The Boundaries of Her Body: The Troubling History of Women's Rights in America

The Boundaries of Her Body: The Troubling History of Women's Rights in America by Debran Rowland, Esq. Sphinx Publishing/Sourcebooks, Inc., August 2004 $29.95, ISBN 1-572-48368-7

Female disenfranchisement in America has a sad 400-year-old history that Rowland's book catalogues in meticulous detail. Both a lawyer and journalist, Rowland marshals almost 800 pages of history and case law to chart the issues confronting women and girls from the 1600s to the present: workplace discrimination, reproductive rights, an oversexed culture and gender violence. The specter of violation lurking behind the title's concerns with bodily boundaries recalls "Poem About My Rights," in which the late poet June Jordan protests, "I can't do what I want to do with my own body because I am the wrong sex the wrong age the wrong skin." What women are allowed to do, Rowland argues, has always been based on who women are or, mostly in the opinions of others, should be.

From time immemorial, women's biology has too often been destiny, with the ability to bear children made into a moral and societal duty. But in the late 1960s and '70s, second-wave feminists, belittled in today's conservative backlash as bra-burning man-haters, paved the way for rights younger women now take for granted: playing college sports; entering professional schools; choosing to have a baby, or not. With an administration seen as hostile to reproductive freedoms, and the expected vacancies on the Supreme Court, Boundaries is openly concerned about Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that ended coat-hanger abortions but has endured challenges ever since. The President declares that a strict construction, or reading the Constitution in the light that the Framers intended, will determine his Court nominations. That standard, Rowland implies, leaves women's rights, reproductive and otherwise, hanging in the balance, for while the notorious three-fifths clause dubiously recognized the nation's black presence, the Constitution is silent on women, who were considered wards of their fathers or husbands, without social identity or consequence.

The comparison with slavery, as if all enslaved African Americans were men, reveals this volume's own biases about who a woman is, from the cover photo of a downcast white girl holding an American flag to chapter analyses that downplay race. For instance, a glaring omission here is the debate over welfare reform, one of the biggest battles in recent memory, which scapegoated poor, black single mothers as lazy freeloaders foregoing marriage for a handout.

Rowland means for Boundaries to be a call to arms for a moribund women's movement whose complacent and decorous tones "has taken on the feel of a wealthy women's charity." The irony is that Rowland, who herself is black, traffics in the all-the-women-are white assumptions that have alienated women of color.

[Author Affiliation]

Reviewed by Angela Ards

Angela Ards is an independent journalist who is also pursuing a Ph.D. in English Literature and African American Studies at Princeton University.