CAMBRIDGE, Mass.- In the corner of a ground-floor gallery at Harvard’s Schlesinger Women’s History Library stands a small glass box containing two cowboy hats.
One is a signed hat by Flo Kennedy, attorney and feminist for Firebrand. The other belonged to Mildred Jefferson, the one-time chairman of the National Commission on the Right to Life.
One is brown suede, the other is straw white – a color contrast that seems to symbolize the stark polarization of the abortion debate.
But “The Age of Roe,” a new exhibit here, which aims to break down any simple understanding of how the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade shaped America.
The show, which has been running since 2020, was originally called “Roe at 50.” But then, the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs sues Jackson Women’s Health Organization in June abolished the constitutional right to abortion, and Roe died at the age of 49.
“It is a strange time to curate an exhibition,” said Mary Ziegler, curator of the exhibition. “Since Dobbs – and I include myself here – it’s been a very emotional time. There’s a lot of heat, and not a lot of light. “
Dobbs, Ziegler said, hasn’t changed much physically about the exhibit, aside from the title. And that title is to raise a question.
“Have we entered a new era?” she speaks. “And if we have, what are we going to make of the old one?”
Debate about abortion can pervade our politics. But it’s a topic a few museums have tackled. Whitney Museum of American Art just nearby buying its first picture related to it. And at historical institutions, the politics charged around the issue can frighten museum directors.
Jane Kamensky, professor of history at Harvard and director of the Schlesinger department, said abortion was “a matter of the magnitude of the lightning rod”. But questions about reproduction are central to women’s lives, she said, and to the library’s academic mission.
Read more about abortion issues in the US
“If you live on the third rail,” she says, “what else can you do but try to use that power for lighting?”
The exhibit represents more than one era in American history. It also reflects the continued growth of Schlesinger, founded in 1943, when the struggler Maud Wood Park donated her women’s rights collection to Harvard. Its collection accelerated in the 1960s when both the women’s movement and the women’s history field were booming.
Today, the library’s 4,400 separate archives include records from the National Abortion Rights Action League and the National Organization for Women, as well as documents by advocates such as the National Abortion Rights Action League and the National Organization for Women. Bill Bairda pioneering reproductive rights activist who in 1965 opened one of the first abortion referral clinics in the United States.
Schlesinger has long held a number of articles from conservative women, such as Jeffersonanti-abortion activist (and the first African-American woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School).
But in recent years, libraries have stepped up expand its holdingslooking beyond what Kamensky has called the predominantly upper-middle-class, liberal, “Acela corridor” views to more inclusive progressive womenwomen of color and conservative women.
The exhibition draws deeply from a huge collection purchased last year from Sisters of life, a Roman Catholic order founded in 1991 by Cardinal John Joseph O’Connor of New York to “promote life” and discourage abortion and euthanasia. Their wealth, much of it amassed by anti-abortion activists Joseph R. Stantonwas kept in the monastery of the order in the Bronx, with limited access to scholars.
Ziegler, who drew the collection for her recent book “Dollars for life: The Anti-Abortion Movement and the Fall of the Republican Founding,” helped bring it to Schlesinger, after lengthy discussions.
“Historically, some archives, especially women’s archives, have tended to gather more from progressive institutions,” says Ziegler. For conservatives, she says, “this can create a feedback loop of distrust.”
Acquiring Sisters of Life, Kamensky said, could be “challenging” for some in the hosting community, including at Schlesinger. But she says that fully understanding the history of American women requires looking beyond the traditional feminist-liberal framework.
“With life activism, we tend to understand it from the outside in,” she says. “The dynamics of our own moment show us it’s not enough.”
The materials on display are mainly photographs, leaflets, writing, pieces of paper and signs. But on one wall, facing the door, is a baffle that makes the actual body and stakes of the abortion viscerally clear.
To the left of a window, there is a large painted cross. From a distance, it seems to reflect religious opposition to abortion. Getting closer, it turned out to be the “cross of oppression” that Baird carried as he protested outside anti-abortion conventions.
On the right is a case with an array of obstetric instruments, along with boxes of abortion pills that are increasingly being carried out of the clinic and into the home.
For some visitors, readable wall text, screens can illustrate how abortion has become “safer, less time consuming and less invasive”. Others may see “evidence of a crime or an instrument of violence.” The potentially powerful responses underscore one of Ziegler’s main goals: keep the story personal and let visitors react.
“The idea is to raise voices that you wouldn’t normally hear, especially those with the most intimate and borderless relationships,” said Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, who contributed. practice a lot. opinion essay for The New York Times.
During a tour last week, Jenny Gotwals, the library’s curator of gender and society, pointed out leaflets with the now-familiar phrases “right to choose” and “women’s rights. In a nearby photo, a man during a 1971 anti-abortion protest in Massachusetts holds a sign that reads “Abortion is murder!”
“It’s really a snapshot of the rhetoric,” Gotwals said.
The projection on the wall of the letters sometimes twists and turns giving different perspectives on experience behind the slogan. But one of the show’s most striking performances was the complete absence of people.
Near wall projections, a series of photographs show the interior of an abortion clinic in Hempstead, NY, founded by Baird, a former pharmacy executive.
The empty waiting area bears an uncanny resemblance to the living room in “The Brady Bunch”. The caption explains that the photos were taken in 1980, after post-correction a firebombing.
The exhibition also explores how the fault lines of race and class cut through the debate. Some items, such as a statement from Combahee River Collectiveshows how abortion was seen as a means of autonomy and freedom for Black women, who sometimes rejected the “choice” argument in favor of calls for “Reproductive justice. Other entries denounce abortion as an instrument of racial genocide, and a moral crime akin to slavery.
For many poor women, Roe herself was no guarantee. A salesman in Spanish advertises a wake-up call for Rosie Jiminez, believed to be the first woman to die of an unsterile abortion after her 1976 passport. The Hyde Revisionwhich prohibits Medicaid from funding abortions.
The show also chronicles how party politics on abortion have hardened since the 1970s, when neither party, one wall read, took a clear position on abortion. The relationship between abortion and religion has also changed.
Initially, the Roman Catholic Church (which attracted most of the early anti-abortion activists) “largely downplayed questions of faith surrounding abortion,” a wall text reads. . And it wasn’t until the late ’70s, when white Protestants embraced the anti-abortion cause, the Southern Baptist Convention Supported a limited right to abortion.
In a small audiovisual gallery, a round of archival footage delivers some vibrant theatrical explosions from the past. A clip shows Kennedycowboy hat activist, leading a feminist “street walk” around St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, singing in your face (and unprintable) feminist national anthem.
Another person recorded the moment in 1985 when Ronald Reagan call on to encourage an anti-abortion protest prepare to march from Los Angeles to Washington. “It’s a battle we’re going to win,” he said.
That high-pitched battle continued. But it was of poor quality, the exhibit noted, by a paradox. Even as party polarization around abortion grows, public opinion remains “remains remarkably stablewith most Americans in favor of abortion rights with some restrictions. “
The show’s goal isn’t to change anyone’s mind, but to “replace dogmatism and ideology with curiosity and discovery,” Kamensky said.
“I hope people will ignore some version of the ‘I didn’t know that,’” she said.
