National Organization For Women Research Articles

From When Abortion Was a Crime to Abortion Is a Crime.

From When Abortion Was a Crime to Abortion Is a Crime Leslie J. Reagan (bio) I began researching the history of abortion in the United States when I was in Judy Leavitt’s Women and Health class at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Assigned a research paper, I suggested the 1960s abortion legalization movement. “That’s too recent,” Judy replied; she advised me to instead examine the medical literature for discussions of abortion. I went to the UW’s incredible medical library, where I used the Index-Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon General’s Office to identify journal articles about abortion and then tracked them down in dozens of regional and specialist medical journals held by the library.1 In this first-year graduate seminar paper, I discovered the persistent conversation among doctors about abortion and their own practices and techniques of performing what they called “therapeutic abortion”—induced when the physician believed that pregnancy threatened the life or health of the woman. The medical literature included patient case studies, collective data, the introduction of new instruments, and discussion about when a therapeutic abortion was required. At one point I switched to colonial history, but one sleepless night of tossing and turning told me that I was not done researching abortion. I made it my dissertation topic. The threat to the legality of abortion posed by Ronald Reagan’s election to the presidency in 1980, while I was a college student, had turned me into an activist, so the topic mattered to me. [End Page 11] But equally important, no one had investigated the hundred years during which abortion from conception on had been criminalized across the nation. What happened to women when early abortion was criminalized? What role did the medical profession play in the new legal landscape? How did the state enforce the new laws?2 I have been asked what it’s like to do research on a “controversial” topic. I don’t know that I ever thought much about whether focusing on abortion was controversial or dangerous. My advisors, Judy Leavitt and Linda Gordon, supported the project. And as an activist before becoming a graduate student, I had already managed my fears of public speaking; my anxieties focused more on writing. The one person who expressed opposition to this dissertation topic, renowned historian Gerda Lerner, was trying to protect me and other students of hers interested in studying sexuality from jeopardizing their future careers; the profession was far more conservative at that time, and many historians were suspicious and disrespectful of topics they considered trivial or not “real history.” She feared that the new field of women’s history and the UW Women’s History Program that she founded could be associated with sexuality and sexual nonconformity at a time when women’s history was already widely marginalized. Her anxiety resembled feminist Betty Friedan’s fear that the “purple menace”—i.e., lesbianism—would hurt the new feminist movement and her new organization, the National Organization for Women (NOW). But Gerda’s fears arose both from her knowledge of the male-dominated historical profession and from her experience as a Jew and a leftist in a rapidly Nazifying Austria: as a student in Vienna, after the 1938 Anschluss, she had been active in the student anti-Nazi resistance and was imprisoned for six weeks until she managed to escape to the United States. A decade later she had seen how the 1950s McCarthyist Red Scare destroyed many people’s careers (including her husband’s).3 But Gerda was no coward: despite her disapproval of sex-related topics, when I told her of my plan to pursue the history of abortion, she soon returned to her role as a historian and mentor, suggesting archives and sources. Though Gerda’s response unnerved me, I plunged ahead—with the support of my advisors Judy Leavitt and [End Page 12] Linda Gordon4 and the extraordinary group of women’s history graduate students at the University of Wisconsin. I was fortunate, too, to find support from the wider historical profession. Senior scholars whom I knew only as books, like Jim Mohr, Joan Brumberg, Allan Brandt, and Nancy Tomes...

Women-Focused Nonprofit Organizations and Their Use of Twitter During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Characterizing a Gendered Pandemic Through Information, Community, and Action.

This study investigates how gender-focused nonprofit organizations used Twitter to advocate on behalf of women and girls during the initial stage of the COVID-19 pandemic. We collected tweets from five nonprofits including Canadian Women's Foundation, Anova, UN Women, National Organization for Women, and Planned Parenthood. Through thematic analysis, we identified nine gender-related themes: safety, physical health, mental health, labor, economic situation, intersectional concerns, leadership, the role of gender in pandemic response and recovery plans, and supporting women's organizations. A subsequent content analysis revealed that women's safety, labor, and economic situation were the most prominent themes. It was also revealed that safety and intersectional concerns were raised by all organizations. We applied the theoretical framework of microblogging functions which distinguishes between information-, community-, and action-oriented tweets. Most of the tweets in our study were informational, much fewer were associated with calls to action and community engagement. Our analysis also revealed relationships between the microblogging functions and the tweets' content themes. We found that informational tweets addressed women's safety, physical health, economic situation, and the role of gender in pandemic response and recovery plans, while community-oriented tweets addressed women's labor, leadership, and supporting women's organizations. Finally, each microblogging function elicited different levels of user engagement on Twitter, with the community-oriented function receiving the largest number of "likes" compared with the information- and action-oriented functions. Our study adds to the growing body of research on social media use by feminist groups and provides novel theoretical insights by expanding the microblogging framework.

