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The overthrow of Roe v. Wade has shaken our country’s foundation and there is more shaking to come.
Roe was monumental and it was the result of the 20th-century women’s liberation movement.
The many significant changes from the women’s liberation movement are not woven into our national narrative (I’ve yet to see a public park named for the women’s liberation movement) because the history of the women’s liberation movement has never been properly taught in public school textbooks or curriculum.
My generation bridged two Americas: before and after Roe. A life of constraint versus a life of freedom.
Life was very different before Roe.
Who remembers young women being told they couldn’t be admitted to a university because the admissions department arbitrarily decided there were enough women enrolled?
Who recalls that female university students were routinely ridiculed by men for taking up space? Men flagrantly criticized female students because it was commonly thought that a woman’s place in the student body prevented a worthy man from attending. It was assumed that a woman was in college just to find a husband. A chilly atmosphere, indeed.
Who knows that the first iteration of intersectionality was written by the Combahee River Collective or that the first book on women’s health care was self-published on newsprint by feminist women who called themselves The Boston Women’s Health Book Collective?
I was eleven years old in 1973 and I was changed by the women’s liberation movement: I knew I had the right to self-determination. I knew I could plan my life and decide when I wanted a family. I had a sense of place in the world previous generations of women did not have.
And today that sense of self-determination includes trans and non-binary people.
I traveled recently to the University of Pennsylvania on a tour of colleges for my teenage daughter. To my delight, I came upon Jenny Holzer’s permanent art installation “125 Years” honoring women at Penn. Chiseled into the granite benches and curbs were words rising and falling like waves telling the various stories of women’s experiences at Penn. Here is one by Sally Schwartz Friedman
“I have strong memories of being female. One of the most vivid: Houston Hall, The Student Union presumably for one and all, where one huge room was reserved for males only! I can recall standing wistfully at the door of that room listening to someone playing the piano and never questioning why I couldn’t enter. How bizarre that seems now and how wonderful that when my daughter entered Penn in 1982, such strange rules didn’t exist.”
The women’s liberation movement and the laws it helped create carved new ground for Americans.
Our freedom and liberty are more than simply written in stone, it is innate.
Teaching the details of the women’s liberation movement in our schools is essential to a free society.
Six Supreme Court justices overturned Roe. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. was one and interestingly he was a member of Concerned Alumni of Princeton, shortly after he graduated in 1972; one year before Roe v. Wade was decided.
Concerned Alumni of Princeton members complained about women being admitted to Princeton (they were admitted in 1969) and they published a magazine that according to the New York Times “persistently accused the administration of taking a permissive approach to student life, of promoting birth control and paying for abortions.”
We live in deeply troubled times, but to be sure, I know that we will overcome the problems of today because we have the successes of the women’s liberation movement at our backs and the outcome will be as monumental as Roe v. Wade itself.
Jennifer Hall Lee is a Pasadena Unified School District Board Member and speaks solely for herself. She is the co-creator of the Women’s History Month Assembly in the PUSD. She lives in Altadena.
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