Category Archives: Women's history

Blog for Choice 2011

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As you can see from the graphic at left, the annual Blog for Choice Day was yesterday.   Since today is the actual 38th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, I figured, better late than not at all!  This year’s question, Given the anti-choice gains in the states and Congress, are you concerned about choice in 2011?

I don’t have much to add to other bloggers’ answer other than echo the overall consensus, Yes, I’m very concerned!

My worries extend beyond the choice of abortion — access to birth control also appears threatened, not so much by new laws, but more so because of economics.   The Republican majority in the House will not be able to revoke the health care law, at least not while President Obama is in the White House and the Democratic party still controls the Senate.  Yet, the existing health care law isn’t really adequate when it comes to contraceptive coverage.  Also, while many reproductive rights activists rightly celebrated making emergency contraception available over-the-counter (OTC), this might actually make things worse for some women because OTC products are not covered by private insurance plans or Medicaid.  Thus, while the rise of what pharmacy historicans call “OTCness” over the past two decades has weakened the boundary between patients and the health care professionals, it has done nothing to address the economic inequalities in the United States that continue to pose an insurmountable barrier to those without the means to pay for the products of this self-care revolution.

AHA Report Part 3: Digital History

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Today’s post concludes my reflections on the AHA 2011 meeting.  As a point of departure, I’ll start with Dan Cohen’s annual report/rant on the dearth of digital sessions at the meeting:

“Evidently we historians will just keep on doing what we’re doing how we’re doing it until it seems truly anachronistic. Just one of the main AHA panels, out of nearly three hundred, covers digital matters; perhaps another will touch on digital methods. By my count there are another six digital sessions overall, but these other sessions are put on by affiliate societies or were added by the program committee during lunches or other break times (that is, there were almost no digital panels proposed by historians attending the meeting). Incredibly, there are actually fewer digital sessions at the 2011 annual meeting than in prior years. Because clearly this digital thing is a flash in the pan.”

I agree wholeheartedly with Dan — we are way behind our colleagues in literature on this account.  Nevertheless, I did get something out of the sessions I attended.

First, I’ll mention one that Dan neglected to list — Documenting Social History: The Story of Three Archives.  (this turned out to be a story of two archives because the U.S. Navy Seabee Museum would not provide travel funds for Lara Godbille to attend the meeting!) To be fair, the term digital history wasn’t in the session title, but Wendy Chmielewski‘s paper was titled “Digitizing Women’s History.”   Poor Wendy — the Marriott forgot to provide a computer and projector for her presentation!  Also, there was no wireless in the hotel’s sessions rooms (just in the lobby and second floor) so no live tweeting for me.  Much of what I heard from her talk was familiar to me — she listed a variety of online sources for women’s history, including Archive Grid,  Discovering Women’s History Online, the Genesis project that is a megasite for collections on women’s history in the United Kingdom, and the section on women’s history in the Library of Congress’ American Memory collection.  The most surprising observation she made was that guide to women’s history collections compiled by Andrea Hinding in the late 1970s is still the most comprehensive source for archival and manuscript collections.  [I find this difficult to believe now that Worldcat includes archival material].

The talk by Ellen Shea from the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, although not specifically on digital sources, did mention their Blogs: Capturing Women’s Voices project.   The mission of this project is “to capture the voices of women whose points of view might not be found elsewhere, as well as to document the use of blogs and other forms of web publishing by American women in the early 21st century, the Schlesinger Library has selected and archived a sample of approximately 20 blogs. These blogs illuminate the lives of African-American and Latina women, lesbians, and women grappling with health and reproductive issues, and typically reflect their engagement with politics, their personal lives and philosophies, and their work lives.”

The library also has archived blogs by organizations whose collections are housed at the library, including the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective.

All of these blogs are searchable.  The library is also experimenting with data mining to make these collections more useful to scholars.

[while we’re on the subject of women’s blogs — I have to give a plug for the roundtable “Women Gone Wild,” starring Tenured Radical, Historiann, Jennifer Ho, May Friedman, Marilee Lindemann and Rachel Leow, in the Winter 2011 issue of the Journal of Women’s History.  It might have featured yours truly had I gotten my act together in time, but alas, was too busy working on other stuff to get a proposal submitted.]

As to sources that were not born digital, the enormous cost of digitization is still a barrier — Shea said that the Schlesinger doesn’t even have a budget line for these projects.  Both presenters concluded that the main result of digitization revolution will not be more archival material online: rather,  special collections and archives of the traditional kind (i.e. paper, books, and other stuff that needs to be examined in person) will be what makes libraries of the future distinctive.

