A new understanding of humanity and feminism from the starting
point of breast health is the ultimate goal of Zillah Eisenstein's
political memoir of her family's experience with breast cancer. The
well-known feminist author argues that politics always needs the
personal, and that the personal is never enough on its own. Her
return to the personal side of the political combines the two for a
radicalized way of seeing, viewing, and knowing.
The author strives to bring together a critique of environmental
damage and the health of women's bodies, gain perspective on the
role race plays as a factor in breast cancers and in political
agendas, link prevention and treatment, and connect individual
support and political change.
Eisenstein was sixteen when her forty-five-year-old mother
successfully battled breast cancer. Her two sisters, Sarah and
Giah, were in their twenties when they were diagnosed, but neither
of them survived. She received her own diagnosis when she was
forty.
Despite her family history, however, Eisenstein rejects the
simple argument that genes are simply determining, rather than
liable to influence by external factors. She also questions the
dominance of the theory that breast cancer is caused by high
lifetime exposure to estrogen. Instead, she views breast cancer as
an environmental disease, best understood in terms of ecological,
racial, economic, and sexual influences on individual women. She
uses the term "manmade" to indicate not only industrial carcinogens
and other cultural causes, but also the male-dominated and -defined
scientific practices of research and treatment.
In response, Manmade Breast Cancers offers a retelling of the
meaning of breast cancerand a discussion of universal feminist
issues about the body. The author says she writes "to discover a
more just globe which will treasure the health of all of our
bodies". The emotional depth and intellectual breadth of her
argument adds new dimensions to how we understand breast
cancer.
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