1950s

The 1950s appear in the book as a point of contrast: women were expected to say no, yet were rarely given accurate language or knowledge about their own bodies. The author links that silence to shame and to the assumption that men, including lovers and physicians, knew more about women’s bodies than women did. The decade’s sexual norms thus form part of a longer history the book challenges through women’s self-knowledge and testimony.

Sexual Norms and Silence

The author contrasts the 1950s expectation of refusal with the sexual revolution of the 1960s, which, in her account, did not by itself create sexual equality: the earlier no was replaced by a constant, eager yes, making women more available to men. She presents neither arrangement as a sufficient alternative to women’s autonomy. Feminist activism in the 1970s began to offer different possibilities, challenging patriarchal religions, Freud, and the double standard governing sexual behavior.

That wider context is joined to the author’s recollection of what she was taught as a girl. She was grateful not to have heard slang that made the female body seem dirty or shameful, but she also never heard the word clitoris and did not learn for years that it is an organ whose function is pleasure. When she learned to speak, spell, and care for herself, every body part seemed nameable except the one area treated as unmentionable. The absence was not neutral: it left her exposed to schoolyard mockery and later to the belief that men knew more about women’s bodies.

From Silence to Women’s Accounts

The book describes a change in method as well as attitude. The author began with interviews, speaking with more than two hundred women and asking about their experiences. Her interlocutors differed in age, relationship status, sexuality, occupation, and racial and ethnic background: she spoke with older and younger women, married and single women, lesbians, college professors, actors, corporate professionals, sex workers, and women from several racial and ethnic communities. Initially shy, many became eager to speak once the conversation began. The interviews developed into monologues, turning private accounts into material that could be heard by others.

The account of a later workshop makes the earlier lack of knowledge concrete. Participants were asked to examine themselves with hand mirrors and then report what they saw to the group. The author says that, until then, what she knew about her vagina came from hearsay or invention; she had never really looked at it and had treated it as something abstract rather than part of her body. In the workshop, looking and describing became a practical counter to a knowledge gap that silence had helped preserve.

Testimony, Class, and Access to Care

The book also insists that women’s opportunities to speak and recover are shaped by material circumstances. The author describes ten years of involvement with women without homes, whom she knew as friends, and says she ran recovery groups for women who had been raped. She argues that poor women’s experiences of sexual violence often go unreported and that poverty can limit access to therapy and other forms of healing. In her account, repeated abuse can erode self-esteem and contribute to drug use, prostitution, AIDS, and, in some cases, death. She also recounts a different outcome: a woman met and fell in love with another woman in a shelter, and their relationship helped them leave the shelter system and establish a home.

The book’s attention to difference extends to audiences as well as interviewees. One student population it describes was 45 percent Black and Hispanic; most students were the first in their families to attend college, and more than 65 percent came from families with annual incomes below $35,000. The author observes that many had had little exposure to feminist literature or ideas. Those circumstances help explain why hearing women speak about their bodies and lives could become a powerful experience: access to feminist language and knowledge was uneven, not simply a matter of individual curiosity.

Public Speech and Significance

After performances, women approached the author to tell their stories, offer suggestions, and describe their responses. She valued these exchanges because the accounts were often delivered simply and matter-of-factly. That continuing response gives the book’s movement from silence to speech a public dimension: the testimony does not end with the interview or performance but prompts further testimony from listeners.

In this framework, the 1950s are more than a period label. They mark one form of constraint, in which refusal was prescribed while accurate bodily knowledge remained withheld. The later feminist turn, the workshop’s direct observation, and the circulation of women’s accounts point toward a different authority: women describing and learning about their own bodies. The book does not treat all women’s experiences as interchangeable; its examples show how class, race, age, sexuality, and access to care shape who can speak, who is heard, and what support is available.