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.

UPDATE: Kathy Davis was recently awarded the 2008 Distinguished Book Award from the American Sociological Association Section Sex and Gender for her book. This award honors those who make a significant contribution to the field of sex and gender through a book on the cutting edge of sociological inquiry. 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!