Women’s Bodies, Women’s Rights

The Conference „Women’s Bodies, Women’s Rights. Health Feminism, Reproductive Knowledge and Women’s Activism Across Europe in the long 20th Century”, Konstanz, October 19-21, 2023 was organized by Emeline Fourment (Université Rouen Normandie), Isabel Heinemann (University of Bayreuth), Heidi-Hein-Kircher (Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe, Marburg) and Anne Kwaschik (University of Konstanz)

A woman’s right to bodily self-determination is and has been a politically, medically, and socially contested issue, as recent attacks on women’s and gender rights by right-wing actors across the globe show. Therefore, it is important to look back at women’s movements and feminist health activism to understand and trace back the confrontations over women’s rights such as access to contraception and abortion, situate them in their respective political and legal contexts and analyze potential continuities until today. The Conference „Women’s Bodies, Women’s Rights” brought together researchers from various disciplines (history, political science, cultural anthropology, and sociology) to present their work on health feminisms, reproductive knowledge, and women’s activism across Europe in the long 20th century. Five panels addressed sources of feminist knowledge and knowledge transfers, turning points and alternative periodizations of feminist history, the role of individual activists and transnational feminist networks as well as the impact of political power structures. Special attention was placed on the question whether feminist knowledge and activism travelled across the Iron Curtain.

In her welcome speech ANNE KWASCHIK (University of Konstanz) underlined the conference’s aim to give more visibility to research on health feminism in Germany and to connect the transnational research fields. She distinguished different approaches to knowledge production in and of social movements and insisted on the role of feminism as a “paradigmatic social movement” (Bereni/Revillard for research on movement’s knowledge cultures. In the same vein, EMELINE FOURMENT (Université Rouen Normandie), HEIDI HEIN-KIRCHER (Herder-Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe Marburg), and ISABEL HEINEMANN (Bayreuth University) stressed the need to investigate women’s health feminism as a deeply political and politicized realm. Bringing together their expertise in the history of knowledge, the history of gender and feminism as well as their transnational perspectives both on Western societies and East Central Europe, they introduced two days of intense interdisciplinary discussion and exchange of ideas. They encouraged participants to assess novel perspectives on feminist movements across the Iron Curtain and to discuss alternative periodizations of feminist history across the 20th century.

First Panel: Health knowledge as a source of women’s empowerment

The first panel focused on health knowledge as a source of women’s empowerment. IEVA BALČIŪNĖ (Lithuanian Institute of History) presented her research on the so called “visiting sisters” as a form of women’s medical care in the provinces of Soviet Lithuania after the modernization of medical services. These nurses assumed a crucial double position. They provided lay medical expertise and support for women, especially in rural areas where no doctors were available. At the same time, the Soviet State requested them to monitor and control women, their pregnancies, and births on behalf of the state.

NADEZHDA BELIAKOVA (University of Bielefeld) and NATALIYA SHOK (W. Wilson International Center for Scholars Washington) reported findings from their research project on women’s health policies in the late Soviet Republics. They traced back patients, public and professional narratives, which transformed from a core focus on maternal and child health during the 1950-70s, towards featuring family planning in a broader context of reproductive health since the mid-1980s and Perestroika. Beliakova and Shok showed how knowledge about women’s health was a marginalized issue in public discourses and how the female body was seen as a source for advances in medical research. Finally, they demonstrated that state health policies addressed women differently according to status and region while some female physicians succeeded in shaping medical discourses on women’s health.

Adding to these perspectives LUCILE QUERÉ (Université de Lausanne) shifted the focus from women’s health to lesbian’s health activism, looking at transformations of health feminism in the 1980s in France and Switzerland. Based on her comparative analysis of lesbian feminist activism in Paris and Geneva, Queré demonstrated that in Geneva the reception of self-help was more favorable to its appropriation by lesbians than it was in France. Due to Queré, the Dispensaire des femmes of Geneva (1978-1987) helped to create an exchange of self-help practices between Switzerland and France and to develop a lesbian critique of medicine.

