As someone who over the past 50 years has thought about and written many books and articles on U.S. feminism, I should have been less surprised by the strong electoral backlash to the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs V. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling, a judgment that overturned the 1973 Roe V. Wade decree and thus 50 years of national abortion rights.
True, I expected massive street demonstrations and marches after Dobbs was announced, the kind of political actions that abortion-rights supporters used in the years before Roe was enacted – and in the years since, as abortion rights continued to be challenged.
