From objects to subjects : 20 Years of Feminist

Taller Salud began in 1979, when Carmen Guzman of Puerto Rico and Eugenia Acuna from Chile met in Puerto Rico. The two women had worked together in New York on the Committee against Women’s Sterilisation Abuse (in 1976, Puerto Rico had the highest sterilisation rate in the world). After long reflection and a visit from Judy Norsigian and Norma Swenson of the Boston Women’s Collective, we decided to form a collective of women, to work under the umbrella of health.

We chose health because we were convinced that health was and continues to be an effective instrument for uniting and organising women, and raising consciousness of our oppression. Because of our reproductive capacity and our gender, all women have suffered discrimination, and abusive and paternalistic treatment from the industrial-medical complex, in one way or the other. The list of examples include:

• unnecessary Hysterectomies, Mastectomies, Caesareans Episiotomies
• lack of access to adequate on ly for those who can afford it
• the "option" of abortion only for those who can afford it
• new reproductive technology
• massive campaigns to promote Hormone Replacement Therapy for menopause.

Working in the area of health opened up doors for us to explore very complex areas of women’s health, which up until then, was hardly deemed a feminist issue. Thus, areas such as reproductive health, occupational health and mental health became working themes in our collective.

Medicine as an institution has become more like an insturment of social control, affecting women’s lives very specifically. If we consider how often a woman seeks medical services during her natural life cycle, we would agree with our sisters of the Boston Collective that women’s lives and health are ’medicalised’.

Throughout our lives, we women have developed an extreme dependency on the medical system and its professionals, who are usually male or have been trained by men. This is so because we believe everything the doctor says as if he were God. We do not question him, disbelieve him or make demands of him, but rather, we do what he says. This is why the doctor-patient relationship is a paternatlistic one, based on inequality, power and, in many cases, abuse. This exercise of power lends itself to the practice of a medicine that is violent for women: one that is masculine ans patriarchal, accompanied by sexist treatment, and which does not take our specific needs into account, in the formulation and establishment of health policies, in the development of new technologies, in research, nor in the provision of services.

Curiously, we conducted our first workshops with the help of a priest, who lent us his church so we could speak to women about contraceptives and health.From the beginning, we incorporated health as a tool for feminist struggle.

In 1980 we started the self-help and self-examination movement in our country, training and informing ourselves on the techniques and offering workshops where we showed women how to examine their breasts, vulva and vagina, for themselves. This was empowering since the experience of vaginal self-examination gives women power in relation to their doctor or gynaecologist.

Some Milestones:

• First women’s group in Puerto Rico to commemorate November 25th as the International Day against Violence against Women.

• 1987: Organised the First National Workshop on Women and Health for grassroots women activists.

• 1989: Caused quite a stir at the First Congress on Women and Health in Puerto Rico, offending some professionals with our presentation, which included a demonstration of self-examination.

• A participant at one of our workshops in Curaçao went on to found the first Drop-In Centre for Victims of Domestic and Sexual Violence in that country.

• The Dominican Republic’s Colectivo Mujer y Salud (Women and Health Collective) was formed as a result of a workshop we offered there.
  
  

Currently, Taller Salud has two small offices (one in San Juan and the other in Loiza) and comprises seven members in the Collective and nine on the task force for implementing projects. Some of our past and current projects include:

• A project on the Prevention and Early Detection of Breast Cancer, which lasted four years and was motivated by the illness of one of our members.

• Recovering Time and Space (now in its sixth year), a project aimed at primary and secondary prevention of HIV in young and adult women.

• The Young Women’s Project for Peace and Development (now in its fifth year), which seeks to prevent pregnancies and domestic violence among pre-adolescents.

In addition to these projects, we continue to offer workshops on reproductive health, sexuality, vaginal health, self-esteem, the impact of (gender) violence on women’s physical and mental health, among others. We plan to incorporate other areas such as menopause, women and nutrition, and the more chronic diseases among women.

All of this work development and growth has brought us much satisfaction, but it has also caused us much pain. Like many other organisations, Taller Salud has faced many difficulties due to conflicts, from which we have learnt. Among the more contentious issues were: the excessive nationalistic sentiment that prevailed when we were deciding who should represent us at overseas events; the claim of "invisibility" in our work, on the part of our lesbian sisters; the overload of work on some more than others; internal power struggles due to differences in the vision and mission of our work; the implications of receiving funding and how this made us restructure the organisation to deal with this new reality; and the professionalisation of feminist work. And there will be more conflicts to come.

All of this is summarised in the greater and ongoing objective, which is: to create and maintain a structure that is not masculine (not rigid or hierarchical); one that does not stray from a feminist philosophy of work, space, and exchange, where respect for diversity and openness to change prevail.