Turning Back the Clock: Texas´ First Day After Roe v. Wade

What the Feminist Movement of the 1960s and ’70s Teaches us about the Fight for Reproductive Justice Today

By Anya Mae Lemlich and Ramy Khalil

Today, September 1, saw an unprecedented assault on the constitutional right to an abortion enshrined in the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. These rights have been attacked, undermined, and restricted before. However, today was the first day that a ban of nearly all abortions after six weeks of pregnancy went into effect in a state.

So far the Supreme Court has accepted this outcome by their inaction. They allowed restrictions before, but today they allowed a state law to go into effect that so blatantly and brutally violates pregnant people’s right to choose. The new law goes so far as to ban abortion even in cases of rape or incest.

Over the next few days the Supreme Court might — or might not — temporarily suspend the law to allow it to be reviewed in the courts. However, what is already clear is that the Texas law will encourage many more right-wing legislators to push the limits of pregnant people’s rights to control their own bodies.  It will lead to a flood of other state legislatures following Texas’ example. This is a significant advance for the right wing in their long-term drive to chip away at Roe v. Wade. 

In addition, the Supreme Court had previously announced  they will issue a ruling next spring on a Mississippi law which further threatens Roe v. Wade. It looks likely they will try to overturn — or at least weaken — Roe v. Wade. 

For the feminist movement and the whole left, this must serve as a wake-up call.

In this article below, Anya and Ramy look at the history of how women won the right to choose and the insights that history offers for today´s struggle.

Overturning Roe v. Wade has been a central goal of the right wing ever since the women’s liberation movement achieved the historic victory enshrined in this Supreme Court ruling in 1973. In fact, they’ve already succeeded in substantially eroding it: 43 states prohibit abortion after a certain point in pregnancy, Oklahoma passed a near-total abortion ban, and more state-level abortion restrictions (90) have been enacted in 2021 than in any year since 1973.

The Supreme Court justices who are threatening Roe v. Wade are the same ones who struck down the core of the historic Voting Rights Act in June at a time when Republicans are trying to pass hundreds of laws across the country restricting voting rights, disproportionately excluding working-class people and people of color.

One way to stop the threat would be to expand the Supreme Court. Congress, controlled by Democrats,  has the power to expand the court and appoint a progressive majority. Biden set up a commission to study this, but according to the New York Times (June 18, 2021), since Biden took office, he has not even uttered the word “abortion” once. It’s clear that the Democratic leadership has no intention of expanding the court or building a movement to defend Roe v. Wade.

This leaves us only one option — to organize a wave of enormous grassroots protests, including a massive march on Washington. Activists need to demand that the leaders of the National Organization for Women (NOW), Planned Parenthood, unions, the Poor People’s Campaign, DSA, Bernie, the Squad, and others issue a united call for escalating national days of action. A mass campaign needs to not only defend Roe v. Wade, but go on the offensive: demanding a repeal of abortion restrictions, a Medicare for All system that includes free abortion and reproductive healthcare, and more.

In fact, this has been done before. We can learn a lot from the mass protests that feminists organized in the 1960s and ’70s which successfully pressured the Supreme Court to pass Roe v. Wade, despite the conservative majority on the court at that time.

Abortion before Roe v. Wade

Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, oppressed and working-class people around the world rose up demanding equality, self-determination, and socialism. Colonized people revolted and overthrew imperialist powers, ten million workers in France brought the country to a halt in the 1968 General Strike, and in Czechoslovakia, workers rose up against Stalinism to demand genuine democratic socialism. In the US, the Black freedom movement shook society, millions protested the Vietnam War, and wildcat strikes swept the country in the early ’70s.

Amidst the rapid radicalization sweeping society, women in the US began openly talking about gender oppression and organizing for their own freedom, in what was originally called the women’s liberation movement and later termed the second-wave feminist movement.

This movement was cross-class and multi-racial, and encompassed a mix of different strategies and theories of change, often conflicting but coming together in shared fights. While the movement put forward a range of demands, the right to legal abortion emerged as a central one (alongside free childcare and equal opportunity) because women understood that they could never be free without control over their reproductive lives.

Planned Parenthood, NOW, unions, Bernie, the Squad, and others need to issue a united call for nationwide protests to defend Roe v. Wade.

Abortions have always occurred throughout human history, whether under safe conditions or not. Abortion was first outlawed in feudal Europe during the early rise of capitalism, but it wasn’t banned in the US until the mid-19th century. In the US, approximately one million women had abortions annually before the procedure was legalized in 1973, resulting in the deaths of some 5,000 women every year.¹

It was hard to tell whether an abortionist would use safe anesthesia and sterile instruments or whether they knew how to perform an abortion safely. Many people, with no other option, administered self-induced abortions with coat hangers or other sharp objects.

