Byllye Avery

Last updated

Byllye Avery
Born (1937-10-20) October 20, 1937 (age 85)
Waynesville, Georgia, U.S.
Alma mater University of Florida
Talladega College
Known forNational Black Women's Health Project

Byllye Yvonne Avery (born October 20, 1937) is an American health care activist. A proponent of reproductive justice, Avery has worked to develop healthcare services and education that address black women's mental and physical health stressors. [1] She is best known as the founder of the National Black Women's Health Project, the first national organization to specialize in Black women's reproductive health issues. For her work with the NBWHP, she has received the MacArthur Foundation's Fellowship for Social Contribution and the Gustav O. Lienhard Award for the Advancement of Health Care from the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, among other awards. [2]

Contents

Family and education

Avery was born in Waynesville, Georgia and grew up on a farm in DeLand, Florida. She is the daughter of L. Alyce M. Ingram, a schoolteacher. [1] Her mother graduated of Bethune-Cookman College. Her father, Quitman Reddick, owned a neighborhood store. He was killed when Avery was 14 years old. The oldest of three children, Avery assumed a lot of responsibility from a young age. [3]

Avery attended college at Talladega College and earned her BA in psychology in 1959. [1] She met her husband, Wesley Avery, while at Talladega College and they married in 1960. [1]

In 1967, Avery received a fellowship to obtain her master's in special education at the University of Florida Gainesville. Upon earning her M.Ed. in 1969, [4] she became a special education teacher. In 1970, only a few months after starting her new position, her husband suffered a fatal heart attack. He was only thirty-three years old and it was discovered after his death that he had very high blood pressure. At the time she was also pregnant with their third child. The death of her husband helped catalyze Avery's commitment to improving health care and health education in the Black community. [3] [5]

Avery met her wife, Ngina Lythcott, in 1989, and the two were married in 2005. Lythcott is a public health practitioner and activist.

Activism

In the early 1970s Avery began participating in consciousness-raising groups and legal abortion referral services. In response to the lack of access to abortion and other reproductive health needs that low-income Black women faced in her community, Avery and her colleagues Joan Edelson, Judy Levy, and Margaret Parrish opened the Gainesville Women's Health Center (GWHC) in 1974. [5] [6] It was the first abortion and gynecological care clinic in the city. [1] They opened these facilities after a petition to open a Planned Parenthood clinic in Gainesville was denied. [1] The GWHC mission statement was to "help women solve the crisis-producing situation of unplanned, unwanted pregnancy", at a low cost. [7] The clinic provided abortions and contraceptive services, facilitated sexuality workshops, and provided other women's health-related training and services tailored to Black women, such as sickle cell anemia testing. To help educate women on best health services, the staff created a monthly newsletter called Sage-Femme.

In 1978, Avery helped to found Birthplace, an alternative birthing center in Gainesville. Certified nurse-midwives assisted women with deliveries and Avery personally assisted in the birth of one hundred patients before her departure. [1]

In 1981, while serving on the board of directors for National Women's Health Network, Avery started a two-year long project called the Black Women's Health Project. As part of this project, Avery planned The Conference of Black Women's Health Issues which was held at Spelman College in June 1983. [8] Two thousand women attended the three-day event. Topics included domestic violence, diabetes, sexual abuse, obesity, sexuality, childbirth, mental health as well as holistic wellness. It encouraged attendees to take charge of their health through consciousness-raising, community organizing around health issues, and self-examination. [1] Following the conference, Avery founded National Black Women's Health Project, now known as the Black Women's Health Imperative, officially in 1984 in Atlanta, Georgia. [9] It is the only national organization exclusively dedicated to improving health and wellness among Black women. NBWHP opened an advocacy and policy office in Washington, D.C. in 1991. By 1991, the NBWHP had chapters in twenty-five states and had expanded its reach to work with women in Belize, Jamaica, South Africa, Nigeria, and Brazil. [1]

Recalling the negative attitudes she was taught about sex as a child, Avery taught her daughters to celebrate their bodies and menstruation. When her first daughter turned eleven, Avery gave her a cake that read "Happy Birthday, Happy Menstruation!" [10] Soon after, she gave a workshop on menstruation and childbearing at her daughter's elementary school that she developed into a film On Becoming a Woman: Mothers and Daughters Talking to Each Other [11] (1987), the first documentary film by African-American women sharing their perspectives on menstruation, sex, and love. [12] [1]

