Lifestyle
Norma Swenson, ‘Our Bodies, Ourselves’ Co-Author, Dies at 93
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.
It was during a women’s liberation conference in Boston in 1969 that a small group began sharing stories of their fraught experiences with doctors. They told of their frustration with the sexism of the medical establishment and of how confounded they were by the lack of knowledge they had about their own bodies. So they set out to learn for themselves, and in so doing they began to assemble a candid and humane encyclopedia of women’s health — by women, for women.
In 1970, the New England Free Press published their first rough version. It was an immediate underground success, with some 225,000 copies eventually sold. The publisher couldn’t keep up with the demand.
Ms. Swenson joined the group in 1971, when commercial publishers were courting the group’s members. After Simon & Schuster published the book in 1973, much gussied up and expanded, it became a juggernaut.
It covered topics that were then considered unmentionable and, in the case of abortion, illegal: sexuality, masturbation, abortion and birth control. There were chapters on body image, rape and self-defense; on heterosexual and lesbian relationships; on childbirth and its aftermath; and, in later editions, on menopause. There were detailed illustrations — including six variations of hymens — and photographs, including a helpful how-to for viewing one’s own vagina with a mirror.
When The New York Times’s chief book critic, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt — a man! — reviewed it, he explained his rationale for giving himself the assignment.
“I learned a great deal from this book that I did not know before, or had somehow forgotten,” he wrote. “And if the authors are correct in their belief that one of the major reasons why men oppress women is because ‘of the male fear and envy of the generative and sexual powers of women’ — and I think they are — why, then, it will do no harm at all for men to read ‘Our Bodies, Ourselves’ and expend a little rational thought on these powers.”
The book revolutionized how women’s health was discussed, and it quickly became a cultural touchstone. Reading it — often under the covers — was a rite of passage for many young women, who nicked it from their mothers’ bedside tables. More progressive moms gave it to their daughters in lieu of “the talk.”
Barbara Ehrenreich called it a manifesto of medical populism. The Moral Majority deemed it obscene. It even had a cameo in “Heartburn,” Nora Ephron’s 1983 revenge novel about the breakup of her marriage.
But the book was always a labor of love. And as the royalties poured in, the Obos, as they called themselves, used the money not to pay themselves but to create a nonprofit that made small grants to women’s health groups.
In 1977, Ms. Swenson and Judy Norsigian, another core member of the collective, teamed up for a tour of 10 European countries to meet with women’s groups who were putting together their own versions of “Our Bodies, Ourselves.” Ms. Swenson would later help to oversee the international editions and adaptations, and would lecture around the world, particularly in developing countries.
“Norma was always committed to an intersectional approach,” Ms. Norsigian said. “She made sure the activism could fit people’s lifestyles. How they could do things with limited resources. How to tailor the work to specific communities in less industrialized countries. She helped breastfeeding support groups in the Philippines, for example, and met with a doctor in Bangladesh who was advocating for indigenous production of essential drugs.”
“Feminism,” Ms. Swenson once told a group of doctors, “is just another name for self-respect.”
Norma Lucille Meras was born on Feb. 2, 1932, in Exeter, N.H., the only child of Halford Meras, who owned the town’s furniture store, and Nellie (Kenick) Meras, who worked as the store’s bookkeeper.
When she was 9, the family moved to Boston. She attended the prestigious Girls’ Latin School (now Boston Latin Academy), graduating in 1949 and studied sociology at Tufts University. She graduated in 1953 and, three years later, married John Swenson, a decorated World War II pilot — he was a member of the 100th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force, also known as the Bloody Hundredth — who worked in insurance and for the Post Office.
It was her daughter’s birth that had made Ms. Swenson an activist. She wanted to deliver the baby naturally, without medication. Her decision was such an anomaly that residents at the Boston Lying-In Hospital gathered to watch her labor. It went swimmingly.
But Ms. Swenson, who was in a 12-bed ward, was surrounded by women who were suffering. They were giving birth according to the practices of the era: with a dose of Scopolamine, a drug that induced so-called twilight sleep and hallucinations, followed by a shot of Demerol, an opioid.
She remembered the women screaming, trying to climb out of their beds, calling for their mothers and cursing their husbands before being knocked out by the Demerol, their babies delivered by forceps.
It was barbaric, she thought. “These women weren’t being helped,” she said in 2018, “they were being controlled.”
