Event Details

End: April 17, 2023
Contact: rwheatley@historians.org

This event is part of the Washington History Seminar series. It is sponsored by the AHA and features Felicia Kornbluh and commentator Kaaryn Gustafson. Register here. 

Professor Felicia Kornbluh’s A Woman's Life is Human Life: My Mother, Our Neighbor, and the Journey from Reproductive Rights to Reproductive Justice (Grove) offers a new history of reproductive rights movements. A Woman’s Life is the first in-depth study of a campaign that decriminalized abortion in an individual state. The book alsoshows that sterilization abuse limited reproductive rights as much as criminal abortion laws limited them; Kornbluh is among the first to historicize the movement against sterilization abuse and its growth into demands for Reproductive Justice. 

Felicia Kornbluh is a writer, activist, and teacher who specializes in the histories of feminism, gender, social welfare, and reproductive politics. She is Professor of History and of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, and affiliated faculty member in Jewish Studies, at the University of Vermont and author or coauthor of three books. Kornbluh writes for scholarly and popular journals, including The American Prospect, New York Review of Books, Forward, and Washington Post. She is vice president of the board of Planned Parenthood of Vermont Action Fund. 

Kaaryn Gustafson is the Director of the Center on Law, Equality and Race and a professor of law at University of California Irvine. Her research and scholarship is interdisciplinary and explores the role of law in remedying inequality—and in reinforcing inequality. Her research over the last decade focused on the expanding administrative overlap between the welfare and criminal justice systems, as well as the experiences of those individuals and families caught in those systems. Her current research explores the history of law in regulating African American families and in regulating labor among poor people of various ethnic backgrounds.