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Forty years after the Boston Women's Health Book Collective familiarized readers with the concept of health feminism, the do-it-yourself activism of the 1970s appears as dated as the black and white photographs that grace the pages of Our Bodies, Ourselves. Yet, the ideas and actions of feminist health activists prove to be useful fodder for academic analysis, as recent publications attest. Michelle Murphy's Seizing the Means of Reproduction focuses on the actions of the feminist self-help movement in California in the 1970s and 1980s in order to tease out the overlaps between feminism and technoscientific practice in women's health politics. As her title suggests, Murphy is interested in the specific methods by which feminist health activists sought to regulate and control their reproductive capacities. They were not, of course, the only group interested in redefining and reshaping reproduction. In this new era of biomedicine, synthetic hormones, tissue cultures, and fertility treatments introduced by scientists altered the terrain of sex and health. But while most analyses position feminists in direct opposition to proponents of the wide-scale use of technoscience, Murphy stresses the ways in which it was impossible to completely separate feminism from technoscience. Murphy characterizes this as a form of entanglement, arguing for “the importance of attending to entanglements, defined as attachments of material, technical, and social relations across divergent and even antagonistic terrains of politics” (12). Thus, despite the fact that health feminists such as Lorraine Rothman and Carol Downer interpreted their actions—seizing the means of reproduction—as entirely distinct from those that linked individual reproductive capacities to global, racial, and environmental concerns, Murphy suggests that such a distinction was elusive.
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