They Didn't See Us Coming: The Hidden History of Feminism in the Nineties

They Didn't See Us Coming: The Hidden History of Feminism in the Nineties

Survive, Revive, Thrive: Chapter 8: Trade Winds

Aging is not lost youth, but a new stage of opportunity and strength. - Betty Friedan, American feminist, 1921-2006 (Cofounder of the National Organization for Women) Where Are We Going? If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable. - Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Roman statesman, 4 BC-65 AD The most challenging aspect of creating a monthly column is to try to balance mission (i.e., long-term strategy), contemporary events (i.e., things happening now), and the urgent (i.e., news you need to know). This column will have a bit of all three. I chose “trade winds” as the theme for this article. As every sailor knows, you must tack to where the wind is, not where you want it to be. I know that every student and Young Professional is waiting for the wind to align with their path. Frankly, I cannot promise that will happen anytime soon, but I can promise it will happen. To borrow a phrase, “patience or pivot” is on everyone’s mind right now. What I would point out is that we have already done both; we have been patient and we have pivoted. I believe that our pivot has been to see the strength and missions of our industry as never before. This is not just in terms of the financial recovery that will significantly enhance activity across all sectors of our industry, but also the impact of having secure and cost-effective energy to power that economy and to provide so many direct benefits to society. My goal as SPE President is to ensure that every initiative that can be considered is considered, that every member feels valued, that their voice is heard, and most of all, that we collectively and proactively work to build the future of our industry. As an adolescent, a family member once told me that “sentimentality is the worst investment advisor.” Obviously, this advice was given as I was about to invest in something stupid and my family member used it as a moment to educate me. I confess it took a while to sink in, but it is true. We must be realistic about the value generated by our investments in life (e.g., time, education, personal relationships, and of course, money). SPE must make investments to remain relevant, and frankly, I need your support to ensure those investments are both wise and appropriate.

Is Protesting Synonymous with Racketeering? Rico's Expansive Reach Post-Now V. Scheidler

This article examines how the Supreme Court’s decision in National Organization for Women v. Scheidler—which held that, under the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, a racketeering enterprise does not need to have an economic motive to violate the Act—has the potential to allow protest activity to be classified as a predicate act. This issue presents a clash between white collar crime and Constitutional protections that remains timely today as there has been a call in the last year for RICO charges to be brought against protesters involved with Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa. This article recommends that protest activity should be clearly defined as not being a predicate offense under the RICO Act unless and until the activity crosses a predetermined threshold where the conduct can no longer be protected by the First Amendment.

Fighting for NOW: Diversity and Discord in the National Organization for Women

Fighting for NOW: Diversity and Discord in the National Organization for Women

THE NATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR WOMEN AND THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY IN REAGAN'S AMERICA

AbstractThis article explores the emergence of women in the United States as a liberal voting group in the 1980s and the impact of this development on the power of liberalism, amid the Reagan revolution – an era often viewed as the apogee of conservatism. As the Republican party shifted in a more conservative direction in the 1980s, gender started to correlate with partisan preference/election outcomes in enough contests to give credence to the belief that women were becoming a decidedly liberal voting bloc. Contemporaneously, the equality-seeking movements of the 1960s and 1970s began institutionalizing their operations and exploiting these demographic shifts, becoming more entrenched than ever within the internal politics of the Democratic party. The National Organization for Women (NOW), the largest liberal women's group, proved to be particularly successful in this respect. Therefore, by presenting substantial archival evidence that liberal politicians and organizations remained a dynamic political force during the 1980s, this article details the growing organizational prowess of NOW and examines how liberals resisted the conservative challenge to fashion a political approach suited to the ‘Reagan Era’.