Approximately a third of the million people having abortions each year had to be hospitalized for complications.² When complications developed, women would often delay medical treatment for fear of criminal charges.

In Leslie Reagan’s book, When Abortion Was a Crime, a woman recounts a story of a college classmate who had an abortion: “She was too frightened to tell anyone what she had done. So when she developed complications, she tried to take care of it herself. She locked herself in the bathroom between two dorm rooms and quietly bled to death.”³

The criminalization of abortion disproportionately forced lower-income women and women of color into these dangerous situations. Rich women, however, could afford safe abortions by paying a private doctor exorbitant fees or traveling to a country where abortion was legal.

Underground networks of activists, doctors, lawyers, and welfare rights groups risked arrest to direct women to physicians who would perform safe abortions. Abortion rights supporters had been persistently lobbying the government to legalize abortion under certain conditions but made very little progress — until the women’s liberation movement exploded onto the streets in the late ’60s.⁴

Rising Expectations

The growing number of women working outside the home and the rising yet unfulfilled expectations of the post-war economic up­swing were crucial factors that contributed to the emergence of the women’s liberation movement. Working outside the home and earning their own money increased women’s economic independence, confidence, and collective consciousness.

World Wars I and II as well as the massive postwar economic expansion drew record numbers of women into the waged workforce. During WWII, the US government opened 3,000 federally subsidized, affordable childcare centers in 49 states to induce women, primarily married white women, to work in factories while men fought the war. After the war ended, the government and corporations used different mechanisms to try and push women back into the home, often refusing to rehire them. The government shut down the childcare centers, and waged a massive propaganda campaign glorifying the joys of motherhood and home-making as women’s duty in the fight against “communism.”

But many working-class women, especially women of color, couldn’t afford to stay home. They often had to take underpaid and undervalued care sector jobs — cleaners, nurses, secretaries, school teachers, restaurant workers — where they faced constant disrespect and humiliation. The median income of working women in 1960 was only about one-third that of men.⁵

Rising living standards and the opening of college doors to women in order to satisfy corporations’ demands for more skilled managers and professionals raised women’s expectations that they could improve their lives through college and a career. However, many women still found doors slammed in their faces by sexist cultural norms and a capitalist system resistant to change.

A Cross-Class, Multi-Racial Movement

Betty Friedan, a left and labor journalist, was one of the first to put words to the depression, isolation, and loneliness that many women faced in the home. In 1963, she published The Feminist Mystique, and in 1966, she co-founded the National Organization for Women (NOW). Both her book and the emergence of NOW are often viewed by historians as the start of the second-wave feminist movement.

NOW campaigned primarily on employment discrimination, filing over 1,000 lawsuits against corporations, many of which were victorious. The surge of new activists was reflected in NOW’s membership figures, which grew by leaps and bounds from 300 in 1966 to 40,000 in 1974.⁶

NOW’s liberal leadership did not want to challenge capitalism; instead they sought an equal place for women within the system. This political agenda meant they often focused on demands that were most immediately impactful to middle-class, white, and straight women. They tried to push radical groups away, for fear they would jeopardize the movement. Friedan famously referred to lesbians as the “lavender menace” — which some lesbians then reclaimed, forming a group by that name to organize for lesbian visibility and liberation.

Contrary to some contemporary critiques of the second-wave feminist movement, organizations like NOW and their primarily middle-class and white membership were not the only active ones, nor were they always the most influential. Socialist, working-class, lesbian, POC, and Black women organized to fight for their interests as well. But they rarely coalesced into a shared movement: as Sharon Smith writes in her book Women and Socialism, “there were a number of different women’s movements that progressed on parallel tracks, largely separated not only on the basis of politics but also on the basis of race, sexuality and class.”   

The National Welfare Rights Organization was founded in 1966, and had around 25,000 members at their peak in 1969, most of whom were Black. One of their organizers, Johnnie Tillmon, argued that women should be paid a living wage for the child-raising and housekeeping work they were already doing. She wrote, “For a lot of middle-class women in this country, Women’s Liberation is a matter of concern. For women on welfare it’s a matter of survival.”

After participating in union struggles for decades, women escalated the struggle in the 1960s against sexist conditions in their workplaces. In 1968, domestic workers — predominantly Black women — created the National Domestic Workers Union. In 1972, flight attendants launched the Stewardesses for Women’s Rights, an organization that used a variety of militant tactics, including slow-downs and sick-outs, to win demands against objectification. Clerical workers, who faced degradation, humiliation, and harassment at work — exemplified in the classic 1980 film 9 to 5 — formed unions.

