Rickie Solinger

• PQ

This chapter considers Solinger’s experience as a white, Jewish child in mid-twentieth-century Cincinnati, in a culture in which no adult she knew, including the rabbi, ever mentioned the Holocaust. At the same time, these adults, including her “liberal” parents, treated the African American domestic workers in their households as marks and proof o...

About the time the Journal of Women’s History (JWH) began publication, I was starting out as a historian, drawing almost exclusively for my work on primary texts from the 1950s and ‘60s. I didn’t realize then that I was participating in the invention of a subfield: the history of reproductive politics in the United States. Since then, this arena ha...

Reproductive politics is a term coined by feminists in the 1970s to describe contemporary, Roe v. Wade-era power struggles over contraception and abortion, adoption and surrogacy, and other satellite issues. Forty years later, questions of reproductive rights are just as complex--and controversial--as they were then. Focusing mainly on the United S...

King v. Smith, the first welfare case heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, overturned the Alabama substitute father law. Such laws directed or allowed welfare officials to use the sexual behavior and reproductive capacity of poor African American women to alienate this population from "cash-money"; to reassert political and bureaucratic control over th...

The anti-prison movement in the United States is a growing activist front, partly because the numbers are so shocking and getting worse. It's hard to avoid beginning with the numbers for just that reason. For example, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 2001, there were 470 inmates for every 100,000 U.S. residents. Four years later, d...

Schoen's well-written book signals from the title that the politics of fertility variously underwrites both autonomy and constraint. In fact, Schoen's work argues that women who live under a regime of reproductive constraint often search for ways to wrest reproductive autonomy out of the teeth of coercion. This book focuses, with appropriate comple...

Introduction: What Is Reproductive Politics? 1 Racializing the Nation: From the Declaration of Independence to the Emancipation Proclamation, 1776-1865 2 Sex in the City: From Secrecy to Anonymity to Privacy, 1870s to 1920s 3 No Extras: Curbing Fertility during the Great Depression 4 Central Planning: Managing Fertility, Race, and Rights in Postwar...

A sweeping chronicle of women's battles for reproductive freedom throughout American history, Pregnancy and Power explores the many forces-social, racial, economic, and political-that have shaped women's reproductive lives in the United States. Leading historian Rickie Solinger argues that a woman's control over her body involves much more than the...

NWSA Journal 17.1 (2005) 239-241 Undivided Rights is a stunning book. It accomplishes nothing less than redefining "reproductive rights," drawing on the histories and the agendas of reproductive rights organizations founded and led by women of color in the past generation, offering crystal clear explanations of the differences between pro-choice wo...

When I was a child, I had a book called The Chosen Baby. Originally written in 1939 by Valentina Wasson, the edition I was given had been revised and updated in 1950 (Wasson 1939). It is the book I, as an adoptee, was given to understand adoption— my origins. It is the story of Mr. and Mrs. Brown, who had everything they could ask for, except one t...

In the past half century, we have moved from criminalization of abortion to legalization, although unequal access to services and violent protests continue to tear American society apart. In this provocative volume, a passionate and diverse group of abortion rights proponents - journalists, scholars, activists, lawyers, physicians, and philosophers...