Birth Control
Two books offer new insights into the last forty-five years of uproar against abortion rights, and the fight to hold onto them.
Winter 2024
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Farmworkers: Rising Again?
Fifty years after the founding of the United Farm Workers, farmworker activism has been reborn in a new form.
What Armies Do: Women Under Occupation 
What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France by Mary Louise Roberts University of Chicago Press, 2013, 368 pp. The title of Mary Louise Roberts’s new book, What Soldiers Do, says it all: sexual abuses …
Roe v. Wade and Beyond: Linda Gordon Responds
As Carole Joffe writes in “Roe v. Wade and Beyond,” legal abortion was a great victory for health, for women’s citizenship, for families and children. But the continued attacks on abortion have been destructive on many grounds. One is universal: …
When Universities Go Abroad: NYU in Abu Dhabi
Scores of American universities have opened campuses abroad, New York University, where I teach, among them. (Others include Georgetown in Qatar, Yale in Singapore, Columbia in Jordan, and Duke in China.) Criticism and debate surround these developments, but have been …
Citizenship and the Right to Birth Control
Calling this year’s political fight about funding for contraception a “war on women” may be a catchy slogan and a strong mobilizing call. But as an analysis, it is misleading. True, birth control does affect women disproportionately, because women still …
The New Deal Was a Good Idea, We Should Try It This Time
On the blogs, in the newspapers, in restaurants, there has been so much discussion of the New Deal lately that the chatter could seem like that at a historians’ convention. Conservatives express panic about socialism and argue that the New …
Who Polices Scholarship?
Linda Gordon on Jon Wiener’s Historians in Trouble
The Trouble with Difference
Since the late 1970s, feminist theorists and scholars have been attacking, subverting, and attempting to dethrone the universalist liberalism of earlier women’s-rights advocates who spoke in the name of a unified, homogeneous womankind. From that point on, the dominant motif …
Welfare Reform: A History Lesson
When people say “welfare” today, they mostly refer to AFDC, the program for single parents and their children. These single parents are mostly mothers, of course, and the current vilification of welfare recipients and their “dependency” is directed primarily at …