Feminist groups sprung up around the country to take matters of sexual assault and domestic violence into their own hands. People created rape crisis centers, rape hotlines, and domestic violence shelters.

Socialists and Marxists were active in the movement, forming their own organizations and/or joining others, the largest of which was a socialist-feminist organization called the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union. They created an abortion-providing group called the Jane Collective, which provided safe procedures to primarily working-class people. They also created Women Employed, which lobbied for decent wages and working conditions, and DARE (Direct Action for Rights in Employment) which campaigned against unfair labor practices against women janitors. And they created the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse, an issue for predominantly poor women and women of color, who maintained that reproductive justice included the right to choose to have children, not just the right to choose not to.

Mass movements, like the women’s liberation movement, can grow quite quickly and affect dramatic social change.

Many women also fought sexism that existed within the “New Left.” Similarly, women of color experienced racism within the feminist movement, and some women of color decided to form their own separate organizations. In 1973 the National Black Feminist Organization was created in New York, and in 1977 a group of Black feminists launched the Combahee River Collective, who coined the term “identity politics.”

Women’s Liberation

Beginning in 1967, young radical women came together to form local groups to discuss their oppression, breaking apart stereotypes and ideas that were previously normalized as natural or biological. By 1969, this practice had spread to over 40 cities and had a name — consciousness-raising. As Jenny Brown puts it, “consciousness-raising was the program of the 1960’s women’s liberation movement… It was responsible for really spreading women’s liberation across the country by 1970.”

In consciousness-raising groups, women questioned unequal gender roles and talked frankly about sexual issues which had been hidden causes for shame and embarrassment, turning depression into anger and building self-confidence and strength together. They began openly speaking about rape and abortion, masturbation, and menstruation. They gave language to phenomena like “rape culture” and “sexual harassment.” The phrase “the personal is political” originated with these groups, describing how events happening to people in the “private” sphere were shared experiences, common, and systemic.

Women’s liberation groups also debated strategies for the movement. Many considered NOW’s emphasis on courtroom tactics too conservative. Instead, they organized demonstrations in the streets and took direct action to confront instances of sexism, making far-reaching demands for changing society.

One powerful organizing tool was a “speak-out” where people publicly shared stories about their abortion experiences. A group called Redstockings in New York, after protesting at a state hearing about reforming abortion laws in which men and one nun were the only “experts” asked to testify, organized their own hearing where the real experts, women who had had an abortion, spoke. The practice spread. One activist explained that their speak-out was “unbelievably successful and it turned out to be an incredible organizing tool. It brought abortion out of the closet where it had been hidden in secrecy and shame. It informed the public that most women were having abortions anyway. People spoke from their hearts.”⁷

Direct action and pressure campaigns proliferated across the country. In New York, feminists testified before the legislature distributing copies of their model abortion law — a blank piece of paper.⁸ In Washington State in 1970, grassroots and socialist organizations campaigned for a state-wide ballot initiative to legalize abortion. They door-knocked, leafleted, held rallies, and sold 10,000 copies of a pamphlet titled “One in Four of Us Have Had or Will Have an Abortion,” which helped convince 56 percent of voters to vote for the initiative.

While many socialist-feminist and radical groups were small, they often pushed NOW and other mainstream organizations to the left. As more women became active and outspoken, NOW began to incorporate more assertive tactics, like protests and mass actions. In 1968 they succeeded in ending sex-segregated job listings in newspapers by combining lawsuits with mass actions.

Striking Back

Each new victory scored by the women’s movement embittered the right-wing anti-feminist opposition, spearheaded by the Catholic Church hierarchy along with evangelical Protestant leaders. In 1971, a bipartisan majority in Congress voted for the Comprehensive Child Development Act, which would have made the government responsible for providing childcare for all children. Yet the right wing pressured President Nixon to veto, scoring a major victory.

In his veto message, Nixon described the act as “the most radical piece of legislation to emerge from the 93rd Congress,” and said it would “commit the vast moral authority of the national government to the side of communal approaches to child-rearing” and “would lead to the Sovietization of American children.”⁹

In response to the “New Right” backlash, NOW called a national Women’s Strike for Equality. Held on August 26, 1970, it commemorated the 50th anniversary of the day women won the right to vote.

100,000 women marched, picketed, protested, and held teach-ins, skits, and domestic strikes across the country.

