Month: July 2022

Losing the Right to Plan Our Lives–An American Tragedy

Adele Fasick2 Comments

Back in the mid-1950s when I was a newly married graduate student at Columbia University, one of the most important discoveries in my new life was the Planned Parenthood Clinic on 125th Street. Having grown up in a family where contraceptives were never mentioned, I was on my own in finding out about birth control.

Contraception was a lot more unreliable during those post-war years than it is now. Aside from condoms for men, the only realistic choice was a diaphragm for a woman, but that had to be fitted and prescribed by a doctor. Of course, a few couples used the only method approved by the Catholic Church. This was the rhythm method which required a woman to take her temperature every day to figure out when she was ovulating and thus likely to get pregnant. Never the most reliable method, it was sometimes referred to as “the pope’s roulette”

The possibility of a surprise pregnancy gave employers and educators an excuse to deny women, especially married women, many of the opportunities available to men. Medical schools, law schools and employers restricted women’s applications because women were not able to control their fertility. States like Connecticut, which made the use of contraceptives illegal even for married couples, added an extra burden for women.

Gradually through the 1950s, new means of contraception were developed. The pill—the  gold standard in birth control—was unveiled to the world in 1954, and during the next twenty years, the pill became more effective and safer for women. The Planned Parenthood organization was instrumental in perfecting the pill. They publicized the need for reliable contraception and helped to fund doctors and scientists who gradually perfected the methods. Planned parenthood ran clinics and publicized the availability of effective contraception as well as providing help in fertility and family planning issues. PBS has prepared a timeline to show the development of contraception. 

Having the means to control fertility changed people’s lives. Birth control allowed women and couples to maintain healthy families they could support. Gradually the repressive laws that prevented people from leading healthy, satisfying sex lives were discarded. States could no longer forbid marriage between people of different races, or people of the same sex. In 1965, the Supreme Court ruled that individuals had the right to privacy in making intimate decisions. Since that time, women and men have had the right to choose their partners, to decide when to have children and raise them, to limit the number of children they had, or to choose not to have children.

By 2022, the world seemed safer for women. Most of us thought our rights were settled and secure. But we were wrong. In a devastating decision, the Supreme Court abruptly declared that it had all been a mistake. A majority of the Court stripped women of the right to choose whether or not to carry a fetus to birth. Who knows what rights they may decide to take away next? The right to get married? The right to decide the number of children they have? The right to choose their partner? 

America’s Founding Fathers believed people had the right to pursue happiness, but it seems our courts have decided that legislators can determine what form of happiness we are allowed to choose even in our most intimate family relationships. Legislators who know nothing about the science of how pregnancy occurs and the complexity of fetal development are given the power to impose their religious beliefs on all of us. Without any factual basis, they can determine who will receive appropriate medical treatment and who will not when complex issues of life and death occur.

Surely this is not what Thomas Jefferson and the other founding fathers had in mind when they declared that each of us has the right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Future justices will look back on the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade as a low point for the Supreme Court. The right to privacy is worth fighting for. We must let legislators and justices know that free people do not easily surrender their rights. The struggle to preserve our freedom is only beginning. We will win it by voting in every election and electing candidates who believe in individual freedom for each of us.  Americans deserve no less.

Dorothea Lange—Picturing America during Difficult Years

Adele Fasick2 Comments

People alive today are no doubt the most photographed generation that has ever lived. Cell phones record our daily life and let us see what is going on in the rest of the world. We are accustomed to seeing people splashing through floods in India, scratching for food in drought-stricken fields in Africa and enduring bombings in Europe.  But documenting news through photographs is a fairly recent development. We owe the richness of our visual lives to a handful of photographers whose work made photography a vital source of information in the modern world. One of the influential women in this field was Dorothea Lange, a documentary photographer who introduced thousands of Americans to the sight of the landscape of our country and the people who live and work in it.

Born in 1895 in Hoboken, New Jersey, Dorothea Lange grew up in New York and its suburbs observing and living with people in the city. As a child she suffered a bout of polio that left her with one crippled leg. She always felt self-conscious about that, but she did not let it hinder her activities. While still a teenager, she made up her mind to be a photographer even before ever owning a camera. After graduating from high school, she travelled to California with a friend and settled in San Francisco. There she got a job in a photography studio and within a few years became a successful portrait photographer. In 1920 she married the painter Maynard Dixon with whom she had two sons.

Dorothea Lange

For ten years or more she and her husband lived busy social and professional lives. They became part of the progressive artistic life of San Francisco and knew many painters and journalists. Dixon loved painting scenes of the rural areas of California and Arizona, so the couple spent a great deal of time traveling in the Southwest. Unfortunately, when the 1920s ended with a financial crash, the market for photographic portraits and for paintings almost disappeared

Both Lange and her husband were ardent supporters of Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal policies of providing help for workers, including artists. For a decade starting in the early 1930s, Lange worked for the Farm Security Administration taking pictures and writing reports about conditions throughout the western and southern states. When the dust storms of the mid-thirties pushed thousands of people from their barren fields in Oklahoma and other Southern states out to California, Lange took some of her most famous pictures, including the iconic “Migrant Mother.”

As World War II started, the United States began to force Japanese American families who lived in Western states into internment camps. Lange proposed a project of documenting this move through photographs. She also interviewed people as they were being moved into the camps and documented their difficult lives. Most of her pictures of camp life, however, were impounded by the government and did not become available until after the war. They can be seen now in the National Archives and at the Bancroft Library of the University of California.

“Migrant Mother” one of Lange’s most iconic photos of the Depression

Dorothea Lange’s life and work continued for twenty years after the end of WWII. For those who are interested in her life and achievements, Linda Gordon has written an absorbing biography. Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits (2009). Gordon not only makes Lange and her personal live come alive, she also paints a picture of California during the first half of the twentieth century. Reading about Lange’s life, we learn about how farming developed in the West and about the variety of Californians—Indigenous people, Latinos, and Easterners fleeing the Depression. Lange’s life was lived at a turning point for the country and her pictures help us understand how important those years were. You can find  the book, Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits, at most public libraries.