Women's Bodies/Women's Lives
Health, Well-Being and Body Image
edited by Baukje Miedema, Janet M. Stoppard and Vivienne Anderson

Our bodies are integral to our lives — our dreams, our desires. Each can only be understood in the context of the other. Where we live, our income levels, our health, our abilities, even how we look help shape our personal and social realities.

Women's Bodies/Women's Lives examines this complex relationship. In sixteen chapters, activists, writers, scholars and healthcare professionals demonstrate how social and cultural expectations mould our realities, and how our perceptions of self shape our being in the world. The underlying question throughout these provocative essays is: Do women really control their own bodies?

In their search for an answer, contributors look at women's lives — with particular attention paid to the intersection of gender, race, ability, sexual orientation and class — from the inside out. They examine how women's bodies and lives are altered by social, personal and cultural expectations, and how women continue to make their bodies and their lives fit into the images constructed by popular culture, the media and the medical and psychiatric establishments.

Women's Bodies/Women's Lives shows us how women in Canada are developing strategies to resist negative constructs of women. This insightful collection probes women's struggles to reclaim the social and personal power that comes out of an identity shaped by one's own sense of self.