Robyn Rowland

In the early 1980s the new reproductive technologies available supposedly offered infertile women a chance to have children. However, there was growing concern that the determination of scientists to dominate nature, their disregard for women’s well-being, and the financial gains to be made from these technologies would together result in the increased modification of all women’s lives and the loss of even more control over our own bodies. Originally published in 1985, the essays in Man-Made Women describe the technologies being used and researched in the areas of in vitro fertilization (’test-tube babies’), sex-predetermination and embryo transfer at the time. They discuss the practical application of the technologies on an international scale and draw attention to the racist and classist assumptions on which they are based. There is also information about the international action that feminists had begun to counter these so-called benevolent and therapeutic technologies. Man-Made Women hoped to encourage women to start questioning the ‘miracle’ of these new reproductive technologies and to become involved in crucial decisions about their bodies and their lives.

In the early 1980s the new reproductive technologies available supposedly offered infertile women a chance to have children. However, there was growing concern that the determination of scientists to dominate nature, their disregard for women’s well-being, and the financial gains to be made from these technologies would together result in the increased modification of all women’s lives and the loss of even more control over our own bodies.Originally published in 1985, the essays in Man-Made Women describe the technologies being used and researched in the areas of in vitro fertilization (’test-tube babies’), sex-predetermination and embryo transfer at the time. They discuss the practical application of the technologies on an international scale and draw attention to the racist and classist assumptions on which they are based. There is also information about the international action that feminists had begun to counter these so-called benevolent and therapeutic technologies.Man-Made Women hoped to encourage women to start questioning the ‘miracle’ of these new reproductive technologies and to become involved in crucial decisions about their bodies and their lives.

‘Very few collections bring home so powerfully the vulnerability of individuals in the face of history’ writes Lisa Gorton of Robyn Rowland’s powerful poems recording the experiences of soldiers, nurses and doctors, women munitions workers, wives, mothers, composers, painters and poets during the Gallipolli War, 1915. It began with the Battle of Çanakkale and the defeat of the British navy. The land battle was hand-to-hand killing, the physical closeness of its soldiers unmasking the depersonalisation of the propaganda of war. Importantly, the book finishes with a poem on women’s friendship 100 years after the war, and the healing nature of love.