‘Feminists for media rights’: a case study in television activism

In 1977 Feminists for Media Rights, of central Pennsylvania, announced that it had achieved ‘victory’ by reaching an agreement with the largest television station in the area, WGAL. The agreement promised new programs for women, a women’s advisory committee, and a women’s program director. This article offers a critical assessment of this ‘victory’. It takes a long view of a challenge to a station’s license, including negotiations, petitions, agreements, and the implementation of agreements, not simply an isolated petition or agreement, to dispel notions of a singular victory or loss. On the one hand, FMR was justifiably pleased with WGAL’s concessions: the station would produce a program about the Lancaster Women’s Center, which was founded by radical feminists in Lancaster and broadcast a new, weekly women’s public affairs show. On the other hand, while FMR had sought to create a feminist space on television, the station ultimately offered not feminist control, but new ‘women’s’ programming, which was often quite traditional. The negotiations between FMR and WGAL shows that the feminist FCC strategy, initiated by the National Organization for Women, was more radical than previous accounts allow: feminists used the ‘petition to deny’ as a legal tool for trying to establish a feminist space on television. The FCC strategy was not simply reformist.

‘Feminists for Media Rights’: A Case Study in Television Activism

In 1977, Feminists for Media Rights, of central Pennsylvania, announced that it had achieved ‘victory’ by reaching an agreement with the largest television station in the area, WGAL. The agreement promised new programs for women, a women’s advisory committee and a women’s program director. This article offers a critical assessment of this ‘victory’. It takes a long view of a challenge to a station’s license, including negotiations, petitions, agreements and the implementation of agreements, not simply an isolated petition or agreement, to dispel notions of a singular victory or loss. On one hand, FMR was justifiably pleased with WGAL’s concessions: the station would produce a program about the Lancaster Women’s Center, which was founded by radical feminists in Lancaster and broadcast a new, weekly women’s public affairs show. On the other hand, while FMR had sought to create a feminist space on television, the station ultimately offered not feminist control, but new ‘women’s’ programming, which was often quite traditional. The negotiations between FMR and WGAL shows that the feminist FCC strategy, initiated by the National Organization for Women, was more radical than previous accounts allow: feminists used the ‘petition to deny’ as a legal tool for trying to establish a feminist space on television. The FCC strategy was not simply reformist.

Women Politicking Politely: Advancing Feminism in the 1960s and 1970s

Kimberly Wilmot Voss describes the contributions of lesser-known women to the women's rights movement and the second-wave feminist movement during its first decades. She focuses on six women who used their jobs in government and journalism to promote the status of women in the public sphere. Ideologically moderate, and to avoid jeopardizing their positions in the civil service and news organizations that employed them, they acted subtly behind the scenes. Unlike radical icons—such as Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, and Gloria Steinem—who gained fame through their place in the movement and politics, the women Voss studies were rarely recognized. Catherine East, the executive secretary of the Interdepartmental Committee on the Status of Women and the Citizens' Advisory Council on the Status of Women, held positions in every presidential commission on women in the 1960s and 1970s. A founder of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and a leader at the United Nations International Women's Year Conference in Mexico City in 1975, she also helped push the equal rights amendment through Congress.

Feminizm amerykański trzeciej fali – zmiana i kontynuacja

The history of American women fighting for equal rights dates back to the 18th century, when in Boston, in 1770, they voiced the demand that the status of women be changed. Abigail Adams, Sarah Grimke, Angelina Grimke and Frances Wright are considered to have pioneered American feminism. An organized suffrage movement is assumed to have originated at the convention Elizabeth Stanton organized in Seneca Falls in 1848. This convention passed a Declaration of Sentiments, which criticized the American Declaration of Independence as it excluded women. The most prominent success achieved in this period was the US Congress passing the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution granting women the right to vote. The 1960s saw the second wave of feminism, resulting from disappointment with the hitherto promotion of equality. The second-wave feminists claimed that the legal reforms did not provide women with the changes they expected. As feminists voiced the need to feminize the world, they struggled for social customs to change and gender stereotypes to be abandoned. They criticized the patriarchal model of American society, blaming this model for reducing the social role of women to that of a mother, wife and housewife. They pointed to patriarchal ideology, rather than nature, as the source of the inequality of sexes. The leading representatives of the second wave of feminism were Betty Friedan (who founded the National Organization for Women), Kate Millet (who wrote Sexual Politics), and Shulamith Firestone (the author of The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution). The 1990s came to be called the third wave of feminism, characterized by multiple cultures, ethnic identities, races and religions, thereby becoming a heterogenic movement. The third-wave feminists, Rebecca Walker and Bell Hooks, represented groups of women who had formerly been denied the right to join the movement, for example due to racial discrimination. They believed that there was not one ‘common interest of all women’ but called for leaving no group out in the fight for the equality of women’s rights. They asked that the process of women’s emancipation that began with the first wave embrace and approve of the diversity of the multiethnic American society.