She became president of the Boston Association for Childbirth Education, which focused on natural childbirth, in 1964, and later served as president of the International Childbirth Education Association. She earned a master’s degree in public health from Harvard in 1973.
Mr. Swenson died in 2002. Ms. Swenson’s partner for the next decade and a half, Leonard van Gaasbeek, died in 2019. Her daughter is her only immediate survivor.
For most of her life, Ms. Swenson traveled the world as an expert on reproductive rights and women’s and children’s health, advising women’s health groups and helping to connect them with policy and grant makers. She taught at the Harvard School of Public Health and served as a consultant to the World Health Organization and other groups.
“Our Bodies, Ourselves,” last updated in 2011, has sold more than four million copies and been translated into 34 languages. The nonprofit behind the book, which provides health resources to women, is now based at Suffolk University in Boston.
“It’s not that things have so dramatically improved for women,” Ms. Swenson told The Times in 1985. “But they’d be much worse if it were not for the pressure of the women’s health movement. We are a presence now that cannot be made to disappear.”
She continued: “Women’s voices are being heard, speaking about their needs and their experiences, and they are not going along with having decisions based simply on what the medical profession needs or what the drug industry needs. I find that enormously exciting.”
Zoe Latta, a co-founder of the fashion brand Eckhaus Latta, saw the clock on Instagram and started searching for pharma swag on eBay. “It was just a hole I got in,” she said. Latta soon rounded up some examples at “Rotting on the Vine,” her Substack newsletter, describing them as “silly byproducts of our sick sad world.”
Pharma swag feels somewhat like Marlboro Man merch — “like this very specific modality of our culture that’s changed,” Latta said, adding, “At first, I thought it was ironic and cheeky. But it’s also so dark.”
In particular, swag like the OxyContin mugs that read “The One to Start With. The One to Stay With” is regarded as highly collectible and highly contentious. Jeremy Wells, a newspaper owner and editor in Olive Hill, Ky., remembered, for example, seeing the mugs sold at a Dollar Tree in New Boston, Ohio, in the late 1990s or early 2000s. “At the same moment that the epidemic is blowing up,” he said.
“You can do a chicken-and-egg argument, and I doubt very seriously that those mugs made anybody get addicted,” he said. “But I do feel like things like those mugs did add to the mystique and the aura of seduction.” (After a protracted lawsuit, Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, has been dissolved and is on the hook to pay more than $5 billion in criminal penalties for fueling the opioid epidemic.)
“I was surprised to see how much this stuff was selling for in general — there is demand,” Latta said, pointing to a vintage Xanax photo frame listed for $230. Latta said she could imagine buying it for a friend who takes Xanax on planes (“if it was at a thrift store for under $10”) or maybe a pair of Moderna aviator sunglasses that she found, which seem to nod at Covid vaccines and the signature Biden eyewear, she said.
Pharmacore — medical-branded pieces worn as fashion — has found new expression at the confluence of identity, medicine and commerce, and at a time when skepticism toward pharmaceuticals is at a high (see: the MAHA movement).
Goth Shakira wears a Blumarine jacket, vintage Jean Paul Gaultier top from Wild West Social House, Jane Wade bra and Ariel Taub earrings.
My ex-boyfriend, whom I just got out of a relationship with, had a pure heart and was a loyal lover. However, he lacked ambition and his family didn’t have the best values. I don’t see myself raising children with him because I don’t want my kids to be surrounded by his family. (I broke up with him on the night of his birthday because his sister got violent with me.) We dated for over a year and I’d always be the one to take care of the check when we’d go out on dates. He had no network, so we would always hang out with my friends and colleagues. Am I wrong for leaving him? Is his loyalty worth going through all that?
Girl. (“Girl” is a gender-neutral term of endearment, by the way.) I’m going to need you to take a deep breath, look at your gorgeous self in the mirror and relish in the fact that you have made the right decision.
First, let’s focus on the good. Loyalty and purity of heart are beautiful traits that many, many people on this earth have. When you find someone who does, and then combine that with your attraction and attachment to this person (along with the reality that many, many people also lack these traits), it makes sense that you’d be feeling like your ex is a rare find that you might not encounter again. However, you can care for someone, and also acknowledge the truth that the life they are setting themself up for is not the life you envision living — or, crucially, the life that you envision your children living. A long-term partnership is so much more than love. It requires a shared vision for fulfillment and happiness, based on compatible values. It necessitates a wholeness from both parties, wherein two individuals take ownership and accountability over their own success and well-being. It is loving to let someone go so they can live their life in peace and free of judgment, and even find someone else whose version of an ideal life more closely matches theirs. Most importantly, letting someone go who you know is not aligned with the life you want to live is a deeply self-loving act.
