For nearly a decade I have wanted, with a growing sense of urgency, to write something that would show what the women’s health movement has meant to the women of my generation, the generation of girls who came of age in the 1950s and 60s, became activists in the causes of others, then turned to help one another and, finally, to help ourselves. We grew up in New York, the Casbah of Algiers, the bantustans of South Africa, dusty Khartoum, provincial France, the North of England, and Old Delhi. Each of us carries, on her body and in her mind, a site of humiliation, a scar of betrayed.