MOW to NOW: Black Feminism Resets the Chronology of the Founding of Modern Feminism

736 Feminist Studies 44, no. 3. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Carol Giardina MOW to NOW: Black Feminism Resets the Chronology of the Founding of Modern Feminism The first meeting of feminist protest in the 1960s was called to order by Dorothy Height, the president of the 800,000-member National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), in Washington, DC, on August 29, 1963. It was the day after the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (MOW).1 “We could hardly believe that after all we were doing in the Civil Rights Movement,” Height recalls, “the women came to feel that they were getting a kind of runaround” as they sought and were denied fair representation in the march because of their sex.2 “I was determined,” she said in her 2003 memoir, “to bring wise women together to learn and gather strength from the experience.”3 As “women talked freely of their concern about women’s participation,” Height observed, “we began to realize that if we did not . . . demand our rights, we were not going to get them. The women became much more aware and much more aggressive in facing up to sexism in our dealings with 1. Dorothy Height, Open Wide the Freedom Gates: A Memoir (New York: Public Affairs, 2003), 146. 2. Dorothy Height, “We Wanted the Voice of a Woman to Be Heard,” in Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement, ed. Bettye Collier-Thomas and V. P. Franklin (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 88. 3. Height, Open Wide, 146. Carol Giardina 737 the male leadership in the movement.”4 “That moment,” Height recalled, “was vital to awakening the women’s movement.”5 Black women’s fight for representation in the MOW appears narrowly framed in scholarly literature as a specific and isolated reaction to the sexism of male MOW planners. I argue, however, that the campaign of feminist protest meetings surrounding the MOW—and the political lessons that emerged—was a starting point in the chronology of the rebirth years of feminist upheaval in the 1960s. Why? Because the lessons of that campaign provided the crucial conceptual model of an “NAACP for women” that would be consciously and purposely adopted by the newly forming National Organization for Women (NOW). Together with Height, Anna Arnold Hedgeman, the only woman on the MOW planning committee, and longtime co-conspirator Pauli Murray, who spearheaded the MOW protests, were critical actors in NOW’s formation and brought the model to NOW’s more well-known white organizers. This model, and the Black women who developed it, opened the trajectory that led to NOW’s establishment in 1966, the first feminist organization of the decade. Black scholar activist Bernice Johnson Reagon called the Civil Rights Movement the “borning” struggle of its time.6 By the early 1960s, the impact of this phase of civil rights mobilization was felt nationwide from lunch counters in small towns to Congress and the Supreme Court. Since at least the 1955–1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott, many thousands of African American women had been protesting, organizing, staging sit-ins and jail-ins, writing treatises, and giving speeches for Black civil rights. Although some white women did participate in the Civil Rights Movement, there were far fewer of them than African American women. Because of African American women’s collective confrontation with white supremacy, more of them were positioned to grasp the systemic nature of male supremacy and the need to fight it collectively. They understood sexism sooner than most white women because they 4. Height, “We Wanted the Voice,” 88–89. 5. Height, Open Wide, 145. 6. Mary King, Casey Hayden, Jean Wheeler Smith, Joyce Ladner, Prathia Hall, Kathie Sarachild, Michael Thelwell, and Bernice Johnson Reagon, “SNCC Women and the Stirrings of Feminism,” in A Circle of Trust: Remembering SNCC, ed. Cheryl Lynn Greenberg (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 150. 738 Carol Giardina had already learned the operations of power and exploitation. They were best prepared to challenge female oppression, as were the white women who participated in the Civil Rights Movement. After all, if the established order could be pushed back when it...

