TEST: Women’s Rights Are Simply Human Rights

I wanted to include a novel since I feel like seeing something through the eyes of the characters helps to make it more real and current for some. Also, this one takes place in the summer before Roe v Wade. It’s about four teenage girls from different backgrounds who are all dealing with unplanned pregnancies. Ola is a teen in rural Georgie who is pregnant, the responsibility of which falls on her younger sister Izella. Then there’s Missippi, who hasn’t fully realized the gravity of her situation. Missippi’s father sends her to Chicago to give birth and it’s there that she meets Susan, who is white and whose father is an anti-choice politician.

This book shows how the women of the Hoopa Valley Tribe started to revitalize the traditional coming-of-age dance for women called the  Flower Dance. It’s a dance that, like many other aspects of Indigenous culture, hadn’t been practiced in decades. To recover the dance, the women consult their elders, medicine women, oral histories, and even museum archives. Baldy discusses the revitalization of the dance within the context of colonization and the gender inequality— and therefore gender violence— that came with it. There are many parallels between Indigenous women’s experiences with being controlled through reproduction and Black women’s. With both groups, the U.S. government has flip-flopped between forced birth and forced sterilization, with a dose of separating children from families thrown in between.