 | This article reads like a press release or a news article and may be largely based on routine coverage .(August 2021) |
Jenny Brown is an organizer in the women's liberation movement and the author of several books on feminism, reproductive rights, and labor. [1] [2] She works with National Women's Liberation, a radical feminist organization of dues-paying women. [3]
Brown began studying radical feminism with Gainesville Women's Liberation (GWL), which was founded in 1968 and was the first women's liberation group in the South. [4] [5] [6] She also worked with the Redstockings of the Women's Liberation Movement, developing the Redstockings Archives for Action, a repository of women's liberation history and activist resources. [7] [8] [9] In 2009, GWL and Redstockings collaboratively founded National Women's Liberation (NWL) and Brown became the national organizer of the new group. [10] [11]
In 2019, Brown published Birth Strike: The Hidden Fight over Women's Work, [12] in which she argues that the legal impediments to contraception and abortion access, rather than being discounted as products of prudish religious values, are better understood as a struggle over labor. The book argues that the ruling class, fearing the economic consequences of a declining birth rate, restricts access to contraception and abortion, intending to push more women into performing the labor of bearing and raising children. But women, she concludes, are engaged in a sort of labor strike––refusing to perform that labor in a world where they lack affordable healthcare, affordable childcare, paid work leave, job protections, and reliable male partners.
Brown was involved in the campaign to make Plan B, the "morning-after pill," available over-the-counter in the United States.
In 1999, the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) found Plan B safe and effective, but approved it only for prescription use. [13] In 2001, a group of reproductive health professionals petitioned the FDA to make it available over-the-counter. [14] The FDA eventually denied the petition in June 2006. [15]
Brown and other NWL activists organized against the FDA. [16] In January 2005, Brown was one of nine women arrested for a sit-in blocking access to the entrance of the FDA headquarters in Maryland, and [17] [18] was one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit that ultimately resulted in a federal court ruling, Tummino v. Hamburg, 936 F. Supp. 2d 162 (E.D.N.Y. 2013), requiring the FDA to make Plan B available over-the-counter, without a prescription and without age restrictions. [19] [20]
Brown and NWL continue to advocate for the expansion of access to emergency contraception, including by making it directly available on school campuses and pushing for universal health care. [21] [22]
In Gainesville, Florida, Brown co-chaired the Alachua County Labor Party for ten years. [23] [24] [25] She also worked as a writer and editor for Labor Notes and is a frequent contributor to Jacobin. [26] [27]
The combined oral contraceptive pill (COCP), often referred to as the birth control pill or colloquially as "the pill", is a type of birth control that is designed to be taken orally by women. The pill contains two important hormones: a progestin and estrogen. When taken correctly, it alters the menstrual cycle to eliminate ovulation and prevent pregnancy.
Radical feminism is a perspective within feminism that calls for a radical re-ordering of society in which male supremacy is eliminated in all social and economic contexts, while recognizing that women's experiences are also affected by other social divisions such as in race, class, and sexual orientation. The ideology and movement emerged in the 1960s.
The sexual revolution, also known as the sexual liberation, was a social movement that challenged traditional codes of behavior related to sexuality and interpersonal relationships throughout the developed Western world from the 1960s to the 1970s. Sexual liberation included increased acceptance of sex outside of traditional heterosexual, monogamous relationships. The normalization of contraception and the pill, public nudity, pornography, premarital sex, homosexuality, masturbation, alternative forms of sexuality, and the legalization of abortion all followed.
The women's liberation movement (WLM) was a political alignment of women and feminist intellectualism that emerged in the late 1960s and continued into the 1980s primarily in the industrialized nations of the Western world, which effected great change throughout the world. The WLM branch of radical feminism, based in contemporary philosophy, comprised women of racially and culturally diverse backgrounds who proposed that economic, psychological, and social freedom were necessary for women to progress from being second-class citizens in their societies.
Shulamith Bath Shmuel Ben Ari Firestone was a Canadian-American radical feminist writer and activist. Firestone was a central figure in the early development of radical feminism and second-wave feminism and a founding member of three radical-feminist groups: New York Radical Women, Redstockings, and New York Radical Feminists. Within these radical movements, Firestone became known as "the firebrand" and "the fireball" for the fervor and passion she expressed towards the cause. Firestone participated in activism such as speaking out at The National Conference for New Politics in Chicago. Also while a member of various feminist groups she participated in actions including picketing a Miss America Contest, organizing a mock funeral for womanhood known as "The Burial of Traditional Womanhood", protesting sexual harassment at Madison Square Garden, organizing abortion speak outs, and disrupting abortion legislation meetings.
Vaginal rings are polymeric drug delivery devices designed to provide controlled release of drugs for intravaginal administration over extended periods of time. The ring is inserted into the vagina and provides contraception protection. Vaginal rings come in one size that fits most women.
