39 books like Just Get on the Pill, 4

This book made me reflect deeply on whom we praise as trailblazing “rebels” and who we ignore, erase, or brand with criminal status in the stories we inherit and then repeat thoughtlessly.

Hartman reimagines “transgression” through the lenses of race, gender, sexuality, and class in early 20th-century New York and Philadelphia. She immerses us in up-close and poignant stories of women’s nonconformity, showing how their choices were flexes not only for survival but for thriving, a refusal to be defined by the ugliest social denigrations of their time (as well as our own).

Wayward Lives is richly sourced, including recovered photographs with the evocative literary portraits. It is a moving, haunting, unforgettable book.

When I read this book as a young lawyer in reproductive rights in the 1990s, it resonated deeply with the daily bias that I witnessed against my clients. Decades later, a highlight of my book tour was being invited to do a talk with Professor Roberts at the Free Library of Philadelphia. Dorothy Roberts’ exploration of “race, reproduction and the meaning of liberty” is powerful.

Her writing clearly lays out how restrictions on abortion, parenting, and access to basic health care are shaped by and also perpetuate American racism. This book inspired me to work for equity and reproductive freedom for all, and hopefully, it will continue to do so for others, too. 

This book is a first. Theobald gives us a really interesting and comprehensive history of pregnancy, birthing, motherhood -- and activism -- on the Crow Reservation in Montana. She explains the interventions of the federal government, for example, via coercive sterilization and child removal, and provides rich accounts of family, tribal, and inter-tribal resistance -- and claims of self-determination -- in the face of these interventions.

Did you know that the supposed ‘father of gynecology’ built his practice on horrific medical experiments conducted on African-American and Irish women? Owens’ book exposes how J. Marion Sims’ practice amongst relatively elite white women was built upon procedures that he developed through experimentation on Black and Irish women’s bodies, and particularly a series of experimental surgeries to repair African-American women’s fistulas, which were painful and debilitating tears between the vagina and the bladder or anus that developed during childbirth. Cooper makes a crucial and revealing methodological move by recovering and reframing the lives of the women who were objectified by these experiments.

China's gargantuan size has haunted its efforts to become a modern nation. Anthropologist Greenhalgh argues that in the late 1970s, Chinese rocket scientists, influenced by doomsday policymakers in the West, convinced the Chinese government to impose a one-child family planning program. The draconian enforcement of the one-child policy subjected millions of women to intimate corporeal surveillance that resulted in uncounted numbers of forced abortions, hidden births, and suffering for the masses. By 2016, when the two children policy was instituted, family planning contributed to an unbalanced gender ratio, delayed marriages, and a possibly irreversible population decline. Social engineering is a modus operandi of the Chinese state, and ironically, its most famous strategy threatens the nation's sustainability as a world industrial power.

What happens to women who can’t get the abortions that they want or need? For most of our history, the answers were anecdotal and speculative until Diana Greene Foster and a team of fellow researchers followed one thousand women, some of whom obtained abortions, some of whom could not do so.

The answer is a triumph of social science reporting. By almost every measure, those women who could not access abortion care fared worse ten years later, and many of the years in between, than those women who were able to make their own choices about their bodies and their lives.

What I loved about the book was how transparent Foster was about the research design for the study and how intertwined she showed that abortion is in so many aspects of women’s lives. 

I’m writing this section just a couple of days after International Women’s Day (IWD).

IWD 2023 focussed on the gender gap in digital innovation. Closing this gap would contribute to progress in achieving substantive gender equality, but IWD organisers also argue, it would generate more economic growth.

This narrative is partial and ideological. It uses a fact (the gender gap) and a worthy objective (of eliminating that gap) to promote a particular conception of women – something that Naila Kabeer illuminates with great effect in Reversed Realities.

Part of the reason for socio-economic gender gaps is the amount of (often unpaid) time women spend caring for others. While care is foundational to what makes us human, in contemporary capitalist societies care work is devalued to the extent that much of it goes unpaid. Could it be otherwise?

Kabeer shows how so much ideology about gender equality is based upon the… show more.

An elegant mystery set in a near-to-partly-cloudy future. In the wake of some sort of apocalypse, communities have rebuilt.

In the Coast Road region, a sustainable civilization based on careful attention to quotas and mutual regard would seem an idyll of peaceful coexistence.

And yet. Enid is an investigator, called upon at times of uncomfortable questions.

She and her partner are called to look into a suspicious death. The buried realities encountered reveal a less-than-ideal picture of communities coping with things that do not fit with their presumptions.

A quiet mystery built atop a fascinating portrait of What Comes Next. I was drawn to the characters, the situation, but most especially the questions hovering just outside the confines of the story.

Hartmann’s book is a classic and is in its third edition.

This is an essential reading for anyone who cares about feminist politics and abortion rights because it provides a global historical context. Laws and attitudes on reproductive rights differ dramatically across the world – where one country might restrict abortion and contraception, another country might grant easy access to contraception and abortion.

This book shows the dark history of global population control efforts that used abortion and contraception to attempt to lower birthrates in poor countries. She reminds us that, across the world, governments and other organizations have used heavy-handed tactics to force contraception and abortion on some people, especially in countries where there are worries about overpopulation.

Hartmann’s book warns against focusing too narrowly on the right to end a pregnancy, without focusing enough attention on the right to bear children too.

In 1965, the Supreme Court ruled for the first time that the Constitution guaranteed a “right to privacy” as it struck down Connecticut’s longstanding ban on the sale and use of birth control. (Amazing trivia: the state legislator who drafted the state’s 1879 anti-contraceptive law was P.T. Barnum.) Garrow’s history recounts the decades-long efforts of Connecticut activists to challenge the restriction, and how lawyers shifted their choice of plaintiffs from doctors asserting the law interfered with their ability to provide medical advice to married women claiming a right to privacy within their marriages. In the years following Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court gradually expanded that novel privacy doctrine, extending it to the intimate decisions of unmarried people, and eventually to cover the right to an abortion with Roe v. Wade.