decades.  You can also view the secondary list of corrections that are, although important to us, less critical. Thank you for your consideration!