Meet Wendy Sanford

I  grew up in an upper middle class white suburban family in Princeton, New Jersey, and attended private schools throughout my life.  During the socially turbulent time of the 1970’s, I became a feminist, a lesbian, and a Quaker. A founding member of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, I co-authored and edited many versions of the women’s health and sexuality classic, Our Bodies, Ourselves, from 1973 to 2011.

 

In seminary at Harvard Divinity School in the 1980’s, I began to read works by women of color as ”devotional reading,” to remedy my previous exclusive exposure to white and mostly male authors. I served for nearly a decade in campus ministry in the Boston area. In my 50s, I began to reckon with my own white skin and the benefits that came to me through being white. In 2003, I earned an MFA in Writing from Vermont College. I live in Cambridge, MA, with Polly Attwood, my spouse of 42 years and our much beloved small border-collie mix named Rory. I am immensely grateful to Mary Norman as a friend and a partner in creating the book These Walls Between Us.

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Here are my recent interviews for Our Bodies Ourselves from The Guardian and BBC.

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