SYLVIE CHAPERON’s (University of Toulouse) lucid comment carved out important similarities between the three papers that otherwise charted a broad time span and investigated socialist and Western countries: While women were mostly patronized by members of the medical hierarchy and had to put up with treatments and health policies that left them little room for maneuver, they nonetheless sought and created solidarity, sorority, or even feminism, especially when it came to issues of abortion and birth control.

In her keynote, MAUD BRACKE (University of Glasgow) targeted the global women’s health movement from the 1970s through the 1990s and the “blind spots of Western feminism”, thus providing a crucial point of reference for further discussion. Bracke offered three case studies of international conferences to map networks of activists and illustrate confrontations and conflict also within the feminist health movements around topics such as contraception and family planning. She traced back how the global women’s health movement developed a reproductive justice agenda that succeeded in shaping the UN in defining reproductive rights in the 1990s. Her talk gave ample testimony to the usefulness of the concept of “hegemonic feminism” (G. C. Spivak), especially in decentering Western narratives of feminism and decolonizing knowledge with the help of intersectional approaches and the concept of reproductive justice.

Second Panel: Knowledge transfer across borders and times

The second panel on “knowledge transfer across borders and time” was opened by KENA HENRIETTA STÜWE (Humboldt University), who presented anarchist perspectives on women’s health and reproductive rights in the German Empire and the Weimar Republic. Stüwe found that early anarchist newspapers from 1907/1908 saw birth control as a central precondition for the liberation of women. At the same time, anarchist authors held potential parents responsible to regulate childbirth, to bear fewer children and raise them according to the expected anarchist values. In the 1920s anarcho-syndicalists continued to use such arguments – birth control was considered a human right and a means to prevent poverty. Within the free workers union, the syndicalist women’s federation (Syndikalistischer Frauenbund) created women-only spaces and organized education around contraception as well as abortion to provide mutual aid and self-empowerment. In this context, health knowledge figured as a prerequisite to women’s emancipation and a political rather than a private issue.

ISABEL HEINEMANN (University of Bayreuth) focused on health feminism in the two Germanies from the 1970s to the 1990s. By presenting different advice books on contraception, abortion, and other health-related topics from the two Germanies, Heinemann illustrated how health activists in both states linked their critique of a patriarchal health system with that of gendered power structures. The West German health movements and the fight for legal abortion through campaigns such as the “Aktion 218” showed how political this movement was. Yet, also in the GDR (German Democratic Republic), feminist women’s health groups emerged during the 1980s, but were less visible due to surveillance and repression by the Stasi. Having read ‘Western’ feminist literature, these women (and men!) demanded information on alternative forms of conception and health care besides state-advocated hormonal contraception and legal abortion (since 1972). Heinemann suggested to broaden the term “health feminism” to include topics like family, gender relations and sexuality and allow for more nuanced comparisons of women’s activism across the Iron Curtain.

Knowledge transfer between Germany and the USA was addressed by ALISSA BELLOTTI (University of Haifa), who presented her research on breast cancer advocacy and the limits of American women’s health activism in Germany. Bellotti showed how the study of breast cancer differed medically and socially from the more common issue of abortion, as breast cancer is medically complicated, potentially fatal and considered a strong taboo in Western societies. In West Germany, public attention grew in 1996 when the feminist magazine “Emma” started a campaign that framed breast cancer as a political issue, almost 20 years after the American breast cancer movement had entered public debates there. In her presentation, Bellotti showed the different conceptions of empowerment and women’s health advocacy in the context of breast cancer, such as “pink ribbon culture” and fundraising campaigns in the USA and the dissemination of medical knowledge through local women-help-women groups in Germany. These differences ultimately prevented one of the most successful American awareness and fundraising campaigns, the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s Race for the Cure, from transplanting successfully in Germany.

In her comment, JANE FREELAND (Queen Mary University, London) emphasized that the papers – although focusing on different periods in German history across the 20th century – all contested narratives of linear progress and instead revealed the limitations and unevenness of change over time. While the papers acknowledged the relevance of the transnational circulation and translation of women’s health knowledge, practices, and politics, Freeland encouraged the panelists to think even more about the relationship between the national and the global or transnational, especially for the uneven history of German health feminism.