Redstockings, also known as Redstockings of the Women's Liberation Movement, is a radical feminist nonprofit that was founded in January 1969 in New York City, whose goal is "To Defend and Advance the Women's Liberation Agenda". The group's name is derived from bluestocking, a term used to disparage feminist intellectuals of earlier centuries, and red, for its association with the revolutionary left.
New York Radical Women (NYRW) was an early second-wave radical feminist group that existed from 1967 to 1969. They drew nationwide media attention when they unfurled a banner inside the 1968 Miss America pageant displaying the words "Women's Liberation".
The National Organization for Women (NOW) is an American feminist organization. Founded in 1966, it is legally a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization. The organization consists of 550 chapters in all 50 U.S. states and in Washington, D.C. It is the largest feminist organization in the United States with around 500,000 members. NOW is regarded as one of the main liberal feminist organizations in the US, and primarily lobbies for gender equality within the existing political system. NOW campaigns for constitutional equality, economic justice, reproductive rights, LGBTQIA+ rights and racial justice, and against violence against women.
Alix Kates Shulman is an American writer of fiction, memoirs, and essays, and a prominent early radical activist of second-wave feminism. She is best known for her bestselling debut adult novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, hailed by the Oxford Companion to Women's Writing as "the first important novel to emerge from the Women's Liberation Movement."
The Miss America protest was a demonstration held at the Miss America 1969 contest on September 7, 1968, attended by about 200 feminists and civil rights advocates. The feminist protest was organized by New York Radical Women and included putting symbolic feminine products into a "Freedom Trash Can" on the Atlantic City boardwalk, including bras, hairspray, makeup, girdles, corsets, false eyelashes, mops, and other items. The protesters also unfurled a large banner emblazoned with "Women's Liberation" inside the contest hall, drawing worldwide media attention to the Women's Liberation Movement.
Kathie Sarachild is an American writer and trans-exclusionary radical feminist. In 1968, she took the last name "Sarachild" after her mother Sara. Kathie coined the phrase "Sisterhood is Powerful" in a flier she wrote for the keynote speech she gave for New York Radical Women's first public action at the convocation of the Jeannette Rankin Brigade. This was a slogan that would become synonymous with the radical feminist movement in the years which followed. She was one of four women who held the Women's Liberation banner at the Miss America protest, and had her paper "A Program for Radical Feminist Consciousness-Raising" presented at the First National Women's Liberation Conference outside Chicago on November 27, 1968. She was a member of New York Radical Women. In February 1969, Kathie led a feminist group that was soon to be called Redstockings in their disruption of the New York State Abortion Reform Hearing, at which women first demanded to testify about their own abortions. In March of the same year, Redstockings held the first ever abortion speakout, which became a model for abortion rights activists across the United States.
Birth control in the United States is available in many forms. Some of the forms available at drugstores and some retail stores are male condoms, female condoms, sponges, spermicides, and over-the-counter emergency contraception. Forms available at pharmacies with a doctor's prescription or at doctor's offices are oral contraceptive pills, patches, vaginal rings, diaphragms, shots/injections, cervical caps, implantable rods, and intrauterine devices (IUDs). Sterilization procedures, including tubal ligations and vasectomies, are also performed.
The personal is political, also termed The private is political, is a political argument used as a rallying slogan of student movement and second-wave feminism from the late 1960s. In the context of the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s, it was a challenge to the nuclear family and family values. The phrase was popularized by the publication of a 1969 essay by feminist Carol Hanisch under the title "The Personal Is Political" in 1970, and has been repeatedly described as a defining characterization of second-wave feminism, radical feminism, women's studies, or feminism in general. It has also been used by some women artists as the underlying philosophy for their art practice.
Irene Peslikis was an American feminist artist, activist, and educator. She was one of the early founders and organizers in the women's art movement, especially on the east coast.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is an American academic, writer, and activist. She is a professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (2016). For this book, Taylor received the 2016 Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book from the Lannan Foundation.
This is a Timeline of second-wave feminism, from its beginning in the mid-twentieth century, to the start of Third-wave feminism in the early 1990s.
Lucinda Cisler is an American abortion rights activist, Second Wave feminist, and member of the New York-based radical feminist group the Redstockings. Her writings on unnecessary obstructions to medical abortion procedures in many ways predicted anti-abortion strategies in the 2010s, called Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers (TRAP) by abortion rights advocates.
The women's liberation movement in Europe was a radical feminist movement that started in the late 1960s and continued through the 1970s and in some cases into the early 1980s. Inspired by developments in North America and triggered by the growing presence of women in the labour market, the movement soon gained momentum in Britain and the Scandinavian countries. In addition to improvements in working conditions and equal pay, liberationists fought for complete autonomy for women's bodies including their right to make their own decisions regarding contraception and abortion, and more independence in sexuality.
veteran organizer Jenny Brown
[Brown was] for decades a mainstay in Gainesville feminist and labor organizing.
