Our Bodies, Our Lives

Of all the upheavals which happened in people’s personal values in the late 1960’s and 1970’s, none can really compare with the revolution in how we viewed our bodies. When I grew up, discussion of bodies was almost taboo. One’s attention was constantly directed inward, toward inner virtue as opposed to external beauty. We tried to look as nice as we could with our limited circumstances, and cleanliness was certainly next to godliness. But all of our family’s resources were directed toward education and inner value.

Only in the late 1960’s did people begin to take a finely-tuned look at the body instead of ignoring it. In my case, as for others, in The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing’s feminine honesty broke new ground. If she could discuss menstruation, the clitoris, writing the words down in a novel everyone was reading, perhaps we could discuss them with each other. Not that I did. The prohibitions for me were much too strong. But I began to think about myself physically in a different way.

I never owned a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves, first published in 1970 by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective to give accurate health and medical information to a broad audience of women, but I think all my friends did. Wilhelm Reich’s phrase “the body is the unconscious” also contributed greatly to this new way of looking at oneself. For if this were true, people were whole, all of one piece. There was no separation between body and soul. The one reflected the other completely.

What followed was a wealth of new ways of thinking, spawning interest in many new and old fields. All of the hippie traveling we did helped, leading people to understand that what we were doing in the West was not the only way. The mind/body connection was explored in physical practices such as yoga, hard and soft martial arts, massage, quigong and meditation. Alternative healing, birthing and dying were all opened to examination and experiment. Food and diet were finally admitted into the health picture.

We had new attitudes about what was attractive, such as natural looking bodies, and people began to understand that emotional weather was part of one’s personal picture as well. People began to sort out what could be cured and what you must live with. Chemical imbalances could now be treated. Handicapped people were helped to achieve their goals. Sexual orientations of all kinds were tested. Everything could be talked about, and generally was!

Line, Marty and Paul live through this change. Each of them is reticent about their own physicality, but they begin to see its importance. Line becomes a nurse, working first in gynecological wards and then in oncology. She studies herbal remedies and practices such as Reiki, and is fully awake to the extraordinary journey people take from birth to death. She becomes a midwife in later years, sharing all that she has learned.

Marty, who has always thought of herself as unattractive, moves into a stronger relationship to her body as she studies tai chi and disciplines her voracious, intellectual mind. She takes photographs which show that consciousness is fully present in the body. Paul, who spends the 1970’s in Alaska, contributes as an educator with an open heart. He marries a French-Canadian woman who insists on treating her early cancer in her own way. Paul also has to deal with his own post-polio syndrome as he gets older.

All of this change was welcome. It complicates things to have so many choices, but also enhances one's ability to give of one's particular gifts. By this time we have come full circle and focus too much on surfaces. We need to get back to an understanding of how much inner values affect our external selves. But time and our ever-renewing culture will probably take care of that.