Jennifer Nelson

In 1948, the Constitution of the World Health Organization declared, “Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” Yet this idea was not predominant in the United States immediately after World War II, especially when it came to women’s reproductive health. Both legal and medical institutions—and the male legislators and physicians who populated those institutions—reinforced women’s second class social status and restricted their ability to make their own choices about reproductive health care. In More Than Medicine, Jennifer Nelson reveals how feminists of the ‘60s and ‘70s applied the lessons of the new left and civil rights movements to generate a women’s health movement. The new movement shifted from the struggle to revolutionize health care to the focus of ending sex discrimination and gender stereotypes perpetuated in mainstream medical contexts. Moving from the campaign for legal abortion to the creation of community clinics and feminist health centers, Nelson illustrates how these activists revolutionized health care by associating it with the changing social landscape in which women had power to control their own life choices. More Than Medicine poignantly reveals how social justice activists in the United States gradually transformed the meaning of health care, pairing traditional notions of medicine with less conventional ideas of “healthy” social and political environments.

A History of the Feminist Women's Health Movement

More Than Medicine

Examines the women's magazine business, wonders how it is thriving amid the failing print journalism industry, and asks if the unrealistic body image it portrays is intentional or not.

The Lure and Loathing of Women's Magazines

Airbrushed Nation

While most people believe that the movement to secure voluntary reproductive control for women centered solely on abortion rights, for many women abortion was not the only, or even primary, focus. Jennifer Nelson tells the story of the feminist struggle for legal abortion and reproductive rights in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s through the particular contributions of women of color. She explores the relationship between second-wave feminists, who were concerned with a woman's right to choose, Black and Puerto Rican Nationalists, who were concerned that Black and Puerto Rican women have as many children as possible “for the revolution,” and women of color themselves, who negotiated between them. Contrary to popular belief, Nelson shows that women of color were able to successfully remake the mainstream women's liberation and abortion rights movements by appropriating select aspects of Black Nationalist politics—including addressing sterilization abuse, access to affordable childcare and healthcare, and ways to raise children out of poverty—for feminist discourse.

Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement

Explores how certain educated northern Europeans in the first half of the sixteenth century increasingly saw their world as disharmonious and inclusive of mutual contradiction. Examines how early modern writers grappled with the problem of cultural, religious, and cosmological difference in relation to notions of universals and the divine.

The Europe of Holbein's Ambassadors

Disharmony of the Spheres

In the 1960s, the city of Halifax razed the black community of Africville under a program of urban renewal and 'slum clearance.' The city defended its actions by citing the deplorable living conditions in Africville, ignoring its own role in the creation of these conditions through years of neglect and the refusal of essential services. In the 1980s, the city created a park on Africville's former site, which has been a place of protest and commemoration for black citizens since its opening. As yet, however, the city has not issued a formal apology to Africville residents and has paid no further compensation. Razing Africville examines this history as the prolonged eviction of a community from its own space. By examining a variety of sources - urban planning texts, city council documents, news media, and academic accounts - Jennifer J. Nelson illustrates how Africville went from a slum to a problem to be solved and, more recently, to a public space in which past violence is rendered invisible. Reading historical texts as a critical map of decision-making, she argues that the ongoing measures taken to regulate black bodies and spaces amount to a 'geography of racism.' Through a geographic lens, therefore, she manages to analyse ways in which race requires space and how the control of space is a necessary component of delineating and controlling people. A much needed re-examination of an important historical example, Razing Africville applies contemporary spatial theory to the situation in Africville and offers critical observations about the function of racism.

A Geography of Racism

Razing Africville

Poetry. In the United States and Europe in the early twenty-first century, a person of mixed ethnicity finds herself questing inside old European art and ideas. Terrible as these things often are, she enjoys recalibrating them, and she is optimistic.

Jennifer Nelson

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