Facing our third winter snow storm during the first two weeks of March, hoping the power stays on and my internet holds up, I wondered why on earth March was selected for Women’s History Month. I mean, who decides these things? And why only one month for one-half of the world’s population? Granted, one should be thankful for small favors, but still—one month?
So, turning to the Google machine, I learned that the first celebration of women’s history was not a month, but only one week long and occurred in Sonoma County, California, in 1978. It was held during March to include March 8, International Women’s Day, according to the National Women’s History Project. Organized by the Education Task Force of the Sonoma County Commission on the Status of Women, the project concluded with a parade through downtown Santa Rosa at the end of the week.
The movement to celebrate women’s contributions to our history spread across the country, and pressure was brought to bear upon our elected representatives during an era when it mattered. A Democratic congresswoman from Maryland, Barbara Mikulski, and a junior senator from Utah, Orrin Hatch, co-sponsored a congressional resolution for National Women’s History Week 1981. (It was indeed a different era.)
From the Women’s History Month.gov website:
Women’s History Month had its origins as a national celebration in 1981 when Congress passed Pub. L. 97-28 which authorized and requested the President to proclaim the week beginning March 7, 1982 as “Women’s History Week.” Throughout the next five years, Congress continued to pass joint resolutions designating a week in March as “Women’s History Week.” In 1987 after being petitioned by the National Women’s History Project, Congress passed Pub. L. 100-9 which designated the month of March 1987 as “Women’s History Month.” Between 1988 and 1994, Congress passed additional resolutions requesting and authorizing the President to proclaim March of each year as Women’s History Month. Since 1995, Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama have issued a series of annual proclamations designating the month of March as “Women’s History Month.”
And in typical Trump fashion, there is nothing on the website to indicate that this year, or last year, a proclamation had been issued designating March as Women’s History Month. Whether the oversight is due to a simple failure to update the .gov website or to Trump’s general disdain for women is hard to tell. And it doesn’t really matter, as the result is the same.
While I was trying to figure out why March was selected as an appropriate month to honor the contributions women have made to history, I discovered the listing of this year’s honorees. The National Women’s History Project has selected “Nevertheless, She Persisted” as its theme this year.
Nevertheless She Persisted: This phrase was born in February 2017 when Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, was silenced during Jeff Sessions’ confirmation hearing for Attorney General. At the time, Warren was reading an opposition letter penned by Coretta Scott King (a past NWHP honoree) in 1986. Referring to the incident, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-KY, later said “Senator Warren was giving a lengthy speech. She had appeared to violate the rule. She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless she persisted.” Feminists immediately adopted the phrase in hashtags and memes to refer to any strong women who refuse to be silenced.
Fighting all forms of discrimination against women takes persistence. The 2018 honorees have all gotten the message to stop, either directly or indirectly, yet they have all continued to fight and succeeded in bringing positive change to the lives of diverse American women.
There are 15 honorees for 2018, and each one has an inspiring story of fighting for change to improve the lives of women in areas as diverse as criminal justice, harassment, racial justice, immigration, disability, and union rights. No matter the obstacles in their path, they have persisted.
One of them, Pat Maginnis, fought for a woman’s right to control her own body long before it was cool. Born in 1928 and raised in an abusive Catholic family, she served a tour in the Army where she was sent to work in a hospital in Panama in retaliation for engaging in a relationship with an African-American man. It was there, while working in a maternity ward and seeing for herself the brutal treatment of women who were denied their desperately needed and wanted abortions, that she became radicalized, a condition that persisted well after she left the Army, returned to the States, and attended school in San Jose.
In particular, the torment of one pregnant woman who was locked in a cage and tied to her hospital bed to prevent a self-abortion attempt reinforced Pat’s determination to “never procreate” and fueled her commitment to help women with unwanted pregnancies.
In her early twenties, she traveled to Mexico for an abortion, outraged that she had to “go into exile,” and vowed never to repeat the experience. A few years later, following a subsequent, self-induced abortion, she was interrogated and threatened by police as she lay, dangerously ill, in the maternity ward of San Francisco General Hospital.
During the Great Depression safe abortions, though not legal, were surprisingly easy to obtain. The economic conditions made bearing children a hardship for many families and tolerance appears to have been granted, according to historian Leslie J. Reagan’s book When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973. It wasn’t until the 1940s that women were pressured to give up the independence they found in their wartime jobs and to bear more children. This societal pressure to return home and have babies included the repression of abortion.
In the mid-1940s, influential Freudian psychologists equated maternity with female sexual gratification. By the 1950s, the "domestic revival" was in full swing; American women married younger, and the birth rate actually rose for the first time in the twentieth century,. Although the push for maternity and domesticity was primarily directed at white women, women of color also felt the pressure to subordinate themselves to men as wives and mothers.[11]
The repression of abortion in this period was new, not normal, and should be incorporated into our understanding of the multifaceted and far-reaching effects of "McCarthyism.[12] . The state's surveillance of abortion in this period is another aspect of the political and cultural attack on critical thought and behavior. McCarthyism was devoted not only to eradicating the Communist Party, but to destroying the labor, peace, and interracial movements. As part of the fervent anticommunism of the postwar period, police and government agents investigated and harassed thousands of people for their political views and frightened many more, [13] while the majority learned to conform and keep quiet. Deviation from standard gender and sexual behavior came under attack along with political deviance. State authorities labeled gays and lesbians "perverts and national security risks," and police raided their bars.[14] Abortion symbolized subversiveness, as did these other ideas and activities. In fact, abortion was linked to communism at this time, and red-baiting entered the medical abortion discourse. The attack on abortion and women who sought to control their own reproduction and lives was the dark side of the era's pronatalist ideology.
