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NEWS & LETTERS, October - November 2008
Woman as Reason
Review: Women of Color. . .
by Susan Van Gelder
Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement, by Jennifer Nelson (NYU Press, 2003).
On the cover photo from a 1979 demonstration, Latina and African-American women march with signs reading "No forced maternity/No forced sterilization," "Women must control the means of reproduction," "Keep abortion safe and legal." From extensive research, Dr. Jennifer Nelson, Director of the Sarah Isom Center for Women at the University of Mississippi, captures not only the activism of radical, Black and Latina feminists but as well the conceptual consequences of that activism.
CHANGING THE MOVEMENT
Even though this book is now five years old, Nelson's thesis that Black and Latina feminists of the 1970s transformed the mainstream battle for abortion rights into "a more complicated view of reproductive rights," is so important now, in our age of retrogression, that we must revisit it. She discusses: Redstockings, founded in 1967 by young, white middle-class women whose Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War movement experiences led them to radical feminism; Black women's critique of the Black Nationalist Movement; and the struggle by Latina feminists in the Young Lords Party (YLP) to include abortion rights, safe birth control and no forced sterilization in Party politics.
Redstockings insisted on free abortion on demand for all women: ". . . women needed both economic power and access to reproductive control . . ." (p. 24). In contrast to the National Organization for Women (NOW), which favored abortion law reform, Redstockings insisted on repeal of all restrictions because even under the 1970 New York State abortion law, "The women who are not stopped from having an abortion by the accusations of murder. . .are stopped by the remaining legal prohibitions, the terrible financial requirements and dangers of the 'criminal' alternative. . . evidence that the new law discriminates against the less well to do" (p. 49). Redstockings recognized that "poor women and women of color found themselves with problems that abortion could not solve" (p. 53).
Nelson concludes: "Black women seldom receive proper credit for the work they have done on reproductive rights. . .they offered a more complicated view of reproductive control than did either Black Nationalists or white women's liberationists. . .Politically active black women of the early 1970s . . . rejected the Black Nationalist argument that the birth of children to black women reinforced black masculinity. They also disagreed with the claim that the use of birth control and abortion by black women spelled genocide for the race. Moreover, they criticized abortion rights feminists for their narrow focus on legal abortion, insisting that feminists needed to bring reproductive abuses ...such as involuntary sterilization--to the forefront. . .white feminists needed to forge an inclusive reproductive rights agenda that synthesized anti-poverty politics, welfare rights, and access to reproductive and basic health care if they wanted to include women of color in their movement" (pp. 56-57).
Nelson presents numerous Black women's organizations of the 1960s and 1970s and their specific critique of the Black Nationalist position on birth control, genocide, abortion and child-bearing. The same women fought to reveal the widespread, devious ways U.S. government agencies managed to fund sterilization at ten times the amount for contraception and abortions.
In 1970, the death of a young Puerto Rican woman from an illegal abortion in the South Bronx crystallized "an original reproductive rights discourse combining both feminism and nationalism stridently put forth by women in the YLP"--a Puerto Rican nationalist organization. This broadened feminist concept of reproductive rights peaked with the formation of a socialist-feminist organization, Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse (CARASA) in 1977 to oppose the elimination of most Medicaid-funded abortions.
GAINING FREEDOM
Nelson shows that the struggles of women of color articulated what was needed for all women to gain reproductive freedom. As a Women's Liberationist since the mid-1970s, what Nelson's book shows me is how far backward we've come from the highpoint of the Women's Liberation Movement. While mainstream feminism still fights primarily for the necessity of abortion rights, the tale is told in how they fight. Nelson's history shows how women--particularly women of color--refused to allow the struggle for abortion rights to be waged as a single-issue struggle, or to pull it out of the struggle for freedom. Mainstream abortion rights groups ignore this revolutionary history at their peril.
My one critique is that Nelson, by choosing not to discuss how the New Right anti-abortion attacks "significantly influenced the politics of abortion and reproductive rights groups" (p. 10), overestimated the lasting impact of Black and Latina feminism on the battle for reproductive justice. Because mainstream feminism took the ground of the Right instead of what came from women of color, they narrowed the fight for abortion rights to a single issue and were outmaneuvered. Since Nelson's "final purpose" is to help contemporary feminists "build an inclusive movement for reproductive freedom [my emphasis] for all women," this book provides an essential foundation for today's unfinished struggles.
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