Norma Swenson, an Author of ‘Our Bodies, Ourselves,' Dies at 93

New York Times

8 hours ago

Norma Swenson was working to educate women about childbirth, championing their right to have a say about how they delivered their babies, when she met the members of the collective that had put out the first rough version of what would become the feminist health classic 'Our Bodies, Ourselves.' It was around 1970, and she recalled a few of the women attending a meeting she was holding in Newton, Mass., where she lived.
It did not go well. One of them shouted at her, 'You are not a feminist, you'll never be a feminist and you need to go to school!'
'I was stricken,' Ms. Swenson remembered in a StoryCorps interview in 2018. 'But also feeling that maybe she was right. I needed to know more things.'
She did, however, know quite a bit about the medical establishment, the paternalistic and condescending behavior of male doctors — in 1960, only 6 percent of incoming medical students were female — and the harmful effect that behavior had on women's health. She had lived it, during the birth of her daughter in 1958.
Despite the initial tension — the woman who had berated Ms. Swenson felt her activism was too polite, too old-school — the members of the Boston Women's Health Book Collective, as they called themselves, invited Ms. Swenson to join their group. She would go on to help make 'Our Bodies, Ourselves' a global best seller. It was a relationship that lasted for the next half-century.
Ms. Swenson died on May 11 at her home in Newton. She was 93.
The cause was cancer, her daughter, Sarah Swenson, said.
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