Never heard of her. Norma Shearer, Norma Desmond, Norma Rae – them I’ve heard of, but Norma Swenson? Huh? Nope.
Norma Swenson. Born in Exeter, NH in 1932, she attended both Tufts and Harvard Universities, receiving her Masters in Public Health from the latter. In 1958, Ms. Swenson gave birth to her daughter; what she witnessed in the maternity ward during her stay would shape the rest of her life – affecting the lives of millions of women in the U.S. and elsewhere on planet earth.
All around her, women in various stages of labor were being given Scopolamine, a drug inducing “twilight sleep” – a state of semi-consciousness often filled with hallucinations and terror. When the women, confused and frightened, resisted – they were tied to their beds with restraints. If they persisted, either verbally or physically objecting to being restrained, they were then given Demerol, rendering them fully unconscious while their babies were delivered by forceps. She said later that she knew immediately: “These women weren’t being helped. They were being controlled.”
Norma refused the drugs, giving birth awake, alert, and fully present — a sight so unusual that the entire labor and delivery ward staff gathered around her bed to watch. Shockingly, most of the residents had never seen a natural birth before. That degree from Harvard might’ve given her a leg up on getting her the treatment she demanded, but regardless, Norma Swenson never forgot what she’d seen.
In 1960, only 6% of incoming American medical students were women. Healthcare was and had been for far too long entirely dominated by male physicians who very often (and still) approached women’s healthcare and bodies with paternalism, condescension, and genuine ignorance – a dangerous combination. Dangerous for women. Women were routinely told to defer to men who knew nothing of their lived experiences, to trust male experts, ask no questions, and accept what they were given.
In 1969, Norma Swenson was among a small group of female Bostonians gathered at a workshop called Women and Their Bodies. This event was part of a women’s liberation conference at Emmanuel College. Sharing their medical experiences – routine dismissals, misinformation, humiliation, and fear – led them meet and continue their discussions after the conference ended because there was so much more to say, and – potentially – report out.
From those initial conversations and further research – twelve of the women spent months answering every medical question they had ever been afraid to ask, or that had been dismissed by male physicians and male dominated institutions. The result? A 193-page stapled booklet called Women and Their Bodies, published by a small local press made available for 75 cents, which booklet spread across America – before the internet!!! – like a revolution.
Renamed Our Bodies, Ourselves in 1971, it sold 225,000 copies almost entirely by word of mouth, and without the benefit of a single advertisement. Norma Swenson – and I hope you’ll remember her name now – was a co-founder of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, the organization behind the book, serving as its first Director of International Programs.
When Simon & Schuster published the expanded commercial edition in 1973, the book became a huge hit and cultural phenomenon. It addressed everything the medical establishment had deliberately, systematically kept from women and girls: answering questions regarding sexuality, masturbation, abortion, birth control, menopause, and childbirth. Author and political activist Barbara Ehrenreich called it “a manifesto of medical populism.” Conservative groups called it obscene, because of course they did.
Norma spent the rest of her long life taking that women’s medical populism truth global — traveling to Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Europe, supporting women’s health movements all over the planet, also helping translate the book into 34 languages. Additionally, she taught at Harvard’s School of Public Health for over 20 years, working with the World Health Organization. Bottom line: Norma Swenson helped ordinary women everywhere understand that their bodies belonged to them.
Her daughter Sarah said that Norma was still asking this essential question on her death bed: “Why don’t women have bodily autonomy in the 21st century? We still don’t have control. Why is that?”
We know why. The patriarchy. And. We persist. All hail Norma Swenson, who died in 2025. Let’s keep up the good fight going until we do, all over, all women and girls everywhere. So! Now you know.
For more on Norma, here’s a link to her wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norma_Meras_Swenson