Abortion Rights & Feminist Narratives with Critic Maggie Doherty

Cultural Mixtapes

On today’s episode we have writer, critic, and lecturer at Harvard University, Maggie Doherty. Maggie’s writing has appeared in several places including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Yale Review, and The Nation. She’s also the author of the book The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s, which was published by Penguin Random House in 2020, and reviewed to critical acclaim by several writers, including novelist Margaret Atwood.

Doherty published a piece in the Yale Review on June 24th that poses important questions about the way Americans tell abortion stories. By comparing present-day narratives, with historical records from the middle of the 20th century, she questions whether Americans today are too apologetic. We spoke in early July, and used this piece as a starting point for our conversation. She alternated between the present and the past to illuminate gaping issues in the way social justice for women’s rights is shaping in the public sphere. This is not dissimilar from the subject of her book, The Equivalents which focuses on The Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study in the 60s. Doherty tracks the development of 5 women who were part of the institute, as well as the simultaneous emergence of Second Wave Feminism, in which the institute, and the art being created in it, played an integral part.

June 24th Piece in The Yale Review - "The Abortion Stories We Tell"
Maggie Doherty's Website
The Equivalents

Writers Mentioned

The Five 'Equivalents'
- Anne Sexton
- Maxine Kumin
- Tillie Olsen
- Barbara Swan
- Marianna Pineda
Other Writers
- Betty Friedan
- Jacques Derrida
Maggie's Recommendations
- Cormac McCarthy
- Kathy Acker
- Mating by Norman Rush
- Love's Work by Gillian Rose