Byllye Avery fought for black women's inclusion
Pioneering feminist drew attention to issues others were afraid to discuss publicly
(Byllye Avery)
Byllye Avery has been at the forefront of the repro rights movement since the 1970s–fighting for women of color to be included as much as their white counterparts.
In 1974, she and two other women opened the Gainesville Women’s Health Center, which was a first-trimester abortion clinic and a gynecological center. It was eye-opening because she saw how frequently black women had abortions.
“Parents brought in that daughters,” she said. “Women and their partners came whether they were husbands or boyfriends. So there were very few women who were kind of sneaking around to get an abortion by themselves. It was more of a decision that people have made together.”
She felt then that Black women often had to get abortions because they didn’t have ready access to birth control.
“A large part of it was really not having access to contraception, and not knowing how to use it because it's not such an easy thing to do. Everybody just thinks that ‘Oh, you just do this. You just do that.’ But a lot of women had a lot of trouble,” Avery said.
She pondered the difference between white women’s health concerns and those of black women. They had the same list of problems she felt, but the priorities were different.
“While white women were talking about reproductive health, black women were really talking more about psychological issues that had to do with racism, sexism, classism, and all of the feelings of being left out,” Avery said.
Avery formed the National Black Women’s Health Project. She put together a conference on black women’s health decisions in 1983. Without any social media promotion, close to 2,000 people attended to discuss those issues. Feminist conferences–while now a mainstay–were pioneering then because they permitted women to congregate and discuss things that up to that point had been heard by small audiences in their homes or in social settings. Those tactics started in the second wave with abortion speakouts and continued throughout the ensuing decades.
“Women hadn't talked openly about things that were happening to them in the home, like sexual abuse and incest,” Avery said. “And then with rapes and all of this and domestic violence…these were things that were on the top of black women's minds that they wanted to talk about and learn from.”
As other feminists like Dazon Dixon Diallo and Loretta Ross told me, the late 1980s and early 1990s were pivotal years in the formation of reproductive justice philosophy. That’s when they started talking about intersectionality. Things like food and housing insecurity came to the fore. Infant mortality was also a major issue. They didn’t have what they needed to deliver a healthy life for children.
“We didn't have the term intersectionality,” Avery said. “But we understood that all of these factors were bearing on us. And we voiced them not using those terms.”
More of this interview will be featured in my forthcoming book Given No Choice: A History of Abortion Rights, which I anticipate finishing this year.