right down to the drape women are given to cover their bodies; they suggested that women should instead take the drape and fling it to the ground. If the doctor replaces it, they suggest throwing it off again. And if he questions this behavior (and one can only wonder at a doctor who would not), they recommend telling him that California doctors have stopped draping. “And if you’re in California, tell him that doctors in New York have stopped this strange custom.” The evening ended with a description of the most radical self-help device of all: the period extractor, a syringe-and-tube contraption that allows a woman to remove her menstrual flow, all by herself, in five minutes; if she is pregnant, the embryo is sucked out instead. Color slides were shown: a woman at home, in street clothes, gave herself an early abortion using the device. “I hesitate to use the word ‘revolutionary,’ ” Frankfort wrote of the event, “but no other word seems accurate.…”
Ellen Frankfort’s report on this session is now reprinted as the opening of her new book,
Vaginal Politics
(Quadrangle Books). When I first read it in the
Voice
, I was shocked and incredulous. At the same time, it seemed obvious that at the rate things were going in the women’s movement, within a few months the material would not be surprising at all. Well, it has been over a year since the Los Angeles Self-Help Clinic brought the word to the East, and what they advocate is as shocking and incredible as ever. I mean, it’s awfully perplexing that anyone would suggest throwing linens allover an examination room when a simple verbal request would probably do the trick. And when Frankfort informs us, as she does at the end of her book, that “there are several groups of women who get together in New York City and on their dining room tables or couches look at the changes in the cervix,” it is hard not to long for the days when an evening with the girls meant bridge.
On the other hand …
On the other hand, the self-help movement and the concern with health issues among women’s groups spring from a very real and not at all laughable dissatisfaction with the American medical establishment, and most particularly with gynecologists. In New York, the women’s movement has turned this dissatisfaction to concrete achievement in placing paid women counselors in major abortion clinics and in working to lower rates and change procedures at these clinics; in Boston, the Women’s Health Collective has produced a landmark book,
Our Bodies, Our Selves
, a comprehensive compilation of information about how the female body works. But the animosity against doctors has also reached the point where irresponsibility, not to mention hard-core raunchiness, has replaced reason. When Frankfort asked Carol about the possible negative effects of period extraction, her question was taken as a broad-scale attack on feminism. The fact is that if doctors were prescribing equipment as untested as these devices are, equipment which clearly violates natural body functions, the women’s health movement would be outraged. It has been justifiably incensed that birth-control pills were mass-marketed after only three years’ observation on a mere 132 women. The Los Angeles women are advocating a device that has not been tested at all for at-home use; in hospitals, it has been used safely, but by doctors, and primarily for early abortion. There is a horrifying fanaticism to all this, and it springs not just from the zeal to avoid doctors entirely, but fromsomething far more serious. For some time, various scientists have been attacking women’s liberation by insisting that because of menstruation, women are unfit for just about everything several days a month. In a way, the Los Angeles women are supporting this assertion in their use of period extraction for non-abortion purposes; what they are saying, in effect, is, yes, it
is
awful, it is truly a curse, and here is a way to be
Ellen Frankfort’s report on this session is now reprinted as the opening of her new book,
Vaginal Politics
(Quadrangle Books). When I first read it in the
Voice
, I was shocked and incredulous. At the same time, it seemed obvious that at the rate things were going in the women’s movement, within a few months the material would not be surprising at all. Well, it has been over a year since the Los Angeles Self-Help Clinic brought the word to the East, and what they advocate is as shocking and incredible as ever. I mean, it’s awfully perplexing that anyone would suggest throwing linens allover an examination room when a simple verbal request would probably do the trick. And when Frankfort informs us, as she does at the end of her book, that “there are several groups of women who get together in New York City and on their dining room tables or couches look at the changes in the cervix,” it is hard not to long for the days when an evening with the girls meant bridge.
On the other hand …
On the other hand, the self-help movement and the concern with health issues among women’s groups spring from a very real and not at all laughable dissatisfaction with the American medical establishment, and most particularly with gynecologists. In New York, the women’s movement has turned this dissatisfaction to concrete achievement in placing paid women counselors in major abortion clinics and in working to lower rates and change procedures at these clinics; in Boston, the Women’s Health Collective has produced a landmark book,
Our Bodies, Our Selves
, a comprehensive compilation of information about how the female body works. But the animosity against doctors has also reached the point where irresponsibility, not to mention hard-core raunchiness, has replaced reason. When Frankfort asked Carol about the possible negative effects of period extraction, her question was taken as a broad-scale attack on feminism. The fact is that if doctors were prescribing equipment as untested as these devices are, equipment which clearly violates natural body functions, the women’s health movement would be outraged. It has been justifiably incensed that birth-control pills were mass-marketed after only three years’ observation on a mere 132 women. The Los Angeles women are advocating a device that has not been tested at all for at-home use; in hospitals, it has been used safely, but by doctors, and primarily for early abortion. There is a horrifying fanaticism to all this, and it springs not just from the zeal to avoid doctors entirely, but fromsomething far more serious. For some time, various scientists have been attacking women’s liberation by insisting that because of menstruation, women are unfit for just about everything several days a month. In a way, the Los Angeles women are supporting this assertion in their use of period extraction for non-abortion purposes; what they are saying, in effect, is, yes, it
is
awful, it is truly a curse, and here is a way to be
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