Anthropologist Emily Martin, author of The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction, reports that one of the motivations that led her to write the book was the prospect of sensitizing not only the scientific community, but also the general public, about of what a feminist analysis of science is. “I hoped to influence women’s self-perceptions of menstruation, menopause, pregnancy and childbirth,” she says.
The book was published in 1987 in the USA and this is its first translation into Portuguese. The author sought to study the cultural processes that affect women and that can be observed in the conceptions that they themselves have of their bodies. Martin interviewed 165 women of different ethnicities, ages and social classes in Baltimore, who lived in different contexts.