Spare Rib, The British Women’s Health Movement and the Empowerment of Misery

This article elucidates Spare Rib’s (1972–1993) value as a source for considering the UK women’s health movement of the 1970s and 1980s. It focusses on the magazine’s role in mediating and shaping its readers’ relationship to negative bodily experience, and outlines its distinctiveness within the broader feminist landscape of women’s health coverage. While aspects of the British women’s health movement have attracted scholarly attention, such as mental health activism and abortion campaigns, we still know relatively little about how non-activist British women interpreted their bodily experiences and health through the feminist lens offered from the early 1970s. The first part of the article focusses on Spare Rib’s contribution to the British women’s health movement. The second part of the article zooms in on a selection of letters that show how readers took up, and found empowerment, in modes of bodily disclosure fostered by the magazine.