Looking for hope in a harrowing time

“Every history of oppression is also a history of resistance.”

Lyz is on vacation. So this week,

Moira Donegan

is writing the mid-week newsletter. Moira is a columnist covering gender and politics for The Guardian and a writer-in-residence at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University. Donegan’s work has appeared in magazines such as n+1, the London Review of Books, Bookforum, and The New Yorker.

Because of paying subscribers like you, Lyz can take a break. So, thank you.

Someone recently asked me what gives me hope, and I realized, to my dismay, that I didn’t have an answer. Maybe you can relate. It’s been an ominous summer. There’s the mass murder and starvation in Gaza; the vast, sweeping destructiveness of the Supreme Court; and the presidential election, which creeps ever closer in a drumbeat of inevitability, like the sound of marching boots. But the question kept nagging at me. Hope? What would that be like?

I decided to go looking for hope, and eventually, I started looking for it in history. What had people done when they had faced previous moments of regression, repression, and violence? What had people done, that is, when they faced the kind of world that I’m afraid we’re slipping into?

That’s how I learned about Pat Maginnis, Rowena Gurner, and Lana Phelan Kahn, who together were called the Army of Three. Beginning in the early 1960s — more than a decade before Roe v. Wade — these women worked together to transform the politics of abortion and the realities of abortion access for women up and down the West Coast. They did not have institutional backing or much funding to speak of. That is to say, they started with nothing more than what most of us already have: a set of moral commitments and a hatred for the injustice they saw around them.

Like a lot of abortion rights activists, the Army of Three came to their politics through personal experience. Maginnis, who came from a working-class Catholic family and spent time in the Army, was a student at California’s San Jose State College. She had several abortions in an era when the procedure was illegal in all 50 states. For her first, she traveled to Mexico, and was enraged at having to “go into exile” to exert control over her own body. After a self-induced abortion in 1959, she wound up in a San Francisco hospital, where police interrogated her as she lay in bed. “Did you give yourself an abortion?” they asked her. “Sure I did,” she replied. “Want me to demonstrate how in court?”

Pat had seen the lengths to which women were hounded and punished for their abortions, and she saw these crackdowns as retaliation for women’s attempts at sexual self-determination. She set about looking for ways to fight back. Maginnis was alone then: The earliest pangs of the second-wave feminist movement would not come for several years, and abortion, though common, remained not just illegal but severely stigmatized. For a while it was just Maginnis making copies of pro-abortion petitions and pamphlets on the mimeograph machine at her university and handing them out to passersby on busy Bay Area streets. 

One of the women who took a flier from her was Lana Phelan, a Florida native with an eighth-grade education. Phelan had had her first child at 14, and had been told by a doctor not to have another; she’d had to scrimp and save as a teenager to have her first abortion, performed by a Cuban woman on the outskirts of Tampa. Years later, when she read Maginnis’ flier, she immediately understood the stakes and joined up with Pat.

Around 1964, they met Rowena Gurner, who had settled in San Francisco after biking across the United States from New York. Like McGinnis, she had had to travel for an abortion, flying to Puerto Rico for the procedure over a weekend and then returning to be back at work on Monday. She joined the group, too. Together, they started calling themselves the Society for Humane Abortion. That was their official name. Unofficially, they were called the Army of Three.

The women expanded their activism. From Maginnis’ one-woman flier operation, they grew into a movement, recruiting nascent feminists, doctors, and lawyers — professionals who had been drawn in by the growing awareness of abortion as a civil rights and public health issue. They began educating people about abortion, birth control, and women’s health; they publicized their cause in the media and lobbied state and local governments — at great personal risk. Some of their speech was illegal, and all of it was unpopular: They endured harassment, threats, and arrests.

The Army of Three held small workshops where they gave out referrals to reliable abortion providers in Mexico and around the world. Thousands of women called upon them for advice. In letters to the group from across the country, preserved by the artist Andrea Bowers, women seeking abortions describe varied lives; they are teens and widows, some married and some single, some with children and some without. “I’m eighteen years old, single, and three months pregnant by a married man,” writes one abortion seeker. “I need your help. ... All that my boyfriend and I can get together is 150 dollars. Will they possibly do it for this amount?” asked another. There were thousands of letters like this: The Army was just three women, facing down the vast need for abortion care nationwide.

Eventually, the group changed its name from the Society for Humane Abortion to the more specific and ambitious National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, or NARAL. Today, it’s called Reproductive Freedom for All.

There are a lot of lessons to take from the Army of Three: how hard it was; how little they had; how they faced entrenched bigotry, punitive laws, and a vast sea of need. But I also take hope: hope in people, armed with little besides their own sense of right and wrong, doing what is in their power to help their neighbors, their peers. The era of repression and illegality that they lived in was also one of resourcefulness, camaraderie, and determination. And so is ours: Groups like abortion funds and OARS carry on the Army of Three’s legacy in our own time. And so this is the source of my hope: every history of oppression is also a history of resistance.