Along with prominent African-American leaders such as Shirley Chisholm, Maxine Waters, Dorothy Height, and Faye Wattleton, issued and signed a public statement, "We Remember: African American Women for Reproductive Freedom", in 1989. [13] The statement supports reproductive freedom (including the right to have children, the right to access to contraceptive services and reproductive health information, and the right to health care as well as safe and legal abortions.) The statement connected racism, poverty, and violence to negative reproductive health outcomes for African American women. The statement was reprinted repeatedly and eventually circulated over 250,000 copies. The statement can still be found in many anthologies on women's rights and activism. [1] Avery was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship this same year in the area of health policy. [14]

In 1990, Avery, along with fifteen other African-American women and men, formed the African-American Women for Reproductive Freedom. The organization was created to end the stigma against abortions in the Black community and to make abortions more accessible for Black women. [15]

Avery has written and lectured widely on how race, class and sex impact women's healthcare. She has called the health discrepancies between African-American and white women a "conspiracy of silence". [16] She has been a visiting fellow at the Harvard University School of Public Health; she has served on the Charter Advisory Committee for the Office of Research on Women's Health of the National Institutes of Health; she has been a health issues advisor for the Kellogg Foundation's International Leadership Program; and she has served as a consultant on women's healthcare in Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa. [17]

Awards and recognition

Selected Bibliography

Related Research Articles

Reproductive rights are legal rights and freedoms relating to reproduction and reproductive health that vary amongst countries around the world. The World Health Organization defines reproductive rights as follows:

Reproductive rights rest on the recognition of the basic right of all couples and individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing and timing of their children and to have the information and means to do so, and the right to attain the highest standard of sexual and reproductive health. They also include the right of all to make decisions concerning reproduction free of discrimination, coercion and violence.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Barbara Smith</span> American activist and academic (born 1946)

Barbara Smith is an American lesbian feminist and socialist who has played a significant role in Black feminism in the United States. Since the early 1970s, she has been active as a scholar, activist, critic, lecturer, author, and publisher of Black feminist thought. She has also taught at numerous colleges and universities for 25 years. Smith's essays, reviews, articles, short stories and literary criticism have appeared in a range of publications, including The New York Times Book Review, The Black Scholar, Ms., Gay Community News, The Guardian, The Village Voice, Conditions and The Nation. She has a twin sister, Beverly Smith, who is also a lesbian feminist activist and writer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Florynce Kennedy</span> American lawyer, feminist, and activist (1916–2000)

Florynce Rae Kennedy was an American lawyer, radical feminist, civil rights advocate, lecturer, and activist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Faye Wattleton</span> American activist

Faye Wattleton is an American reproductive rights activist who was the first African American and the youngest president ever elected of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and the first woman since Margaret Sanger to hold the position. She is currently Co-founder & Director at EeroQ, a quantum computing company. She is best known for her contributions to family planning and reproductive health, and the reproductive rights movement.

Reproductive justice is a critical feminist framework that was invented as a response to United States reproductive politics. The three core values of reproductive justice are the right to have a child, the right to not have a child, and the right to parent a child or children in safe and healthy environments. The framework moves women's reproductive rights past a legal and political debate to incorporate the economic, social, and health factors that impact women's reproductive choices and decision-making ability.

Beverly Smith in Cleveland, Ohio, is a Black feminist health advocate, writer, academic, theorist and activist who is also the twin sister of writer, publisher, activist and academic Barbara Smith. Beverly Smith is an instructor of Women's Health at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Merle Hoffman</span>

Merle Hoffman is an American journalist and activist.

Black Women's Health Imperative, previously the National Black Women's Health Project, was formed in 1983 in Atlanta, Georgia out of a need to address the health and reproductive rights of African American women. NBWHP was principally founded by Byllye Avery. Avery was involved in reproductive healthcare work in Gainesville, Florida in the 1970s and was particularly influenced by the impact that policy had on women of color and poor women. Additionally Avery was also concerned with healthcare choices and wanted "to provide an environment where women could feel comfortable and take control of their own health".

African-American Women for Reproductive Freedom was an American-based reproductive rights organization that formed in 1990. The organization developed as a way for African American women to show support for "Jane Roe" in Roe vs. Wade. Faye Wattleton was one of the first major supporters of the organization.

African Americans', or Black Americans', access and use of birth control are central to many social, political, cultural and economic issues in the United States. Birth control policies in place during American slavery and the Jim Crow era highly influenced Black attitudes toward reproductive management methods. Other factors include African-American attitudes towards family, sex and reproduction, religious views, social support structures, black culture, and movements towards bodily autonomy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Loretta Ross</span> African American activist, writer and teacher on reproductive justice

Loretta J. Ross is an African American academic, feminist, and activist who advocates for reproductive justice, especially among women of color. As an activist, Ross has written on reproductive justice activism and the history of African American women.

