CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Within the nook of a ground-floor gallery at Harvard’s Schlesinger Library on the Historical past of Girls in America sits a small plexiglass case, holding two cowboy hats.
One was the signature headgear of Flo Kennedy, the firebrand feminist lawyer and activist. The opposite belonged to Mildred Jefferson, a onetime president of the Nationwide Proper to Life Committee.
One is brown suede, the opposite is white straw — a coloration distinction which may appear to represent the stark polarities of the abortion debate.
However “The Age of Roe,” a brand new exhibition right here, goals to interrupt down any easy understanding of how the Supreme Courtroom’s 1973 resolution in Roe v. Wade has formed America.
The present, within the works since 2020, was initially going to be known as “Roe at 50.” However then the Supreme Courtroom’s resolution in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in June struck down the constitutional proper to abortion, and Roe was lifeless at 49.
“It was a bizarre time to be curating an exhibit,” Mary Ziegler, the exhibition curator, mentioned in a phone interview. “Since Dobbs — and I embody myself right here — it’s been a really emotional time. There’s been loads of warmth, and never loads of gentle.”
Dobbs, Ziegler mentioned, didn’t materially change a lot concerning the exhibition, past the title. And that title is supposed to boost a query.
“Have we entered a brand new period, or not?” she mentioned. “And if we have now, what can we make of the previous one?”
Debate over abortion might pervade our politics. Nevertheless it’s a topic few museums have tackled. The Whitney Museum of American Artwork solely just lately acquired its first portray associated to it. And at historic establishments, the charged politics across the concern might scare museum administrators off.
Abortion, mentioned Jane Kamensky, a professor of historical past at Harvard and the Schlesinger’s college director, is “a problem of lightning-rod depth.” However questions of replica are central to the lives of ladies, she mentioned, and to the library’s tutorial mission.
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“For those who stay on the third rail,” she mentioned, “what else are you able to do however attempt to use that electrical energy to light up?”
The exhibition represents greater than an period in American historical past. It additionally displays the persevering with evolution of the Schlesinger, which dates its origins to 1943, when the suffragist Maud Wood Park donated her girls’s rights assortment to Radcliffe School, her alma mater. (Harvard School didn’t admit girls till the Seventies.) Its amassing accelerated within the Sixties as each the ladies’s motion and the sphere of ladies’s historical past had been exploding.
At present, the library’s 4,400 separate archival collections embody the data of the Nationwide Abortion Rights Motion League and the Nationwide Group for Girls, in addition to the papers of advocates like Bill Baird, a pioneering reproductive rights activist who in 1965 opened one of many first abortion-referral clinics in america.
The Schlesinger has lengthy held some papers from conservative girls, like Jefferson, the anti-abortion activist (and the primary African American lady to graduate from Harvard Medical College).
However in recent times, the library has pushed to broaden its holdings, trying past what Kamensky has known as its predominantly upper-middle-class, liberal, “Acela hall” perspective to incorporate extra radical women, girls of coloration and conservative women.
The exhibition attracts deeply from an enormous assortment acquired final 12 months from the Sisters of Life, a Roman Catholic order based in 1991 by Cardinal John Joseph O’Connor of New York to “promote life” and discourage abortion and euthanasia. Their holdings, largely amassed by the anti-abortion activist Joseph R. Stanton, had been stored within the order’s convent within the Bronx, with restricted entry for students.
Ziegler, who drew on the gathering for her latest ebook “Dollars for Life: The Anti-Abortion Motion and the Fall of the Republican Institution,” helped carry it to the Schlesinger, after prolonged discussions.
“Traditionally, some archives, particularly girls’s archives, have tended to gather extra from progressive organizations,” Ziegler mentioned. For conservatives, she mentioned, “this will create a suggestions loop of distrust.”
The Sisters of Life acquisition, Kamensky mentioned, could also be “difficult” for some within the archival group, together with on the Schlesinger. However she mentioned {that a} full understanding of the historical past of American girls requires trying past the normal liberal-feminist body.