The future of libraries was also the main issue addressed in the session on Critical issues in Bibliography and Libraries in the Digital Age. I’m really glad I attended this instead of the session on Google ngrams (which was not in the room indicated in the digital addendum to the conference program — did anyone out there ever find it?) because I got a lot out of it.  Matthew Shaw’s presentation centered around the “Growing Knowledge” exhibit at the British Library, which shows the way that the digital revolution is changing historical research, among other things.  His main point was that the traditional role of libraries — to organize and catalog information, establish relationships among sources, etc. — are at the center of the so-called digital revolution.  He used the metaphor of a library as “an airport for books or a convention center of the mind.”  Libraries will be responsible for preservation of digital materials, but more importantly, creating ways for researchers to find, filter, assess, and assemble relevant information from these sources.

Dominique Daniel and Steven Wise both addressed issues of digital literacy and the critical role that librarians/information specialists play in teaching “Generation Y” how to use both digital and analog sources properly (amen to that!)   The key point I got from both presentations: historians recognize a need for information literacy but are doing little to address it.  Librarians, on the other hand, are doing all sorts of great things with media literacy but are not necessarily addressing the issues particular to the discipline of history (unless, like Wise, they are both librarians and history instructors).  There needs to be more collaboration between historians and librarians around issues of media literacy — this goes beyond just showing students how to use databases and other e-resources and tools.

I’m not really sure what the answer is to getting more historians involved in digital history.  Speaking only for myself, the main reason I got into it was so I could introduce graduate students in public history to various tools and methods that are revolutionizing their field.  I do some stuff on information literacy in the historical methods class.  Oh yeah, and the self-promotion on this blog and on Twitter has brought me in contact with scholars I might not have met otherwise.  Yet, I’m far from a master of this subject and find it difficult to find time to keep up with everything that’s happening.  I would guess that I’m not alone here.  Thoughts?

AHA Report Part 2: Women’s History edition

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I’m finally getting around to writing part 2 of my AHA report.  The first women’s history session I attended was

Popular and Profane: Race, Gender, and Regionalism in Peyton Place

Now, I’ve never read this novel but I have read Jennifer Scanlon’s biography of Helen Gurley Brown, Bad Girls Go Everywhere,  so was especially interested in hearing her paper.  So, I’m going to limit my comments to her paper because I don’t feel qualified to comment on the others.  Scanlon’s main point is that both Peyton Place and Sex and the Single Girl show how women were able to move outside the 1950s feminine ideal (and by 1950s, she means “long 1950s” — i.e. including the early 1960s depicted in Mad Men).  She uses both books in a course on bad girls in the 1950s.  She and other panelists found that many women from the 1950s identified with the central characters of these books because they didn’t feel they fit the mold of 1950s femininity.  These books were also popular because they show female sexual agency and women entering the world of men.  Scanlon concluded that we need to rethink where feminism came from, include the voices of working, non-college educated women like Gurley Brown in challenging the feminine mystique.  Scanlon is looking for examples of films that “tamed” the bad girls of the 1950s.  I throw this out there for film historians/studies folks to give her some ideas.

Another session I found extremely useful was

The Challenges and Opportunities of Teaching Women’s History

I offered to blog about this to keep the dialogue going (and of course gave everyone the wrong URL).  Here are some major talking points:

Ana Rosas discussed how she incorporates her activism into the classrooom.  She also warned of the dangers of universalizing women’s experiences.

Sara Scalenghe described the challenges of teaching about women in the Middle East and how she has to overcome her students’ Islamaphobia and the assumption that things are wonderful for women in the modern U.S.

Mary Kelley says she begins her classes by throwing out statistics that indicate in a concrete way the progress that has been made for women since the 1960s (she uses Gail Collins’ book When Everything Changed as a point of departure), and also describes what remains to be done.  She hopes to motivate students to be activists to continue work on behalf of women’s rights.

Katherine Hijar described the challenges of teaching her conservative, evangelical students and how she attempts to correct the misappropriation of history by Sarah Palin and other far right political figures.  She identified three discursive trends:

1. a belligerent model of civic engagement (NB: this was the same day as the Arizona shootings/assassination attempt on Rep. Gabriel Giffords — I didn’t find this out until later in the day).

2. history means histories of great men, usually political and military leaders

3. the ongoing political instability may make extreme points of view appealing to Americans looking for certainty — and feeds much of the racist, sexist, and classist ideology circulating in contemporary American society.