The meaning I glean from your words is this: It’s not so much that you yearn for him romantically and fear you made a mistake simply because your life is empty without him. (In fact, it sounds like you were the one adding a lot of value to his otherwise limited existence through your resources.) It seems that you feel guilty for leaving him behind as you went on to pursue a better life for yourself. That kind of feeling is more caretaking, and dare I say maternal, than loving (at least the kind associated with romantic partnership). He’s your ex, not your son. Unconditional love is only healthy and appropriate in the context of a parent-child relationship, and that’s not the situation here. People who engage in romantic relationships with men — women, femmes, gay men, etc. — are socialized to be ever-forgiving, to have infinite patience and compassion. The lines get blurred when you do feel kindness and genuine compassion for someone you care about. It can be difficult to discern when you’re being too harsh, and when you’re just setting a healthy boundary. Society makes it difficult for us in that way. But we don’t have to succumb to that pressure.
You can’t fall in love with someone’s potential. If a person, especially a man, shows up to a relationship as someone you can’t envision spending an extended period of time with, then that’s not your person. Not only is it impossible to truly “fix” or “change” anyone, it’s simply not an efficient or productive use of your precious energetic and material resources. Of course, we all change over time, and hopefully in positive ways. But that change needs to be self-directed, coming from within each individual. “Change” exerted on another through force robs the receiving party of the dignity of authoring their own life path. Even the verbiage of your question indicates that you’ve already extended a lot of generosity and patience toward someone who didn’t feel like working toward social and financial independence, and setting boundaries with their family should have been a top priority. I can sense your exhaustion underneath the guilt. That’s the root of the matter. And what matters is you.
I can sense your exhaustion underneath the guilt.
Loss is just space. It can hurt and feel empty at first. But it also allows you the room you need to expand your world with abundance, not shrink it and drain it into scarcity. Affirm in your heart and in your mind that love itself is an infinite resource. If you channel the patience and generosity that you once put into your ex into a life where you are fulfilled to the utmost, the right person (or people) will find you.
And, girl. Some time from now, when you are loved by a man who takes his own dignity seriously, and supports you in the feminine energy of rest and calm that you deserve to experience and embody, you will be so grateful to this current version of you that had the courage to let go. I’m proud of you.
Photography Eugene Kim
Styling Britton Litow
Hair and Makeup Jaime Diaz
Visual Direction Jess Aquino de Jesus
Production Cecilia Alvarez Blackwell
Photo Assistant Joe Elgar
Styling Assistant Wendy Gonzalez Vivaño
The kiss finally happened at a Halloween party Chatterjee hosted at her apartment, while the two were watching “American Psycho” on the couch at 3 a.m., when everyone else had gone out for food. “We’re sitting so close our legs are touching and I’m freaking out,” Braggins said.
“I looked at Abby, and I was like, ‘I’d rather kiss you than watch this,’” Chatterjee said. So they did. About a month later, they were official.
On April 10, Braggins suggested they take a trip to Home Goods in Brooklyn. When they ended up at Coney Island Beach instead, Chatterjee was none the wiser. It was an early morning, so the two, along with the dog they adopted together, Willow, enjoyed having the beach to themselves.
Braggins ran ahead with Willow and crouched behind some rocks. When Chatterjee got a glimpse of Willow, there was a bandanna tied around her neck. It said, “Will you marry me?” Braggins pulled out a shell with a ring in it. The answer was yes.
A few days before, Chatterjee had proposed to Braggins amid a gloomy, cloudy sky on top of the Empire State Building.
The two were married on April 21 at the New York City Marriage Bureau, in front of three guests, by Guohuan Zhang, a city clerk. Afterward, they celebrated at Bungalow, an Indian restaurant in the East Village, with a few more friends.
Though Chatterjee’s parents were not present at the wedding, one of the couple’s most meaningful moments came in 2023, when Braggins traveled to India to meet Chatterjee’s family for the first time. Chatterjee had never brought a partner home before, and she had warned Braggins that same-sex relationships were still not widely accepted there. But by the end of the trip, Chatterjee’s mother had embraced Braggins as family, telling her, “I have two daughters now.”
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