Forty years ago, nearly 2,000 black women gathered in Atlanta for a conference at Spelman College. The event was a milestone in the then-nascent movement, as Dara Mathis recently reported in Headway, a New York Times initiative covering world issues through the lens of her progress.
Black women came in droves from all over the country to share with each other the experiences that impacted their well-being. I spoke to some of the women who attended the event to understand what drew them there, what they discovered, and the impact the conference had on them. I learned a few things from our conversation.
I was struck by how participants openly discussed many aspects of their lives for the first time. When she attended the conference, Brenda Smith had just graduated from Spelman College and she was studying at Georgetown University Law Center. “That was probably one of the first places I heard about abortion,” Smith told me. “I think it’s the first time I’ve ever heard people seriously talk about sexual violence, domestic violence. Maybe this is the first time I’ve heard people openly admit that they love other women, or maybe this is what I felt. I think it was my first time.”
Nancy Anderson was a young doctor working at a county hospital in Atlanta at the time. “I read a book called ‘This Bridge Was Called My Back,'” Anderson said. “So I realized, ‘Oh, there are people out there who are actually describing what it’s like to be a Black woman.’ They had all kinds of perspectives. I realized there were other people like that in Atlanta.” Reading this book, which collects writings by women of color, began the process of inquiry that led her to the events at Spelman and helped me get started. Thousands of similar individual catalysts inspired women across the country to organize buses and carpools to head to Georgia.
Perhaps the innovative message that resonated most at the conference was that women’s well-being is worth our time, attention, and consideration. Otherwise, Black women in particular faced a ubiquitous message that they must endlessly sacrifice their own needs for their families and communities.
“It taught us not to be ashamed of our bodies, not to be ashamed of our pleasures,” Smith said. “That health has never been a currency that we have to pay for the well-being of our families and communities. That we are truly thriving and not being traumatized is something we have to do to lie on the tracks every time something happens. It was actually more generative and helpful to our community than it was.”
This event spawned a national organization, the National Black Women’s Health Project, now the Black Women’s Health Imperative, as well as dozens of local chapters around the country that would hold their own conferences.
The circumstances that brought so many black women to Spelman in 1983 are as relevant today as they were then. In 2018, nearly 20 years after Sheryl Gay Stolberg reported for the Times about the alarming mortality rates of Black mothers during and after childbirth, Linda Villarosa writes about the persistence of Black maternal and child mortality rates. A deep and intimate record of what is known. .
Years of careful research and scholarly consideration have reinforced the conclusions that would have resonated on that stage in Georgia 40 years ago. As Villarosa states in her article, “For black women in America, the inescapable atmosphere of societal and systemic racism creates a kind of toxic physiological stress, resulting in high blood pressure. and preeclampsia, and these symptoms can directly lead to increased rates of infant and maternal death. And that societal racism is further expressed as widespread, long-standing racial bias in health care, including ignoring legitimate concerns and symptoms, and resulting in poor birth outcomes even for the most advantaged black women. This may help explain why this is defective. ”
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