The women's health movementin the United States refers to the aspect of the American feminist movement that works to improve all aspects of women's healthcare. It began during the second wave of feminism as a sub-movement of the women's liberation movement. WHM activism involves increasing women's knowledge and control of their own bodies on a variety of subjects, such as fertility control and home remedies, as well as challenging traditional doctor-patient relationships, the medicalization of childbirth, misogyny in the health care system, and ensuring drug safety.

Monica Simpson is a queer Black activist, artist, and executive director of SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, the United States' largest organization dedicated to reproductive justice for women of color.

The SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, also known as SisterSong, is a national activist organization dedicated to reproductive justice for women of color.

Luz Rodriguez is a Puerto Rican reproductive rights advocate.

Latina Roundtable on Health and Reproductive Rights (LRHRR) was a Latina reproductive rights organization based in New York City.

Jenny Brown is an organizer in the women's liberation movement and the author of several books on feminism, reproductive rights, and labor. She works with National Women's Liberation, a radical feminist organization of dues-paying women.

For the Hong Kong actress and singer, see Miriam Yeung.

Nkenge Touré is a leader in the Reproductive Justice, Anti-Racism, and Black women's health movements and a former member of the Black Panther Party.

Monica Rose McLemore is an American nurse who is an associate professor of Family Health Nursing at the University of California, San Francisco. Her work considers reproductive justice and medical care for marginalised communities, with an overarching aim to eliminate healthcare inequalities. During the COVID-19 pandemic, McLemore studied the impact of coronavirus disease during pregnancy.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Price, Kimala. "Avery, Byllye". Oxford African American Studies Center. Oxford. Retrieved February 18, 2017.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "Byllye Y. Avery". Black Women's Health Imperative. Retrieved May 7, 2020.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  3. 1 2 Loretta Ross, "Smith Voices of Feminism Oral History Project Interview with Byllye Avery". Accessed on March 25, 2018
  4. ↑ "Byllye Avery - MacArthur Foundation". www.macfound.org. Retrieved February 16, 2019.
  5. 1 2 Nebbe, Charity. "Byllye Avery: Advocate for African-American Women's Health". www.iowapublicradio.org. Retrieved February 16, 2019.
  6. ↑ Price, Kimala. "Byllye Avery". Oxford African American Studies Center. Oxford. Retrieved March 8, 2018.
  7. ↑ University of Florida Digital Collections. Accessed on April 1, 2018.
  8. ↑ "Our Story". Archived from the original on March 26, 2017. Retrieved May 7, 2020.
  9. ↑ Sillman, Jael; Fried, Marlene, Gerber; Ross, Loretta; Gutierrez, Elena R. (2004). Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice . South End Press. ISBN   978-0-89608-729-3.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  10. ↑ Love, Barbara J. (September 22, 2006). Feminists Who Changed America, 1963-1975. University of Illinois Press. ISBN   978-0-252-09747-8.
  11. ↑ On Becoming a Woman: Mothers and Daughters Talking to Each Other
  12. ↑ On becoming a woman: mothers & daughters talking together. OCLC   30694664 . Retrieved March 20, 2018– via WorldCat.
  13. ↑ "We Remember: African American Women for Reproductive Freedom" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on March 26, 2019.
  14. 1 2 Byllye Avery: Women's Healthcare Leader. MacArthur Foundation. https://www.macfound.org/fellows/357/
  15. ↑ Kathryn Cullen-DuPont (March 2018). Encyclopedia of women's history in America. Infobase Publishing. p. 6. ISBN   978-0-8160-4100-8 . Retrieved March 2, 2018.
  16. ↑ While, Evelyn C. (1994). The Black women's health book: speaking for ourselves. Seattle, WA: Seal. p. 6. ISBN   1878067400.
  17. ↑ "Neva, Goodwin. Encyclopedia of Women in American History. "Byllye Avery." Accessed on March 30, 2018.
  18. ↑ "Collection: Byllye Avery papers | Smith College Finding Aids". findingaids.smith.edu. Retrieved May 7, 2020.
  19. ↑ "Billye Avery, the first person, after Dr. Height, to receive the Dorothy I. Height Lifetime Achievement Award featured on PBS Special". stylemagazine.com. Retrieved May 7, 2020.
  20. ↑ "APHA Presidential Citation". www.apha.org. Retrieved May 7, 2020.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.