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 Sue Wells, award-winning author of Out of the Dead House (Wisconsin, 2001) and Professor of English, says she has a “truly cool project” for research into women’s history waiting on her shelf. About to step down after one of the most productive chair terms known to this department, she’s anxious to revisit her subject: the publishing sensation created in 1971 by 14 activists in the women’s movement. Their co-authored, nontraditional book on women’s health, Our Bodies, Our Selves, sold hundreds of thousands of copies in that first edition, while they distributed it gratis to women’s clinics and educational programs. By its eighth edition in 2005, the pathbreaking work was being read in 19 languages. What most intrigues Sue Wells is that this one book’s influence has changed the sound of popular and educational medical writing from the voice of a single authority to the multiple voices of experience.
Wells' research to date shows the group’s unconventional methods coming from their challenge to the status quo for women. Alienated by experiences with male doctors, these activists educated themselves on topics crucial to women’s health by sneaking into medical lectures and passing around a library card borrowed from a Harvard medical student member. Their weekly papers, presented in group meetings, were rewritten to add others’ experiences and eventually became free public courses for women, who contributed experiences in turn. So developed the synergistic format of the book, in which “authoritative” medical information alternated with spliced-in experiences from women’s lives.
According to Wells, this model has quietly revolutionized the way popular and educational medical texts are written. An expert in rhetoric, she investigates techniques of speech and writing and teaches their history from as far back as Greek literature, so it’s natural that she’s eager to uncover more roots of this innovation. For this project, her broadest research aim mingles rhetoric with the history and sociology of science: she wants to see how scientific information changes its content as well as methods when it circulates as part of a social movement.
But women’s scientific writings don’t have to circulate to excite Sue Wells. Theses, articles, case reports, and more by nineteenth-century women physicians and students at the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania were under her microscope in Out of the Dead House, honored by the W. Ross Winterowd Award as best book of the year in composition theory. She wanted, Wells says, to find out whether women really do science differently from men as some have claimed. The college’s archives held an excellent test case because these women, barred from joining male medical societies or publishing in their journals, wrote only for other women scientists.
Her findings? Women “writing medicine” – say, case reports – followed disciplinary norms just like men. But women’s writing about medicine – say, professional issues – showed differences: for one, more careful record-keeping; for another, more irony and jokes, suggesting less diligent lip service to the status quo.
As she talks about her projects, Sue Wells’ feeling for the vividness of women’s history becomes contagious. “I saw papers that no one had probably looked at since they were first graded,” she says with elation, “and I got to look into amazing archives.” As long as she keeps on doing that, we can be sure we have an expert guide to the surprises waiting there.
Text and photo by Gabriele Bernhard-Jackson
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