She argued that Palin’s rise represents these trends as well as the “political mobilization of ignorance.”  She presents a model of conservative Christian feminism that is appealing to women and non-threatening to men.  Her book, America by Heart, employs a selective and often inaccurate history of frontier women to support her “Momma grizzly” trope.   Nevertheless, Hijar tries to recognize that her students are find their way in the world. She attempts to find ways to enlighten them in ways that are non-confrontational, something she finds especially important given that there are few media models for engaging in civil debate.

The comments also reiterated the need to confront the “easy” narratives of women’s history, that basically say that things used to “suck” for women and now things are “great.”

That’s my take on the panel.  I’ll invite others to comment and/or revise.

Documentary video on National Women’s Health Network

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I’m still powering through the last few papers and exams, but am taking time to post this short documentary by/about the National Women’s Health Network.  The Network celebrated its 35th anniversary on December 16, 2010 (happy belated anniversary!)  They l will have a prominent place in my forthcoming book (which I plan to mail to the press after Christmas, I promise!)

And here’s a call for donations rom Executive Director Cindy Pearson:

Together, we have been improving women’s health in the US since 1975.

  • We bring the voices of women consumers to the policy and regulatory decision-making bodies in D.C.
  • We work to improve the health of all women by providing unbiased, evidence-based information that women need to make informed decisions about their own health.
  • We are supported by our diverse members from all across the country.

We play our watchdog role fearlessly. And, we do it without taking any financial contributions from drug companies, the health insurance industry, medical device manufacturers or anyone else with a financial stake in women’s health decision-making.

Will you help us?

We have a great opportunity with our 35th Anniversary Challenge Campaign. A small group of members are stepping forward with pledges to give $35,000 if we raise $35,000 from gifts ‘above and beyond’ usual year-end gifts.  These members generously pledged to help encourage others like you to step up and give more as well.  You can be sure that any gift you give to NWHN, large or small, will have a big impact on the lives of women and their families. Now, it’s on to the next 35!


Rape Rape Part II: Wikileaks and Julian Assange version

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via Slate Double X

Where Rachel Larimore says that “Julian Assange is Creepy: So is His Arrest on Rape Charges.”   In a turn of phrase oddly reminiscent of Whoopi Goldberg’s comments about the rape charges against Roman Polanksi, Rachel writes:

“It’s not that the charges aren’t serious. They go beyond Assange allegedly not using a condom when a woman asked him to. He comes across as a creep and a misogynist. But they are still cases of “acquaintance rape,” which is notoriously difficult to prove.  And that just contributes to the idea among skeptics—and Assange’s lawyer, naturally—that these are trumped up charges designed to keep Assange from causing trouble for the United States and its allies. It doesn’t help that the last time Assange had a document dump, Swedish authorities wanted to question Assange and then released a statement backing off and saying that he “is not suspected of rape.”

So, according to Rachel, date rape must not _really_ be rape?  WTF?!

In response to Rachel, Amanda Marcotte argued that “Assange Defenders Attack Rape Accusers for No Good Reason.”

” I have to agree with you that the circumstances of Julian Assange’s arrest are suspicious as hell and that the charges against Assange seem credible enough.  I’m surprised at how many people find it impossible to hold both thoughts in their heads at once and believe that because Interpol is exploiting the sexual assault charges to get Assange, it must mean the charges themselves are lies.  I often caution people not to assume conspiracy when opportunism is what’s likely in play. Even before all this came out, I really disliked the hero worship of Assange, who has always put me off my lunch.  It’s possible both that Wikileaks is a necessary curative for government overreach and that its leader is out to serve his own ego needs above all.  Anyone who thinks that’s impossible needs to think harder about what’s going on when politicians get sentimental on the campaign trail.

What is disgusting to me is how much of the left has conveniently forgotten that women who file rape charges can pretty much always expect to have their names dragged through the mud, unless they were “lucky” enough to be raped by someone of much lower social status who also jumped out of the bushes to rape them.”

Thanks, Amanda.  This needed to said, and now it has, and I don’t have too!  Back to grading. . .

My blogging gets me on a conference program

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Hey folks,

I turned my ramblings on the 50th anniversary of the contraceptive pill into a paper proposal for the 2011 annual meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine.  Yay!   The title of my paper is “The Pill at 50: Scientific Commemoration and the Politics of American Memory.”  I’ll write more later but just thought I’d share this exciting news!