“With pro-life activism, we have a tendency to know it from the surface in,” she mentioned. “The dynamics of our personal second reveals us how inadequate that’s.”
The fabric on show is especially pictures, fliers, letters, clippings and indicators. However on one wall, reverse the doorway, is a diptych that makes the bodily actuality and pitched stakes of abortion viscerally clear.
To the left of a window, there’s a big painted cross. From a distance, it might appear to replicate spiritual objections to abortion. Come nearer, and it seems to be the “cross of oppression” Baird carried when he protested exterior anti-abortion conventions.
To the fitting is a case with an array of obstetric devices, together with packing containers of the abortion medicines which have more and more taken the process out of clinics and into the house.
For some guests, the wall textual content reads, the show might illustrate how abortion has develop into “safer, much less time-consuming and fewer invasive.” Others may even see “proof of against the law or devices of violence.” The doubtless sturdy responses underline one in all Ziegler’s foremost targets: hold the story private, and let guests react.
“The concept was to raise up voices you don’t often hear, significantly individuals most intimately related, and never editorialize loads,” mentioned Ziegler, a legislation professor on the College of California, Davis, who has contributed opinion essays to The New York Instances.
The exhibition begins with a small show about abortion activism earlier than Roe. Throughout a tour final week, Jenny Gotwals, the library’s curator for gender and society, identified fliers with the now-familiar phrases “proper to decide on” and “a lady’s proper.” In a close-by picture, a person at a 1971 anti-abortion protest in Massachusetts holds an indication studying “Abortion is Homicide!”
“It’s actually a snapshot of the rhetoric,” Gotwals mentioned.
Wall projections of generally wrenching letters give totally different views of the expertise behind the slogans. However one of many present’s most placing shows is fully devoid of individuals.
Close to the wall projections, an array of pictures present interiors from an abortion clinic in Hempstead, N.Y., established by Baird, a former pharmaceutical government.
The empty ready space bears an eerie resemblance to the lounge on “The Brady Bunch.” Captions clarify that the images had been taken in 1980, following repairs after a firebombing.
The exhibition additionally explores how the fault traces of race and sophistication minimize throughout the talk. Some objects, like a press release from the Combahee River Collective, present how abortion has been seen as a method of autonomy and liberty for Black girls, who’ve generally rejected the rhetoric of “selection” in favor of requires “reproductive justice.” Different objects denounce abortion as a instrument of racial genocide, and an ethical crime akin to slavery.
For a lot of poor girls, Roe itself was no assure of something. A flier in Spanish advertises a vigil for Rosie Jiminez, mentioned to be the primary lady to die from an unsterile abortion after the passage in 1976 of the Hyde Amendment, which forbids Medicaid funding for abortions.
The present additionally captures how the social gathering politics of abortion have hardened for the reason that Seventies, when neither social gathering, a wall textual content notes, had a transparent place on abortion. The connection between abortion and faith has additionally shifted.
Initially, the Roman Catholic Church (which fielded most early anti-abortion activists) “largely downplayed questions of religion round abortion,” a wall textual content says. And till the late ’70s, when white evangelicals embraced the anti-abortion trigger, the Southern Baptist Conference supported a restricted proper to abortion.
In a small audiovisual gallery, a loop of archival footage brings some pungently theatrical blasts from the previous. One clip reveals Kennedy, the cowboy-hatted activist, main a feminist “avenue stroll” round St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York Metropolis, singing in-your-face (and unprintable) feminist anthems.
One other captures the second in 1985 when Ronald Reagan called in to encourage a rally of anti-abortion protesters getting ready to march from Los Angeles to Washington. “It’s a battle we’re going to win,” he mentioned.
That pitched battle continues. Nevertheless it’s undergirded, the exhibition notes, by a paradox. Whilst social gathering polarization round abortion has widened, public opinion has “remained strikingly stable, with most People supportive of a proper to abortion with some restrictions.”
The present’s aim isn’t to vary anybody’s thoughts, however to “substitute dogmatism and beliefs with curiosity and discovery,” Kamensky mentioned.
“I hope individuals come away saying some model of ‘I didn’t know that,” she mentioned.