It was in this repressive atmosphere that Pat Maginnis, a 26-year-old college student, began her campaign as America’s first pro-abortion activist in 1959. She handed out mimeographed leaflets and pro-abortion petitions on street corners in San Jose and other Bay Area cities.
At the time an abortion reform movement, led by physicians and public health officials, hoped to expand the existing laws (that allowed therapeutic abortions only to save the life of the mother) to include therapeutic abortions for "psychiatric, humanitarian, and eugenic indications." The decision as to whether or not an abortion should be allowed would still be made by a hospital committee of men, and there was no attempt to include a woman’s desire for an abortion as a legitimate reason for a therapeutic abortion.
Although Maginnis was initially supportive of the reform movement and gathered signatures for a California bill that would incorporate the changes, she became one of its earliest critics. She formed the Society for Humane Abortions (SHA) in 1962 to support the reform, but soon she was opposing it. Writing about the SHA in When Abortion Was a Crime, Reagan notes:
The society put women, rather than physicians, at the forefront. It exposed the medical review committees, which reform measures would make permanent legal institutions, as insulting and humiliating to women. The professionals who initiated the reform movement assumed that physicians would review women's abortion requests. The society criticized such a system. A woman's decision to have an abortion "should not be frustrated and delayed by the complex machinery of legislated abortion committees which sit in judgment of the woman," the SHA argued. "A decision to obtain an abortion should be treated just as any other surgical procedure, as a private matter between a patient and her physician."[19] In an SHA cartoon, a woman asked a psychiatrist, "How much does a psychosis cost for a legal abortion?" Psychiatrists, who had worked to help women obtain abortions, had come to be seen as barriers and were vilified for their role.[20]
The SHA helped radicalize the abortion discourse when it proclaimed abortion as a right and demanded repeal of abortion laws. "The termination of pregnancy," the organization declared, "is a decision which the person or family involved should be free to make as their own religious beliefs, values, emotions, and circumstances may dictate." Furthermore, the group argued, abortions should be available, affordable, and provided in a way that was neither "humiliating nor discriminatory." SHA's perspective would be adopted by women's liberation groups and, ultimately, all sections of the feminist movement.[21] For the first time an American women's organization had framed the problem of abortion in terms of women's right to control their reproduction.
By 1964 Pat Maginnis had joined forces with Lana Phelan Khan and Rowena Gurner to become the Army of Three behind the new organization, the Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (ARAL), the predecessor to NARAL. While the SHA was focused on education and awareness, the new organization was more radical in its activism. The women hoped that in violating the laws on speaking out about abortion and contraception and getting arrested, they could get the laws overturned.
In an era when police routinely arrested women as they lay bleeding from botched abortions, and even sending birth control information through the mail was illegal, the Army of Three marshaled the almost inconceivable courage to transform the personal into the political, unveiling the country’s most taboo topic in the streets, the public halls, the media, and the courtroom. With their indomitable activism leavened with sardonic humor, the three women would spend the next decade in relentless organizing, courtroom battles, public education, protest, and political theatre.
While it may have been illegal to mail information about birth control, it was definitely illegal to do what these three women did. They went out into communities and gave women instructions on how to obtain contraception and abortions, either self-induced or through travel to Mexico, Japan, or Puerto Rico. Even providing them with information on how to deal with customs, it is estimated that they helped some 12,000 women obtain abortions from clinics on their List. And they traveled to some of the clinics themselves, vetting the conditions before including them for referral. A woman who was referred to a clinic was expected to file a report on her experience with the ARAL afterwards. Finally, women were judging the physicians instead of being judged by them.
What made headlines, though, were the self-abortion classes the women ran. In 1969 Pat Maginnis and Lana Khan published The abortion handbook for responsible women. Sadly out of print, the book, using sardonic humor, describes how to obtain an abortion on either side of the law, including chapters oh how to qualify for a “legal” abortion and an instant “pyschoses” diagnosis, how to fake a hemorrhage, as well as how to self-induce an abortion.
Rowena Gurner and Lana Kahn have both passed away, but Pat Maginnis is still persisting.
At 88, the “mother of the movement” retains an uncanny memory, sharp wit, and hard-core dedication. Living in East Oakland, she continues her activism with the trenchant jibes in her political cartoons, and still spends most of her time working for women’s reproductive rights and animal rescue. She was active as a volunteer in Occupy Oakland and Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign.
Her techniques are worth memorializing and cherishing. Not only is she a hero who helped all American women claim their own bodily autonomy, but her work created a climate wherein the antiquated anti-abortion laws were ripe for overturning by the Supreme Court in 1973. Without her efforts and the efforts of other women who worked alongside her and in cities across the nation, we might be living in a country where abortion was still illegal.
Instead, we’re living in a country where it is technically legal but generally unavailable.