A debate opened up among activists about what the demands of the women’s strike should be. Liberal middle-class elements in the movement limited their demands to the legal right to abortion, childcare, and equal employment opportunities.¹⁰ Socialists and working-class women wanted more — free abortion on demand, free 24-hour community-controlled childcare, and equal pay for equal work.¹¹

Socialist feminists rejected the supposedly more “realistic and practical” call for reforming the existing abortion laws, for which previous abortion rights activists had been lobbying for years without success. Instead, they insisted on the full repeal of all laws limiting a woman’s right to abortion, as well as government funding for abortion to make it free and accessible.¹³

The popularity of these more radical demands caused NOW and the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws/National Abortion Rights Action League, (NARAL, founded in 1969) to call for the abolition of all laws restricting abortion — the first mainstream organizations to do so.

Socialist ideas were a strong influence in the movement. Many looked to the 1917 Russian Revolution, for example, which brought to power the first government in the world to establish free abortion, free community-run childcare, and equal pay for equal work, as well as free socialized healthcare and the decriminalization of divorce and homosexuality.

The two wings carried their different banners together in the largest women’s rights demonstrations since the suffrage movement.¹⁴ 100,000 women marched, picketed, protested, and held teach-ins, skits, and domestic strikes across the country. In New York City, protesters hung a banner on the Statue of Liberty which read, “Women of the World Unite.”¹⁵

Political Balance in Society Shifts

Although the feminist movement never reached the massive size of the Black freedom movement, hundreds of local protests demanding the legalization of abortion took place between 1969 and 1973.16 Court actions to do away with laws against abortion began in over 20 states between 1968 and 1970.¹⁷

By the early ’70s, the movement’s persistent demand for legalizing abortion without any restrictions compelled 11 state governments to liberalize their abortion laws, allowing the procedure under certain conditions.¹⁸

Despite these concessions, socialist feminists continued to insist on free abortion to prevent market forces from getting in the way of women’s needs. In New York, for example, the availability of abortion attracted women from all over the country, driving the price of abortion through the roof, making it less accessible to lower-income women and women of color.¹⁹

Finally, on January 22, 1973 the Supreme Court issued its historic Roe v. Wade ruling, striking down all state laws prohibiting abortion during the first three months of pregnancy.

This crucial victory took place under the administration of President Richard Nixon — a conservative Republican adamantly opposed to abortion — and a Supreme Court with a majority of Republican appointees. Nixon had insisted only two years before: “Unrestricted abortion policies, or abortion on demand, I cannot square with my personal belief in the sanctity of human life — including the life of the yet unborn.”²⁰ (The New York Women’s Strike Coalition replied: “We will grant Mr. Nixon the freedom to take care of his uterus if he will let us take care of ours.”)²¹

The past 50 years show that reforms won under capitalism will always be temporary.

Activists’ persistent organizing had shifted public opinion in favor of the right of women to decide whether and when to have an abortion. By 1969, 64 percent of Americans considered the decision on abortion a private matter, and in 1976, 63 percent of women supported efforts “to strengthen and change the status of women in society.”23

Lessons for Today

The women’s liberation movement transformed public and private life for women: the cultural and political change was reflected in legal wins, like Roe v. Wade, as well as literature, art, higher education, and daily life. The explosive growth of this movement disproves the idea put forward by many liberals — then and now — that change only happens gradually, step-by-step. Mass movements, like the women’s liberation movement, can grow quite quickly, and can affect dramatic social change.

Victories like Roe v. Wade were not handed down by enlightened judges or politicians from either party, but won in spite of them. Feminists had to fight hard for these gains by building their own independent mass movement and large-scale protests. The courts, laws, and political system are not immune from mass pressure; they do respond to shifts in public opinion, and activists can sway them by building mass protest movements which convince and inspire the majority of working-class people.

This was demonstrated again by two marches on Washington in 1989 that drew a total of 900,000 people and another protest of over 500,000 in 1992 which impacted the Supreme Court’s 1989 Webster ruling and its 1992 Casey ruling. The Court’s Casey majority opinion admitted: “A decision to overrule Roe … under the existing circumstances would address error, if error there was, at the cost of both profound and unnecessary damage to the Court’s legitimacy.” Translated — criminalizing abortion would lead to a massive backlash and undermine the legitimacy of the Court, due to widespread public support for abortion rights.²⁴

The feminist movement would not have been as successful if it had not been part of a broader upswell of mass working-class struggles, expressed in Black freedom struggles, the anti-war movement, and a wave of wildcat strikes in the early 1970s. The ruling class, worried about a threat to the capitalist system itself, was compelled to grant concessions — substantial reforms — to these movements, to protect the integrity of their system as a whole.

