Making Democracy Real: African American Women, Birth Control, and Social Justice, 1910–1960

After completing the PhD in women’s history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Joyce C. Follet became a public historian at the university, working in community education, oral history, and documentary film. She produced the television documentary Step by Step: Building a Feminist Movement, 1941–1977, which traces contemporary U.S. feminism to earlier labor, civil rights, religious, and political activism. As Coordinator of Collection Development at the Sophia Smith Collection, Follet directed the Voices of Feminism Project to document the diversity of women’s lives and the duration of women’s movements. She codirected the Steinem Initiative, which explored the potential of women’s and gender history as an organizing tool. She currently directs the Reproductive Justice History Project at Smith College, which is producing a toolkit that puts the 500-year history of U.S. women of color, queer women, and low-income women organizing for sexual and reproductive health, rights, and justice in the hands of activists for use in movement building today.