Feminist professor discusses new book about her pioneering mother
A Woman's Life is a Human Life available in bookstores now
Dr. Felicia Kornbluh thinks sterilization abuse and ableism are forgotten dimensions within reproductive rights history. It’s something that has come up in her research a bunch of different times in a bunch of different ways.
“It's one of those areas where some of the people in the past that we’re tempted to put people on a pedestal actually don't come out looking so great,” Kornbluh said.
Kornbluh believes that ableism shouldn’t just be a criticism that feminists defend their pioneers from. It’s something that they have to take an active part in fighting against. Part of that means acknowledging that troubling part of the movement’s legacy.
Kornbluh is a professor of history and gender studies at the University of Vermont. Her mother, Beatrice, worked to repeal all abortion laws in the state during the 1960s. Rodriguez-Trias led a prominent career in feminism and liberalism, culminating with a Presidential Citizen’s Medal awarded by Bill Clinton in 2001, weeks before he left office.
Kornbluh details the connection between the effort to decriminalize abortion and the fight against sterilization abuse that affected women of color in earlier American history in her new book A Woman’s Life is a Human Life, which also includes information about her mother’s involvement in New York’s feminist movement.
Kornbluh said she remembered her mother getting angry when she discussed life before Roe.
“She would clench her fists and her blood pressure would go up and her face would get red,” Kornbluh said. “And she would just get adamant, ‘You don't understand it. They were butchers. They were butchers.’ That started when I was–as I remember it–when I was about 10 years old, and I didn't really know what the heck she was talking about.”
Kornbluh writes about her mother’s close friend and neighbor, Dr. Helen Rodriguez-Trias, a Puerto Rican woman and leader against sterilization abuse.
The book shows that movements often overlap and weave into one fabric. The efforts of women of color during the second wave laid the foundation for what developed into the reproductive justice philosophy in the late 1980s and early 1990s that was pioneered by women like Byllye Avery, Dazon Dixon Diallo and Loretta Ross, who is featured in the book. Kornbluh said it to grasp the reproductive justice movement, you have to understand that it came from the fight against sterilization abuse. In Kornbluh’s words, it, “became the kind of the fundamental intellectual point of the movement for Reproductive Justice, which is that people need freedom to have children, just like they need freedom to not have children.”
The Clergy Consultation Service is also described in Kornbluh’s research. The organization began in New York, with Howard Moody being its founder. Lawrence Lader, a pioneering abortion rights advocate and respected journalist, also played a role in the book, as did Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan–who were rivals within the feminist movement, though that isn’t detailed in great depth within this book. We also learn about the Redstockings along with their visionary leader, Lucinda Cisler, who predicted much of the challenges abortion rights activists would face in the ensuing decades.
The book is available on Amazon and in bookstores.