MOW to NOW: Black Feminism Resets the Chronology of the Founding of Modern Feminism

736 Feminist Studies 44, no. 3. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Carol Giardina MOW to NOW: Black Feminism Resets the Chronology of the Founding of Modern Feminism The first meeting of feminist protest in the 1960s was called to order by Dorothy Height, the president of the 800,000-member National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), in Washington, DC, on August 29, 1963. It was the day after the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (MOW).1 “We could hardly believe that after all we were doing in the Civil Rights Movement,” Height recalls, “the women came to feel that they were getting a kind of runaround” as they sought and were denied fair representation in the march because of their sex.2 “I was determined,” she said in her 2003 memoir, “to bring wise women together to learn and gather strength from the experience.”3 As “women talked freely of their concern about women’s participation,” Height observed, “we began to realize that if we did not . . . demand our rights, we were not going to get them. The women became much more aware and much more aggressive in facing up to sexism in our dealings with 1. Dorothy Height, Open Wide the Freedom Gates: A Memoir (New York: Public Affairs, 2003), 146. 2. Dorothy Height, “We Wanted the Voice of a Woman to Be Heard,” in Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement, ed. Bettye Collier-Thomas and V. P. Franklin (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 88. 3. Height, Open Wide, 146. Carol Giardina 737 the male leadership in the movement.”4 “That moment,” Height recalled, “was vital to awakening the women’s movement.”5 Black women’s fight for representation in the MOW appears narrowly framed in scholarly literature as a specific and isolated reaction to the sexism of male MOW planners. I argue, however, that the campaign of feminist protest meetings surrounding the MOW—and the political lessons that emerged—was a starting point in the chronology of the rebirth years of feminist upheaval in the 1960s. Why? Because the lessons of that campaign provided the crucial conceptual model of an “NAACP for women” that would be consciously and purposely adopted by the newly forming National Organization for Women (NOW). Together with Height, Anna Arnold Hedgeman, the only woman on the MOW planning committee, and longtime co-conspirator Pauli Murray, who spearheaded the MOW protests, were critical actors in NOW’s formation and brought the model to NOW’s more well-known white organizers. This model, and the Black women who developed it, opened the trajectory that led to NOW’s establishment in 1966, the first feminist organization of the decade. Black scholar activist Bernice Johnson Reagon called the Civil Rights Movement the “borning” struggle of its time.6 By the early 1960s, the impact of this phase of civil rights mobilization was felt nationwide from lunch counters in small towns to Congress and the Supreme Court. Since at least the 1955–1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott, many thousands of African American women had been protesting, organizing, staging sit-ins and jail-ins, writing treatises, and giving speeches for Black civil rights. Although some white women did participate in the Civil Rights Movement, there were far fewer of them than African American women. Because of African American women’s collective confrontation with white supremacy, more of them were positioned to grasp the systemic nature of male supremacy and the need to fight it collectively. They understood sexism sooner than most white women because they 4. Height, “We Wanted the Voice,” 88–89. 5. Height, Open Wide, 145. 6. Mary King, Casey Hayden, Jean Wheeler Smith, Joyce Ladner, Prathia Hall, Kathie Sarachild, Michael Thelwell, and Bernice Johnson Reagon, “SNCC Women and the Stirrings of Feminism,” in A Circle of Trust: Remembering SNCC, ed. Cheryl Lynn Greenberg (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 150. 738 Carol Giardina had already learned the operations of power and exploitation. They were best prepared to challenge female oppression, as were the white women who participated in the Civil Rights Movement. After all, if the established order could be pushed back when it...

Part of Our Lives: A People's History of the American Public Library by Wayne A. Wiegand

