Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic

In 1973, The Year The Women's Movement Won An Important Symbolic Victory With Roe V. Wade, Reports Surfaced That Twelve-year-old Minnie Lee Relf And Her Fourteen-year-old Sister Mary Alice, The Daughters Of Black Alabama Farm Hands, Had Been Sterilized Without Their Or Their Parents' Knowledge Or Consent. Just As Women's Ability To Control Reproduction Moved To The Forefront Of The Feminist Movement, The Relf Sisters' Plight Stood As A Reminder Of The Ways In Which The Movement's Accomplishments Had Diverged Sharply Along Racial Lines. Thousands Of Forced Sterilizations Were Performed On Black Women During This Period, Convincing Activists In The Black Power, Civil Rights And Women's Movements That They Needed To Address, Pointedly, The Racial Injustices Surrounding Equal Access To Reproductive Labor And Intimate Life In America. As Horrific As The Relf Tragedy Was, It Fit Easily Within A Set Of Critical Events Within Black Women's Sexual And Reproductive History In America, Which Black Feminists Argue Began With Coerced Reproduction And Enforced Child Neglect In The Period Of Enslavement. 00while Reproductive Rights Activists And Organizations, Historians And Legal Scholars Have All Begun To Grapple With This History And Its Meaning, Political Theorists Have Yet To Do So. Introduction: Black Female Body Politics -- What Free Could Possibly Mean: The Intimate Sphere In Enslaved Women's Visions Of Freedom -- Racial Violence And The Post-emancipation Struggle For Intimate Equality -- Intimate Injustice, Political Obligation And The Dark Ghetto -- Intimate Justice. Shatema Threadcraft. Includes Bibliographical References (pages 167-195) And Index.