Added later:  here’s the abstract:

This paper will use coverage of the 50th anniversary of the contraceptive pill as a case study of collective memory and commemorative practice in the history of science and medicine. As Pnina Abir-Am observes in her introduction to Commemorative Practices in the Sciences, a “commemorative mania” has swept the world in the past several decades and relationship between memory and historical writing has become “a major element of both scholarly and public discourse in the twenty-first century.” I will show that like the Clemence Royer centennial celebration described by Joy Harvey in the same volume, celebration of the Pill’s 50th anniversary was a “focal point for feminism, politics, and science” in the United States. For the scientists who developed and tested the first contraceptive pills, the anniversary of the Pill was a way to affirm their collective professional past as well as reassert their professional authority in the present. The celebrations also illustrated culture wars over reproductive rights and the meaning of controversial events in the history of science and medicine in the United States. Finally, I will show that feminist analysis of this historical event was not monolithic, but reflects the complicated history of women’s relationship to contraceptive technology and medical experimentation since the 1960s.

Learning Objectives:

  1. Explain the ways in which different political, scientific, and social groups commemorated the 50th anniversary of the contraceptive pill.
  2. Understand how memory studies can be used as an analytical tool in the history of medicine.
  3. Explore the difficulties historians face in interpreting a politically controversial subject for the public.

Historians of Women and Science don’t need no man-splainers

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via Geek Feminism, which had a link to  Richard Holmes’s The Royal Society’s lost women scientists.  Lesley Hall then commented:

“I’m somewhat annoyed at all the coverage A MAN talking about lost women scientists is getting, when we have several decades-worth of women historians of science who have been saying the exact same thing. This seems to me pretty much the standard thing of no-one listening until it’s said by a bloke (even if the women have already been saying it).”

Right on, Leslie!  The History of Science Society has an award dedicated to this subject, named after esteemed historian Margaret W. Rossiter (and on of my graduate committee members at Cornell). Previously it was just the History of Women in Science award, which Rossiter won in 1997 for her encyclopedic book, Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action.

Now, I’m not saying men can’t do women’s history — but hey, how about giving credit to those who paved the way for you?

Why I’m not surprised that most of the Bush family is pro-choice

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via RHReality Check. Here’s an excerpt from the story by editor-in-chief Jodi Jacobson:

“The Bush family has a long history of support for Planned Parenthood.  Prescott Bush, father of George H. W. Bush (Bush 1) and grandfather of Bush 2 was the treasurer of Planned Parenthood when it launched its first national fundraising campaign in 1947. Birth control being controversial in the period pre- Griswold v. Connecticut (and yes, history obviously repeats itself), Prescott Bush was attacked for his pro-choice position and knocked out of the running for a Senate seat in Connecticut.

While he was a Congressman, George H.W. Bush was a leader in establishing Title X, the program that most in the contemporary right wing love to hate. The fact is that most programs today targeted for extinction by Republicans and Tea Party fanatics were either supported or established by…Republicans, albeit for reasons having more to do with population control than women’s rights.

In the sixties, the connections between family planning and economic security were becoming clearer.  President Lyndon Johnson was the first to establish public funding for family planning services as part of the War on Poverty. According to a brief review of legislative history by the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association Johnson began offering grants for family planning services in 1965, the same year the Supreme Court struck down the Connecticut law that prohibited the use of contraceptives by married couples in Griswold. Then, in the late sixties, the Social Security Act was amended to require state welfare agencies to make family planning services and information available to recipients.

Following on this platform, Republican President Richard Nixon “took a special interest in family planning.”

“Soon,” the NFPRHA brief states, “Congress responded, enacting Title X of the Public Health Service Act, the first – and to this day, only – federal program dedicated to providing family planning services nationwide.”

Signed into law by President Nixon on December 26, 1970, champions of the program during its enactment included then-Congressman George H.W. Bush, who said in 1969: ‘We need to make population and family planning household words. We need to take sensationalism out of this topic so that it can no longer be used by militants who have no real knowledge of the voluntary nature of the program but, rather are using it as a political steppingstone. If family planning is anything, it is a public health matter.'”

I’m not surprised by this at all.  Support for population control was pretty mainstream in the 1960s and 1970s, but the reasons behind it were not exactly pro-choice (and not just because they were talking about contraception, not abortion).  Rather, the Johnson and Nixon administrations and Congress at this time supported federal funding for birth control clinics because they believed that overpopulation contributed to international terrorism and domestic political unrest.  This is quite different from a rights-based framework that advocates expanding women’s access to birth control because it gives them more control over their bodies.  Because these programs targeted poor women of color, militant civil rights groups alleged that these programs were “genocidal.”  Women of color who supported reproductive rights criticized this argument, but they also found fault with the population control approach that disproportionately affected their community. For these women, reproductive freedom meant not only the right to limit their fertility but also the right to reproduce regardless of race or income level.  For more on this topic, see Jennifer Nelson, Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement.