Reviewed by: Part of Our Lives: A People's History of the American Public Library by Wayne A. Wiegand Dawson Barrett PART OF OUR LIVES: A People's History of the American Public Library. By Wayne A. Wiegand. New York: Oxford University Press. 2015. In the spirit of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, Wayne A. Wiegand draws on library records, newspaper accounts, and the professional journals of librarians to present the public library as a contested space across lines of race, gender, class, sexuality, and age. Wiegand begins with Benjamin Franklin's establishment of the Library Company of Philadelphia in 1732, which Franklin hoped would inform and empower a community of "self-made" colonial men (and which ultimately offered its assistance to the writers of the U.S. Constitution). In what became a recurring theme among [End Page 126] subsequent librarians, Franklin rejected fiction, instead preferring to collect books that offered so-called "useful knowledge." This judgment, on both books and their readers, proved elitist and sexist, and it was overruled, again and again, by popular demand. After all, as Wiegand notes, novels were empowering companions for different subsets of library users, including women, people of color, youth, and the working classes. As a study of libraries (and librarians, as their gatekeepers), Part of Our Lives is largely a history of clashes over censorship and First Amendment rights—and over the uses of community spaces more broadly. American libraries have provided public platforms for the Humane Society, Amnesty International, and the National Organization for Women, as well as for neo-Nazis (and groups protesting against them). At various points in U.S. history, librarians have banned Mark Twain, Harry Potter, and suspected communist sympathizers—and proudly defended the availability of Mein Kampf. In more recent decades, libraries across the country have celebrated "Banned Books Week" to draw attention to censorship debates and their history—a history that Wiegand traces through a series of cultural, political, and technological changes. In Part of Our Lives, the central questions that frame the history of American public libraries ask which public(s) they should serve—and how. In the Jim Crow South, for example, libraries enforced racial segregation and promoted pro-Confederate historical narratives. Librarians who spoke out against segregation were fired or threatened, and anti-racist librarians struggled at various points even to identify and stock titles that featured people of color without negative racial stereotypes. Unquestionably, libraries, like many other public institutions, perpetuated white supremacy both directly and indirectly, but they also served as spaces of resistance to it. In addition to a powerful anecdote that Wiegand relays about the author Richard Wright, public libraries offered meeting spaces for civil rights organizations, were the targets of civil rights protest campaigns, and, today, serve as memorials to those struggles. Libraries have similarly reflected the country's relationship to poverty, including debates over whether or not to keep them open late enough to be accessible to workers, public disgust at libraries'openness to homeless populations, and attempts to open new branches and reach rural areas with bookmobiles. Library funding was a key component of both the New Deal of the 1930s and the War on Poverty of the 1960s, and cutting it has been a frequent topic of policy and discussion in the post-1960s period. Part of Our Lives is a love letter to U.S. libraries, warts and all, and a helpful study in both the hopeful promises and the ugly failures of the American democratic experiment. Appropriately, children and teenagers have been central to the missions of public libraries for the last century. Libraries, Wiegand argues, were, collectively, one of the arenas in which U.S. history was decided. The nation's investment (or lack thereof) in the next generation through libraries will make them equally important to its future. Dawson Barrett Del Mar College Copyright © 2018 Mid-America American Studies Association

Should We Stay or Should We Go? Local and National Factionalism in the National Organization for Women

While the National Organization for Women (NOW) has endured over time, it has faced significant internal factionalism. In this article, I ask why some of these factions resulted in schisms, while other factions persisted in NOW over time. This is a critical question for understanding how organizational location and factional collective identities combine to produce different outcomes when internal conflict breaks out. My analysis of interview, archival, and secondary data indicates that organizational location influences factions’ independent collective identities, shaping what they want and their perceptions of opportunities to change their organization. Compared to national level factions, local factions also lack the ability to use NOW’s hierarchical structure to their advantage in their effort to stay. This sheds lights on the distinct patterns of factionalism and schism in formalized groups.

The Family Politics of the Federation of South African Women: A History of Public Motherhood in Women’s Antiracist Activism: Winner of the 2017 Catharine Stimpson Prize for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship

AbstractThis article reexamines the roots of the Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW), the first national organization of women from all state-defined racial groups united against apartheid, founded in 1954. It argues that the deep history of public motherhood in southern Africa was what made FEDSAW possible: biological and symbolic motherhood had long been associated with responsibility for public social life in the region. Moreover, the article demonstrates that the first half of the twentieth century represented a time of profound transformation in the ways that women in southern Africa talked about and experienced motherhood. The influences of both missionary Christianity and international socialism encouraged women to claim that long-standing regional cultural forms of public engagements were an extension of private maternal responsibilities. African women talked about their public activism as emanating from an idealized private sphere to make themselves legible as social actors, both to agents...

Working in the Black Man's Shadow: Mary Church Terrell and Anna Arnold Hedgeman's Fight Against Jim Crow

