Podcasts about byllye avery

Byllye Avery, cofounder of the Black Women’s Health Imperative, speaks to historian Susan Reverby about her activist work, beginning in the 1970s, to increase women’s access to abortion. She discusses the state of reproductive rights before and after Roe v. Wade, the genesis of the “reproductive justice” movement, and the tactics that might be needed in a post-Roe future. Ask a Feminist is part of the Feminist Public Intellectuals Project, which provides a host of free feminist resources (http://signsjournal.org/fpip).

Founded in 1983 in the wake of the first visionary national conference on Black women’s health, the National Black Women’s Health Project was a galvanizing grassroots force in the lives of many thousands of Black American women. The organization, initially under the aegis of the National Women’s Health Network, coalesced around the work of two dynamic women activists: experienced health feminist Byllye Avery, already co-founder of two other pioneering feminist women’s health institutions, and social justice consciousness-raiser Lillie Allen. From its inception, the NBWHP struggled to cope with the multiple, deeply intersecting burdens of creating a social justice oriented Black women’s health agenda that not only had to bridge gaps of accessibility, affordability, and education but also recognized Black women’s profound need for sufficient social, emotional, economic, and political support to allow them to improve their health and health outcomes. Despite many successes, the staggering weight of this complex agenda quickly became inextricably linked with organizational politics, personality conflicts, economic woes, and a controversial and organizationally distinctive form of psychopolitical self-analysis that led to the downfall of the NBWHP as a grassroots resource for Black women’s lives. The making and unmaking of the National Black Women’s Health Project is a history that speaks, loudly and distinctly, to present-day attempts to address both racial and gender-based health disparities.

The March 13, 2012 edition of Tell Somebody started out with cab driver Richard Tripp talking about the www.coppinc.com Spring Break for the Homeless event coming up in Kansas City on April 7th.  Tripp is the founder and director of COPP Inc, and every Spring and Fall has been putting on events where a couple of thousand people come for free food, free clothing and free entertainment. Next, we heard from Byllye Avery, founder of Black Women's Health Imperative, one of the groups in a coalition called HERvotes.  The 101st International Women's Day was March 8th, and March is Women's History Month, but you'd never know it from the current political climate and the attacks on women's rights and threats to the health and economy of all. The show ends with an account of how revolution broke out on International Women's Day in 1917 in St. Petersburg.  What has come to be called the February Revolution was sparked by women, and this last segment of the show is part of an eyewitiness account by Russian Army machine gun training officer Hugo Hakk, never heard anyplace else before it was serialized on Tell Somebody in 2009. Click on the the pod icon above or the .mp3 filename below to listen to the show, or right-click and choose "save target as" to save a copy of the audio file to your computer.  You can also subscribe to the podcast, for free, at the iTunes store or your podcast directory.  If you have any comments or questions about the show or any problems accessing the files, send an email to: mail@tellsomebody.us