Voting Matters because Women’s Health Matters

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via National Women’s Health Network.  As a counter the dire reports that women are apathetic about the midterm elections, I’m passing along this reminder from NWHN:
“If you care about women’s health, you should also care about voting.  Here are just a few ways that tomorrow’s election might affect women’s health.
  • Research on alternative treatments for hot flashes, safe and effective contraceptive methods for women of all sizes, and the best ways to prevent pre-term labor are all funded by federal research grants – some candidates want to cut funding for the National Institutes of Health.
  • The FDA approved two new contraceptives this year after carefully reviewing the evidence of their safety and effectiveness – some candidates want Congress, not FDA to decide which contraceptives should be approved.
  • Women who need abortions are more likely to have their abortion early in the first trimester, when it is safest, in part due to the availability of medical abortion using mifepristone – some candidates want to ban medical abortion.
  • Many young women can now get health insurance coverage through their parents, thanks to health care reform – some candidates want to de-fund health reform.

If you care about women’s health, remember to vote tomorrow, November 2rd.  Start by checking out the candidates running in your district.  Find out what they think about women’s health issues.  If you need help figuring out which district you’re in, which candidates are running, and where your polling place is, check out the easy-to-use tool created by the League of Women Voters.  Let’s make sure we vote to protect women’s health on Tuesday.”

Our Bodies, Our Blog has an even more direct message — get out and vote!

History of Health Activism Conference at Yale

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Here is a Yale Daily News report on the conference, “Health Activism in the 20th century,” that I participated in at Yale last weekend.  (minor correction — MADD stands for Mothers Against Drunk Driving!)  As the reporter was only there for Saturday (bright and early at 8:30am!) and I was the first presenter, he didn’t get a chance to observe my brilliant presentation, Creating a Middle Ground: Feminist Health Activists and Emergency Contraception in the United States, 1970-2000! (I’m giving a shorter version of this paper at the History of Science Society meeting next weekend )  Here are the main points:

This paper looks at the changing position of the National Women’s Health Network (NWHN) on emergency contraception, aka the “morning-after pill.” Initially this group was a vehement opponent of emergency contraception and other forms of hormonal birth control.  By the early 1990s the organization had joined broader efforts to develop a dedicated emergency contraceptive product.  NWHN found that there was sufficient evidence about the safety and effectiveness of this contraceptive method to “cautiously support its use.”
More importantly, increasing restrictions on abortion and access to federally-funded birth control under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush convinced the organization that they needed to help ensure that women had access to emergency contraception when other birth control methods failed.

This paper is a chapter out of a book-length project on the history of emergency contraception in the United States, which is under contract with Rutgers University Press. This project aims to use the history of emergency contraception to illuminate key themes in the politics of birth control and abortion since the 1960s.

In terms of relevance to other issues in health activism in the twentieth century, one of my main points is how the history of emergency contraception reflects the professionalization of the women’s health movement. Since the 1970s, feminist health activists had gradually become insiders in reproductive health by earning professional credentials, which gave them the ability to reform organized medicine and health care policy from within. Although some of their contemporaries accused these newly-minted professionals of “selling-out” rather than furthering the cause of women’s self-empowerment,” the corresponding radicalization of the medical “establishment” was equally significant. This book is intended to contribute to recent scholarship on how women have used experience of the physical body as a source of knowledge production and feminist practice regarding women’s health issues. For example, Wendy Kline argues that “body knowledge” was central to the women’s health activism of Second Wave feminism, and that this feminist framework was abandoned as the women’s health movement adopted the professional credentials and scientific language of the health care establishment.
I suggest that rather than being a departure from Second Wave feminist strategies that were based on knowledge of the biological body, recent activism on emergency contraception demonstrates how women have continued to use personal histories of their bodies to transform reproductive health research and healthcare policy. Since the early 1990s, emergency contraception has served as a “bridge issue” that brought together former adversaries, including feminist health organizations, population and family planning people, and groups representing women of color who were the main targets of attempts to control the “population crisis” in the United States.

This coalition did not arise without a struggle and had to overcome much bad faith generated by sexism in the medical profession and the racist and coercive policies of the population movement. My book shows how these diverse groups created a “middle ground” between an older liberal feminist position that tended to support technological innovations such as hormonal contraception; and a more radical feminist position that criticized the use of hormones but was otherwise in favor of reproductive rights.