Unfortunately, however, the feminist movement was not prepared for the unceasing attacks on women’s and workers’ rights since the rise of neo-liberalism, the Reagan era, and the rightward shift of the Democrats. The right to abortion has been steadily eroded since 1973, most immediately with the passage of the Hyde Amendment in 1977, which banned the use of federal funds for abortions (signed into law by Democratic President Jimmy Carter). Though abortion was still legal, this severely restricted working-class women from accessing it.

Fifteen years later, the Supreme Court further weakened Roe v. Wade with the ruling in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which — while upholding the decision in Roe — allowed states to adopt restrictions on abortion in the first trimester. That opened the door for one restriction after another. Despite very effective direct action to defend abortion clinics from right-wing violence, the religious right’s unswerving legislative attacks on abortion has meant that it is almost impossible for working-class women in many states to access any abortion services. The legal right to an abortion is valuable, but it’s not enough if abortion and reproductive services are not also accessible and affordable.

Some radical feminists, reacting to their anger at a sexist society, viewed men as the enemy of women and argued that men had nothing to gain by taking part in the feminist movement. Proposals for separatist communities (women living separately from men) sprung up, sometimes by lesbians as a response to homophobia within the movement. Yet these ideas pitted working-class women and men against one another, and made it harder for the feminist movement to grow. Although the movement won many gains, its appeal was limited by both the liberals and many radicals’ failure to adopt a socialist class-struggle program that could bring together all working-class people by asserting that working-class men would also gain from ending sexist oppression, and by linking the fight for gender justice to the fight for economic justice.

We can learn from socialists’ insistence on calling for far-reaching changes. The radicals’ bold, unapologetic case for free abortion on demand with no restrictions raised the confidence of millions of people and changed the terms of public debate. This stands in stark contrast to the apologetic, timid defense of abortion by today’s leaders of NOW, NARAL, and Planned Parenthood, who continually preach “moderation” and “realism.”

A working-class political party would help unite progressive movements against the capitalist elite and all forms of oppression.

Our feminist movement today can bring back the still-powerful demands of the socialists of the 1970s. The new political platform adopted by Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), for example, calls for free abortion on demand, the repeal of all laws restricting abortion, universal childcare, and an end to forced sterilization. DSA, along with other feminist groups, should wage campaigns around these demands, bringing together a concerted national fight, particularly while the Supreme Court is reviewing a case that threatens, yet again, to weaken or overturn Roe v Wade.

And we can learn from the creative, wide-ranging tactics of the second-wave feminists. All sorts of direct actions, public skits, debates, marches, and protests are at our disposal, made even more accessible through modern technology. The #MeToo movement has been a powerful example of the effect that mass speak-outs can have on public consciousness and their ability to effect change.

The experience of the past 50 years shows that reforms won under capitalism will always be temporary and partial. The ruling class can be compelled to make certain concessions (such as legalizing abortion) under the pressure of mass movements, but as soon as these movements subside, the capitalists will move to roll back the reforms. We must build not only periodic protests but ongoing broad mass organizations that can lead a sustained movement against the ruling elite. In particular a working-class political party would be able to unite progressive movements together against the ruling class and set our sights on overthrowing the capitalist system itself.

Anya Mae Lemlich is a food service worker and a socialist feminist activist. Ramy Khalil is a history teacher and a member of the Seattle Education Association.

Endnotes

1 Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open (New York: Penguin, 2000), p. 52.

2 Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, first edition, 1995), p. 499.

3 Leslie Reagan, When Abortion Was a Crime (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 197.

4 Rosen, p. 157.

5 Zinn, p. 494.

6 Sherry Wolfe, Sharon Smith, & Elizabeth Schulte, Abortion Rights: Lessons for a New Struggle, International Socialist Organization, 2001, p. 16.

7 Rosen, p. 158.

8 Rosen, p. 158.

9 Rosen, p. 90.

10 Rosen, p. 92.

11 Rosen, p. 92.

12  Rosen, p. 158.

13 Rosen, p. 158.

14 Rosen, p. 92.

15 Rosen, p. 92.

16 Wolf, Smith, & Schulte, p. 17.

17 Zinn, p. 499-500.

18 Rosen, p. 158.

19 Ellen Frankfort, Vaginal Politics (NY: Quadrangle, 1972), p. 36.

20 Judith Hole & Ellen Levine, Rebirth of Feminism: (NY: Quadrangle/NY Times Book Company, 1970), p. 293.

21 Hole & Levine, p. 293.

22 Zinn, p. 500.

23  Sara Evans, Personal Politics (NY: Random House, 1979), p. 221.

24 SocialistAlternative.org/support-naders-campaign-for-president/defending-womens-abortion-rights/