Working in the Black Man's Shadow:Mary Church Terrell and Anna Arnold Hedgeman's Fight Against Jim Crow Julie de Chantal (bio) Joan Quigley. Just Another Southern Town: Mary Church Terrell and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Nation's Capital. New York: Oxford University Press. 2016. 358 pp. Selected bibliography, notes on sources, notes, and index. $29.99. Jennifer Scanlon. Until There Is Justice: The Life of Anna Arnold Hedgeman. New York: Oxford University Press. 2016. 262 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, notes, and index. $34.95. In 2016, Joan Quigley and Jennifer Scanlon published biographies of civil rights activist Mary Church Terrell and Anna Arnold Hedgeman, respectively, with Oxford University Press. These monographs are not a first foray into the genre for either author. In 2009, Scanlon, Interim Dean for Academic Affairs and Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at Bowdoin College, published Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown, the first biography of the editor of Cosmopolitan magazine. That same year, lawyer, journalist, and recipient of the J. Anthony Lukas Works-in-Progress Award, Joan Quigley, published The Day the Earth Caved In: An American Mining Tragedy, telling of the events surrounding the coal mine fire in Centralia, Pennsylvania. Both authors remain true to their respective styles for their current publications; Scanlon digs deep into Hedgeman's life to understand her trajectory and achievements, and Quigley uses Terrell as a point of entry to examine the struggle for desegregation in the nation's capital. Practitioners of African American women's history, in particular, have used biographies to fill in the gaps where often primary sources were lacking. These personal stories serve as an entry point into the complex history of activists who faced the double burden of being both black and women. While Mary Church Terrell has been the subject of several biographies and studies in the past, Anna Arnold Hedgeman remained an elusive figure of the civil rights narrative, and for cause. As Scanlon astutely points out in Until There Is Justice, Hedgeman's contributions to the Civil Rights Movements were obscured by [End Page 491] the achievements of her male counterparts—A. Philip Randolph and Martin Luther King Jr., among others. Scanlon's important monograph is long overdue and fills in the gap left by the absence of Hedgeman in the literature. Through the lives of their subjects, each of these books increases our understanding of black women's activism from both a local and a transnational perspective, and each challenges the ways in which we include them in the Civil Rights Movement's narrative. Until There Is Justice follows Hedgeman from her youth in Minnesota to her first experience as an educator in rural Mississippi and on through her work for the YWCA, her political activism in the nation's capital, and her work with the women's movement. Throughout the monograph, Scanlon grapples with a question long considered but often avoided in the field: how did black women confront gender discrimination within the Civil Rights Movement? Furthermore, she examines how Hedgeman's several identities—as religious practitioner, political activist, civil rights leader, social worker, policymaker, educator, and wife—informed her leadership and helped her develop such a broad social justice agenda. We learn in Scanlon's book that Hedgeman played a critical role in the long Civil Rights Movement. She was instrumental in the creation of the Fair Employment Practices Commission, organized the March for Jobs and Justice, and coordinated efforts for the March on Washington. A proponent of Social Christianity, her work also extended to the National Council of Churches and to the General Commission on Religion and Race. She organized the African American vote during her time as a Democratic Party strategist for the 1948 election, and she joined the Health and Human Services Department after World War II. In the 1960s, she came together with other civil rights and women's rights leaders to form the National Organization for Women (NOW). While much of Hedgeman's work met with success, often new challenges brought with them a small amount of frustration and disappointment. As a black leader, she was tasked to do more with fewer resources...

Abortion Politics, Mass Media, and Social Movements in America. By Deana A. Rohlinger. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. xii+173. $85.00.

<i>Abortion Politics, Mass Media, and Social Movements in America</i>. By Deana A. Rohlinger. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. xii+173. $85.00.

Sexual Violence and the US Military: Feminism, US Empire, and the Failure of Liberal Equality

This article considers the ways in which military women’s rights campaigns have linked the “epidemic” of sexual violence to the struggle for military women’s equality. I analyze the approaches of the National Organization of Women (NOW) and Service Women’s Action Network (SWAN) in order to trace a partial history of military women’s rights organizations built on liberal feminist ideals. I argue that understanding military sexual violence as a result of women’s inequality does nothing to explain sexual violence against men, as well as occludes global victims of US sexual and imperial violence. Ultimately, I argue that organizations such as SWAN are emblematic of a neoliberal feminist approach that problematically prioritizes women’s equal access to the military over a critique of US militarism.

Making Rights Work: Legal Mobilization at the Agency Level

This article discusses how McCann's theory on legal mobilization and social change is generalizable to the legal decisions of agencies. I demonstrate how the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) routinely delayed and denied Title VII employment rights on the basis of sex and how this resulted in the formation of the National Organization for Women (NOW) to ensure that the sex provision of Title VII was enforced. The article also discusses the influence of NOW in shaping the first years of Title VII law and the organization's role in reversing EEOC decisions denying rights under the sex provision of the law.