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When I was a kid my mom wouldn’t let me have an Easy Bake Oven, because she rightfully despised the idea that little girls were to be trained to be nothing more than kitchen drones and caregivers, pretending to be satisfied with the prospect of whipping up triple layer delicacies with a big bogus smile on their faces and popping amphetamines on the sly to get through the day.

Of course, this was the mid-70s, right smack in the middle of Women’s Lib, and my mother, married at 18 in 1958, was not hard core like some who were born a bit later. But had had her consciousness raised at least to the extent that she’d be damned if her little girl was going to have an Easy Bake Oven. (more…)

So I’m up in Maine with the family and a group friends at a rented vacation home. The kids are sacked out and there’s about 25 minutes of puppetry of the pundits on MSNBC before the dulcet tones of Obama will woo the members of the Mile High club. So I grab a copy of Our Bodies in Menopause off the shelf and flip through it.

Photo Courtesy of Our bodies Ourselves

In case you never snuck a peek of Our Bodies, Ourselves when your the parents of the kid you were baby sitting for were out, it is the September Vogue-sized women’s health Bible, first published by a collective of feminists in the early ’70s. They rightfully resented the paternalistic leave-it-to-the-experts attitude of the medical establishment, and encouraged women to take charge of their bodies and their health. The original contained pictures of women with bad haircuts with their vaginas splayed open, giving birth naturally and with great and painful heroism. Inspiring, in a I-am-woman roaring kind of way.

Not so, Our Bodies in Menopause, issued presumably because those second wavers are now debating hormone replacement therapy.

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