Berkeley Talks

In 1957, a terrified 17-year-old girl lay on a Harlem kitchen table undergoing an illegal, backstreet abortion. Nearly dying from complications, she was rushed to a hospital ward where nurses badgered her and demanded to know what she had done. That teenager was Frances M. Beal.Long before she would write the seminal 1969 manifesto "Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female" or co-found the Third World Women's Alliance, Beal was navigating the violent realities of being young, Black and female in America. In this episode of Berkeley Talks, Ula Taylor, a UC Berkeley professor and chair of African American studies, presents her latest book project, which reconstructs Beal’s political radicalization brick by brick. Blending first- and third-person narrative, Taylor explores how Beal’s life — from the pressures and policing of her early years to unappreciated domestic labor and single motherhood — helped shape her pioneering work in social justice feminism.“Black feminism for Fran was not a politic that came f