Storytelling platforms the future of online repro rights advocacy
A few thoughts on how to build grassroots movements with social media pages and accounts
I recently saw an opening for a job at Planned Parenthood that had a listing asking for people who knew how to build storytelling platforms on social media and online. That seems to be one of the more important manners of advocacy going forward. So I figured I’d share my own understanding of doing that so that others may use it as a template to create their own avenues of storytelling.
My Facebook page, Given No Choice: A History of Abortion Rights, features links to my newsletter as well as photos that I’ve amassed in the last 4 years doing research on abortion and reproductive issues. The page has a national following now and reaches people I both agree with and those whom I don’t.
I’ve done several other similar pages, including ones dealing with World War II, black history and even the cocktail culture in Pittsburgh. The premise is simple–you have some compelling photos to share and you write one to two paragraphs giving it some caption that provides important and illuminating context about the larger story. The posts themselves are mini-stories designed to advance the larger narrative of the page.
There are some things that feminist leaders can do to help storytellers like myself and other people within grassroots social media. Secondary sources, including newspapers and archived television clips, are vital to telling these stories. I’ve managed to find enormous amounts of information pertaining to abortion and birth control using newspapers.com, a database that uses artificial intelligence to go through a repository of old newspapers to find relevant articles that match keyword searches. It’s the Google of pre-internet days.
What needs to happen now is the addition of newspapers that aren’t currently searchable on the repository. Since much of liberal history, including that for feminism and LGBTQ issues, was documented in alternative media–much of which is housed at places like the New York Public Library–those publications need to be added so that researchers can use that source within their own storytelling. It wouldn’t take much pressure to get that to happen as newspapers.com, which is run by Ancestry.com, digitizes the information for free.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., the famous Harvard educator focusing on black history, has called for massive digitization of newspapers because of their ability to open up new avenues of research into racial injustices. That was how I wrote my last book about 2,000 Black and Latino people who were forced out of Johnstown, Pa., at gunpoint and under threat of imprisonment in 1923. We commemorate the 100-year anniversary next year with a symposium featuring myself, a local historian and someone whose family went through it. That wouldn’t have been possible without these secondary source repositories. And so I urge anyone who has that influence to make it a reality because it could do the same thing for feminism that it did for civil rights and black history.
Additionally, there are also storytelling opportunities for people on social media like Tik Tok or Instagram. Vanderbilt University has a repository for archived news coverage dating back to 1968. Much of the second wave is documented there in the reels that are searchable and downloadable. What got me thinking was how it could be used by abortion rights activists and leaders. If that video was downloaded and licensed, it could be a way of creating moving images of the types of leaders we currently need on Tik Tok and elsewhere. Gloria Steinem at the 1972 convention discussing George McGovern’s nomination and the Redstockings storming into the New York General Assembly are inspiring depictions of women and better role models than what we’re seeing from popular culture now. Much like the archived photos that are used for Facebook, these video clips could be used to give a history lesson of some sort. It could be a good method of introducing younger women to figures like Bella Abzug and others that they know little to nothing about.
Part of the problem with younger generations is the historical illiteracy when it comes to topics they advocate on. These storytelling platforms can serve as a solution to that.