Third Panel: Transnational encounters as sites of knowledge transfer

The transnational dissemination of knowledge was also the focus of the third panel with presentations on international feminist health conferences as well as travel activities by feminist health activists. EMELINE FOURMENT (University of Rouen Normandie) and BIBIA PAVARD (University Paris 2, Carism) presented their project on the 1974 international women’s conference in Frankfurt and the circulation of feminist self-help knowledge. Despite its transnational scale and scope, little is known about this conference, which developed from a Danish feminist summer camp in 1974. Overall, Fourment and Pavard argued that this conference was a paradigmatic example of transnationalism from below. The conference was dominated by an atmosphere of building enthusiasm around global sisterhood. It marked a specialization of certain activists e.g., on women’s medicine and sexuality. Finally, it led to other major international events such as the Brussels Tribunal on violence against women in 1976.

In a similar vein, CAROLINA TOPINI (University College London) analyzed the transnational transfer of reproductive knowledge through the international women and health meetings (IWHMs) from the late 1970s up until 2015. Topini described these meetings as a catalyst for the global feminist movement and place for exploring political solidarity and transnationalism. Over the years, they turned into a crucial space for the evaluation of feminist actions and helped activists to engage with global health policy. Topini tracked broad changes in the discourse and agenda of these meetings and showed how they shifted from a predominantly white European movement with a focus on abortion to a global movement to address also interlocking oppressions concerning sterilization, abuse, maternal mortality, and disability. Since 1981, meetings got more intersectional, providing increasing visibility for migrant women and women from the Global South as well as lesbian women and women with disabilities.

KASSANDRA HAMMEL (University of Tübingen) explored the exchange of feminist health knowledge across borders by presenting two key personalities and their engagement in health feminism, the German journalist Gudula Lorez and the British publicist Eleanor Stephens. Hammel’s study was based on the analysis of feminist magazines from Germany and the USA. Whereas Lorez travelled to the USA which she deemed the “land of feminist possibilities”, Stephens became part of the Boston Women’s collective in 1986 and contributed to the famous British feminist magazine “Spare Rib”. Hammel showed how individual activists travels had a significant impact on the dissemination of feminist ideas concerning women’s sexuality.

In her comment, IMKE SCHMINCKE (LMU Munich) carved out that all three papers presented feminist activists as producers of alternative knowledge. This knowledge relied on experience and was related to the body and sexuality, it was collective in character, produced through practices and, finally, presented either counter-narratives or alternative forms of specialized knowledge. While she hinted the relevance of personal networks for transnational exchanges, she encouraged to further investigate how feminist public spaces were claimed and to think more about the role of feminism within health activism.

Fourth Panel: Women’s health activism between grassroot movements and the state

Focusing on women’s health activism between grassroot movements and the state PEIROU CHU (ENS Lyon) opened the fourth panel with her research on marriage and sexual counselling centers as a space for sexual reform in the Weimar Republic. Chu carved out how gender norms and hierarchies were consolidated by a (pseudo) scientific discourse promoted by antifeminists such as Paul Julius Möbius in 1900. In the context of 20th century social reform movements, however, first counselling centers were founded under the leadership of the Bund für Mutterschutz (federation for maternity protection) following the example of the Magnus Hirschfeld Institute in 1919. Chu insisted on the limits of this maternal and patronizing effort of the women’s movement. Women mainly sought advice on contraception instead of counseling on marriage and family matters while conservative doctors rallied against contraceptives altogether.

AGNIESZKA KOŚCIAŃSKA (University of Warsaw) elaborated on activism in Poland in the 1960s and the role of polish Catholicism. Kościańska introduced the catholic intellectual and journalist Anna Morawska (1922-1972), who worked on the topics of gender, marriage and family planning in Poland and was also involved in global networks such as the civil rights movement in the USA. Contrary to the doctrine of the Catholic church, Morawska represented the idea that marriage was not only for “procreation” but also for the development of a relationship, of one’s own personality and for sexual pleasure. In this context she promoted a catholic argument for contraception based on humanist ideals. The example of Anna Morawska demonstrated that in the 1960s Catholicism in Poland was diverse. Morawska’s ideas are still present in the church today e.g. when polish Catholics take part in abortion rights activism.

