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BCRW @ 50 Main Menu Barnard Center for Research on Women

1980s and 1990s: A Broader Analysis of Reproductive Justice

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While in the early years of the center saw sterilization abuse alongside abortion rights and access as an integral part of the reprodcutive justice fight, this issue seems to be less in the forefront of reproductive justice work at the Center in the 80s and 90s. The conversation shifts from the right to abortion to abortion access, with many speakers articulating the ways that, despite Roe v. Wade’s ruling, state governments across the country were limiting access to abortion.

In a 1990 talk on “Dominating Women through Reproduction” at the 17th Scholar and Feminist Conference (Apocalypse Now? Race and Gender in the Nineties), Suzanne Lynn, Assistant Attorney General of the State of New York said that the right to choose when to bear children is a “recently and incompletely won right.” Citing examples of access being dependent on wealth and ability to pay, she asks, “What constitutes real choice in a society marked by such glaring disparities in wealth and opportunity?”

In a statement that feels eerily similar to the current mainstream political conversation around Roe v. Wade, Lynn talked about the ways that the conservative Supreme Court was threatening to revoke the 1973 ruling, as well as other protections in place for reproductive rights. In her mind, “the fact that aboriton remains a battleground in this society bespeaks a deep-seated ambivalence and fear on the part of the American public towards the changes in women’s status and roles over the last 30 years.” These questions and analyses point to broader questions around reproductive justice as it connects with the overarching power structures of patriarchy and white supremacy in the United States. In a time when the Clinton administration was slashing welfare benefits, BCRW was attuned to the neoliberal idea of “family values” and how it negatively impacted reproductive health—while President Clinton vetoed a late term abortion ban in 1996, he passed many laws restricting abortion access to women in federal prison, and changed welfare laws to deny benefits to many new mothers, include rape victims and those who had children out of wedlock.

Another topic the center engaged with frequently in the ‘80s and ‘90s was lesbian motherhood and lesbian reproductive rights. In 1981 at the 8th Scholar and Feminist (The Dynamics of Control), participants gathered to hear a presentation of the paper “Lesbian Rights and the Struggle for Reproductive Freedom.” The 1986 Scholar and Feminist Conference (Women’s Images and Politics) featured a workshop titled “Lesbian Mothers ‘Choosing Children,’” and in 1988, at the Scholar and Feminist Conference dedicated to Motherhood Versus Sisterhood, partiticpants gathered to discuss “Creating Families: The Experience of Lesbians.” These events focused on the experiences of lesbians raising children, and the differences between being born into a lesbian family versus being born into a heterosexual family in which the mother eventually came out as a lesbian. Additionally, speakers at the 1988 talk emphasized that many of the questions they were asking—about male nurturing, which mother was considered the “real” mother—were specific to white family roles, and that kinship models in Black communities were very different than in white communities. Finally, at the Scholar and Feminist conference in 1996 on Our Families: A Feminist Response to the Family Value Debate, there were two workshops on lesbian families and lesbian motherhood: “Forming and Maintaining Lesbian Families” and “Lesbian Parenting: Radical or Retrograde?” These workshops raised questions about what family means in our society, and what it means to be part of a lesbian family. They engaged with questions of legality—such as access to partners and family members in the hospital, at a time when lesbian relationships were not recognized by the state—as well as if having children was a “great equalizer” that lesbians had in common with all humans, or if choosing to have children meant you were “deserting” the lesbian community and returning to heterosexual values. This string of events in the late 20th century explored how lesbians fit into the reproductive rights narrative, and what it meant for lesbians to choose to have children.

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1980s: Lesbian Sexuality While lesbians were more or less absent from conversations around women’s issues in the early 1970s, growing lesbian activism and visibility within the women’s movement meant that lesbians were able to enjoy some attention in BCRW’s programming in the 1980s. In her talk at the 1987 Scholar and Feminist Conference, writer Ginny Vida paid homage to lesbian activist milestones. One of these was the Second Congress to Unite Women in 1970, where lesbians confronted feminist organizers and declared their right to participate openly in the feminist movement. At the time, mainstream feminist political groups like the National Organization for Women (NOW) hoped to make their politics appeal to men. Seeing lesbians as a threat to the women’s movement’s image and respectability, well-known feminist and founder of NOW Betty Friedan pejoratively referred to lesbians as “the lavendar menace.” Lesbians were not considered part of the movement or invited to be on the panel at NOW’s Second Conference to Unite Women. In response, a group of lesbians decided they would interrupt the event to make themselves heard.

At the Second Congress to Unite Women, the group, who Vida referred to as “Rita Mae Brown and her cronies,” inconspicuously attended the conference wearing sweatshirts. As part of their action, they killed the lights during the conference, stood up from their seats and unzipped their sweatshirts. When the lights came back on, the audience saw women amongst them, standing up with pink shirts that read, “Lavender Menace,” on them. Meanwhile, some women from the group marched down the aisle of chairs, carrying signs that read, “Take a lesbian to lunch this week” and “Women’s liberation is a lesbian plot.” They took over the mic and began to speak on lesbian issues, such as their experiences of being institutionalized for being lesbian, and tried to push against stereotypes to appeal to the feminists in the women’s movement. Ginny Vida saw the interruption of the Second Crongress to Unite Women as a hallmark moment which marked the beginnings of lesbian visibility within the women’s movement.

As lesbians became more accepted and eventually incorporated into the mainstreams of feminist politics, lesbian issues became a topic of focus at BCRW during the 1980’s. Joan Nestle and other members of the Lesbian Herstory Archives spoke on reclaiming lesbian herstory at the Scholar and Feminist Conference in 1980. After acknowledging the implicit homophobia in the conference organizers’ treatment of her and the other representatives from the LHA, she names the other manifestations of homophobia that they face. She argued that the straight world has appropriated lesbians and lesbian identity, and that because of this, lesbians have no history and are condemned to lose their memory. She pointed out how lesbian herstory was considerred valueless by straight society. While universities pay a fortune for one letter by James Joyce, “We find our culture on sale for five cents,” she said. Not only are lesbians resigned to cultural and historic undesirability and erasure, she argued, but they are defined and overwritten by the sexologists and straight authorities who endlessly pathologize their existence. Other talks held at BCRW in this time included Lisa Duggan’s workshop, “The Social Enforcement of Heterosexuality and Lesbian Resistance in the 1920s” and “Lesbian Rights and the Struggle for Reproductive Freedom” in 1981, “Lesbianism and the Social Function of Taboo” in 1979, and “Lesbian Mothers ‘Choosing Children’” in 1986. These events marked a shift in BCRW’s feminist engagement with the topic of sex and sexuality to explicitly include and focus on lesbian experience and sexuality.

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