Panel III: Histories of Legal Movements and Bodily Autonomy

Jennifer Holland

Beginning in the 1970s, social conservatives used Progressive-era tools—the initiative, referendum, and recall—to institutionalize anti-queer discrimination and to mark gay people as undeserving citizens.  While progressives often ignored the rural parts of their states, banking on the urban vote to secure gay rights, white religious conservatives organized in small towns relentlessly, infusing anti-queer and anti-feminist politics into places as mundane as the local grocery store. This paper examines one radical group—the Oregon Citizens Alliance—and their numerous campaigns in the early 1990s, showing how the group transformed the sexual politics of Oregon’s rural areas.

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Melissa Murray

This paper (co-authored with Kate Shaw) considers the rhetoric of democracy—and the appeal to restore the abortion question to the states for democratic deliberation–that undergirds Dobbs.  I will be discussing the Dobbs majority’s reliance on the (false) narrative that Roe was immediately criticized on the ground that it disrupted democratic deliberation that was ongoing at the state level. Our paper traces the intellectual history of this claim, and as we find, the notion that Roe disrupted democratic deliberation on abortion did not immediately emerge in the aftermath of the 1973 decision.  Rather, it emerged later, alongside strategic changes in the pro-life movement’s strategies, as a means of undermining the precedential effect of Roe.

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Lauren McIverson Thompson

Two lesser-known federal cases in the 1930s, United States v. Dennett and United States v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries, were important catalysts for the political and legal future of birth control well in advance of the famous Supreme Court case Griswold v. Connecticut. Both rulings ushered in a new era for birth control clinics and contraceptive availability, even as state and federal obscenity laws remained in force. The elevation of medical rights and expertise in Dennett and One Package would transform the legal landscape for reproductive medicine in ways that continue to reverberate in our own time.

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Chair: Ana Raquel Minian, Stanford Department of History & Clayman Institute Affiliated Faculty