Health

At Mujeres, it was a full spectrum of possibility for women. From the most basic safety around abuse and runaways, all the way to exploring work and motherhood and sexuality and health and nutrition. -Diane Avila, May 25, 2022

The Festival's inclusion of women’s and community health organizations was especially strong. With a personal focus on health empowerment, Festival organizer Diane Avila aimed to offer Pilsen women an expansive vision of what would later be called “reproductive justice.”

Bringing health groups to the Festival was a priority for Festival coordinator Diane Avila. Avila, who would later train to be a physician at Harvard Medical School, was initially motivated to get involved in Mujeres after the way she was treated by Chicago institutions during her own pregnancy. This experience drove her goal to empower Latinas in relation to their bodies and reproductive lives by teaching herself about reproductive health and working to inform her community (Diane Avila, interview by author, May 25, 2022). 

Not all women at Mujeres or in Mexican Pilsen were focused on bearing children, and the Festival also addressed women's health beyond reproduction. More people in Pilsen would learn that Festival co-coordinator Diana Solís identified as a lesbian after she returned from the first National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights in October 1979. Solís grew up helping her mother raise her six younger siblings; although her friendship circle of lesbians of color included mothers and their children, Solís did not aspire to become pregnant.

MLEA’s Dar a Luz Program, offering a workshop in the photo above, was present at the Festival. Led by Pati Sorrondeguy, this program educated neighborhood women “on prenatal care and help[ed] them have safer pregnancies and healthier babies” (Fernández, Brown in the Windy City, 256). As we also see in the photo, by 1979, MLEA was a distributor of the groundbreaking book Our Bodies, Ourselves (1971) by the Boston Women’s Health Collective, which they sold in English and Spanish language versions after the book was translated in 1976 (Avila, interview). 

The Chicago Women’ Health Center represented the feminist health movement at the Festival. According to its website, the Center was founded as a collective in 1975 by health care providers, counselors and health educators “troubled by unjust gynecological care disparities in Chicago…. Emphasizing self knowledge and a peer approach to health care, these early collective members believed that health care was a right, not a privilege, and that gender inequality was a serious barrier to respectful health care.”  Other clinics invited to attend include the nearby South Lawndale Health Clinic, founded by Dr. Jorge Prieto (father of Mujeres executive director Luz Maria Prieto), and the Emma Goldman’s Women’s Health Center, a woman-centered clinic started after abortion became legal by Laura Kaplan and other former members of the Jane Collective, the renowned Chicago underground abortion service (Kaplan, The Story of Jane).

Although MLEA was circumspect about abortion in this largely Catholic community (Fernández, Brown in the Windy City), six years after the Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision (410 U.S. 113m 1973), H.E.R.S. Health Evaluation and Referral Services participated in the Festival. H.E.R.S. was founded in 1973 soon after abortion was legalized when many, largely unmonitored abortion clinics were opening. H.E.R.S. visited and interviewed these clinics and physicians to conduct evaluations, and by 1979, provided other health-related referrals, education, and services (Laiken, "HERS") until 1990. The National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) is also listed in the Festival program.

With the community stresses of migration, poverty, racism, and discrimination and the many bars on Pilsen’s streets, Hispano Alcoholic Services provided culturally oriented services to Latino communities around Chicago and tabled at the Festival that day. Here, we see a poster informing women in Spanish of the potential harm to the fetus of drinking while pregnant two years after the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) issued its first national health advisory on alcohol and pregnancy (Warren, “A Review”). According to the June 1979 Mujeres newsletter, Hispanic Alcoholic Services, founded in 1974, offered counseling services at the Mujeres office each Tuesday.

How does a reproductive justice framework differ from reproductive rights? Learn from an interview with Loretta Ross, co-creator of this powerful theory.

You can learn learn more about the history of Nuestros Cuerpos, Nuestras Vidas, the Spanish language edition of Our Bodies Ourselves for U.S. Latinas and Latin Americans.

SOURCES

Fernández, Lilia. Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012. 

Kaplan, Laura. The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion. Service. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Laiken, Amy. "HERS (Health Evaluation and Referral Service)." Chicago Women's Liberation Union Herstory Project. https://www.cwluherstory.org/cwlu-workgroups-articles/hers-health-evaluation-and-referral-service

Quinn, Gordon and Jerry Blumenthal, directors. The Chicago Maternity Center Story. 1976; Kartemquin Films. 60 min.

Warren, Kenneth. “A Review of the History of Attitudes Toward Drinking in Pregnancy.” Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research 39, no. 7  (July 2015): 1110-7.