A Raisin in the Sun and feminist history

*Cross posted on Choice Words

So this is old now, but I wanted to finish it since it’s about an important part of feminist history.

I was really happy with the new version of A Raisin in the Sun that was on ABC in February. While I was disappointed that they left out one of my favorite lines from the play – a climactic moment in which matriarch Lena explains that in times of desperation there’s nothing a woman won’t do for her family, including getting an abortion – I was happy to see that they expanded the abortion plot-line.

In the original play we only find out that Ruth is having an abortion when she lets slip that the doctor she saw about the baby was a she. The play debuted in 1959, 14 years before Roe v. Wade, so abortion is illegal in the time of the play. During this time there weren’t female gynecologists, so ‘female doctor’ referred to an abortionist. In this case – assuming the story is set in Chicago – that female doctor is a member of JANE.

Jane began as Abortion Counseling Service in 1969 with a phone number whose answering machine told the caller they’d reached “Jane.” Advertised entirely by word of mouth, the women of Jane counseled callers on their decision to have an abortion and gave referrals to abortion providers.

The women later learned to assist in abortion procedures and setup a midwife service so women facing complications wouldn’t have to go to a hospital and admit to having an illegal abortion.

Jane members saw that the high prices of abortion at that time (about $500) was a financial burden and prohibitive for some women, and after finding out that not all the providers they knew were doctors they decided to learn how to do abortions themselves. Over the years the Jane network performed more than 12,000 illegal abortions. The women collected a $25 donation from patients who could afford to pay in full, which was added to an abortion fund to make the procedure accessible to all women.

In the original version of A Raisin in the Sun we never see Ruth meeting with the abortion provider, but in this new version we see Ruth enter a beauty parlor where after a discrete conversation she is led upstairs to the owner’s apartment for the abortion procedure. This might have just been an attempt to show characters out of the house since most of the play takes place on one set, but I like that it tells more about this history of abortion during this period – that the only female doctors were abortion providers, that women learned to provide abortions outside of hospitals, and that abortion being illegal didn’t stop it from happening.