Back in 1992, just after she’d published her first book, Feminist Fatale, and became the de facto spokeswoman for Gen X feminists, Paula Kamen appeared on a panel about feminism past and present. One of the other panelists mentioned Jane, the Chicago abortion collective that ran from 1969 until the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973.
Kamen decided to write a play instead of a conventional piece of journalism in order to create a feeling that the stories were coming directly from the women themselves. She tracked down former Jane members and clients by placing ads in the Defender and the Tribune‘s now-defunct WomaNews section. Back in 1992, Roe v. Wade was only 19 years old, and the bad old days of illegal abortion were still vivid memories. Some women were still terrified to talk about it. “People hung up on me,” Kamen remembers.
The separatist wing of the black liberation movement was also staunchly anti-abortion because of its ties to the eugenicists of the early 20th century who used abortion as a means of limiting the African-American population. But later on in Jane’s history, after New York passed the nation’s first nonrestrictive abortion law in 1970, many of its clients were poor and black and couldn’t afford to travel out of state.
And although the women in Jane were working too hard under difficult circumstances to join in what Sowlat calls “rah-rah, girl-power feminism,” she does believe in the play’s ultimate message that Jane was about women helping women, despite their fears—one of the purest notions of feminism.
