Without knowing much about the context of the lesson, I started reading the ninth edition of Rose Kushner’s book “If You’ve Thought About Breast Cancer…” The chapters provide a comprehensive coverage about breast cancer from screening to coping to recovering, in a rather methodical order. Although the writing is structured similar to an academic publication, I found Kushner’s book very layman friendly for the amount of details it contains and with a hint of empathetic overtone.
It was when I finished the other readings in the lesson that I finally come to realize how radical a literature on the breast cancer was in Kushner’s time, an age when the very words “breast cancer” were considered shameful. Back then, the overall women’s health issues were either overlooked or regarded with much repugnance, in addition to be largely constricted by moral and religious dogma. Breast cancer was one of the problems, so were contraception and abortion, which perhaps were issues taken up by more feminists. Although Kushner did not pose as a feminist for most parts, she did condemn the “Male Chauvinism” and publicly criticized the President of U.S. for his indifference over his wife’s body, citing the masculine society as the cause. According to Barron H. Lerner in his book The Breast Cancer Wars: Fear, Hope, and the Pursuit of a Cure in Twentieth-Century America, M.D., Kushner once wrote:
No man is going to make another man impotent while he’s asleep without his permission, but there’s no hesitation if it’s a woman’s breast.
Her use of comparison to male genitalia is much similar to feminist writings against female genital mutilation and other movements.
The slides also mentioned the fact that Kushner refused to authorize the one step biopsy and mastectomy procedure, and as a result was turned down by 18 surgeons. I could only imagine the amount of courage that would enable one to not only fight against cancer, but also the male-dominated institutions that reinforced “unnecessary and inadvisable” procedures (Week 3 Slides).
I truly admire Kushner for her effort of disseminating factual and meaningful information, for her progressive stance in the face of cancer, and for her movement against the powerful and mainstream male dominated media.
I appreciate how you picked up on the radical nature of Kushner’s work for their time. And as with all work both flawed and groundbreaking.
I also really appreciate how you read this text by positioning it in its moment of historical production, which allows us to access its radical approach (and its bravery). Well done! Sometimes as contemporary readers we can err on the side of reading a historical document with only our present concerns/approach, and we can miss entirely what the text was doing in its historical moment. But your attention to the historical moment (including its gendered power dynamics) gives us many generative routes into very useful interpretation of the text as a historical archive. Thanks for your great work here.
Kimberly