From Grassroots to Ginsburg: How a Feminist Network Absorbed Lessons from Southern Black Women’s Experiences, Fought Involuntary Sterilization, and Won a Late-1970s “Magna Carta” for the ACLU

Abstract In 1973, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Women’s Rights Project filed a lawsuit on behalf of Nial Ruth Cox, a Black woman who had been sterilized as a teenager by the state of North Carolina. The lawsuit initiated an ACLU campaign against involuntary sterilization that shows 1970s legal feminists fighting for race and class as well as gender justice. By examining their efforts from the bottom up, we can see how Black women’s agency and the precarity of sterilization victims’ lives taught middle-class white activists about intersectionality. A previously unexamined source—the transcript of a conversation between Fannie Lou Hamer, Gloria Steinem, and Brenda Feigen Fasteau—provides an intimate, real-time look at the exchange of ideas among Black and white feminists. The persecution of another lawyer in the ACLU network—young Black southerner Edna Smith Primus—made the legal battle an existential one, culminating in a Supreme Court decision that strengthened the ACLU.