AGATA IGNACIUK (University of Granada) focused on the relationship between grassroots movements and the state in the context of abortion rights in Spain in the 1980s and 1990s. Relying mainly on oral history testimonies, she placed special attention on the experiences of women gynecologists providing abortion services after the decriminalization of abortion in Spain in 1985 (abortion and contraception were banned until Franco’s death in 1975 and beyond – contraception was decriminalized in 1978 and abortion in 1985). Ignaciuk argued that women protagonists like Elisa Sesma and Eva Rodriguez balanced activism, feminism, and the political economies of abortion activism.

Commenting on this section, HEIDI HEIN-KIRCHER (Herder Institute, Marburg) hinted at the importance of both health experts and counseling, but also practitioners for concepts of health feminism. While marriage counselors in the early 20th century and catholic women intellectuals in midcentury Poland pursued distinct normative trajectories, they nonetheless promoted concepts of feminist agency. Abortion professionals in Spain also advocated feminist activism, but at the same time followed economic interest.

Fifth Panel: Women’s health activism and technologies of reproductive control

The last panel provided perspectives on new reproductive technologies and feminist activists involvement in family planning policy. VERONIKA LACINOVÁ NAJMANOVÁ (University of Pardubice) described how doctors in inter-war Czechoslovakia focused on maternal health and the prevention of abortion as a central motive in the promotion of contraception, joined by feminist activists and birth control associations. After the legalization of abortion in Socialist Czechoslovakia in 1957, doctors advocated contraception (next to abortion) to enhance participation in social and public life. The motive of women’s health was central to the promotion of contraception in both periods as was the influence of doctors in promoting birth control. However, in the interwar period, the reasons for emphasizing this issue were mainly the popularity of eugenics, while in the 1960s new arguments came up like the quality of the sex life or the involvement of women on the labor market.

MARÍA MUNDI LÓPEZ (EHESS, University of Granada) talked about medical abortion through Mifepristone in France and Spain from 1980 to 1990. She understood medical abortion as a complex practice and introduced Mifepristone as a symbol for social, political, and medical struggles around abortion until now. While developed in 1982 in France, the abortive drug RU486 got marketing approval in France in 1988. This was the beginning of a controversial campaign accompanied by threats of boycott and harassment. Spanish mass media discussed Mifepristone from 1982 onward, which coincided with the debate around partial criminalization of abortion in Spain. In 1990 arguments by the feminist movement in Spain included that Mifepristone would prevent physical and psychological trauma of surgical abortions, strongly opposed by the Spanish Catholic Church. Mundi López showed how public debates on the commercialization of controversial abortion technologies unfolded.

In her comment, CLAUDIA ROESCH (University of Konstanz), stressed the value of studying two countries “at the periphery” of current research on reproductive rights. While the appearance of new reproductive technologies united the two otherwise rather distinct case studies (debates on reliable contraceptives in the Czech Republic at midcentury, on legal abortion in Spain in the late 20th century), she suggested to further explore the complex interactions between medical professionals and feminist groups in both countries when advocating and making use of the new reproductive technologies.

The conference successfully brought together various perspectives on health feminism, women’s movements and the State in the 20th century in different local contexts stressing the importance of social movement’s knowledge production. Papers and discussions both demonstrated the importance of intersectional perspectives, carved out historical continuities in health feminist activism across Europe and discussed patterns and actors of transnational knowledge transfer. The speakers underlined the importance of feminist activism for women’s health and policies, and the relationship between national, transnational, and global history of women’s health activism. The East-West focus proved to be very fruitful for critical questioning of historical categories of research on Western feminism. Main findings were among others the huge importance of international networks forged at international women’s conferences and the fact that feminist knowledge even crossed the iron curtain. In the final discussion the participants agreed on ways of continuing and enlarging their network for further (interdisciplinary) research on transnational health feminism and its histories.