"Hold your head up and stick out your chin": Community Health and Women's Health in Mound Bayou, Mississippi

This article expands on research that appears in my book, Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement (NYU Press 2003), in which I argue that the feminist framework of reproductive health care, or even the feminist framework of women's health care, was far too narrow to understand the health care needs of most black women in the 1970s. Black feminist activists of this era maintained that for black women (as well as for other women of color, including Latinas and Native American women), a broad understanding of health care needs was essential to women's reproductive health. Rural African American women in the Mississippi Delta in the 1960s similarly argued that women's reproductive health could only be understood within a broad context of health care, one which improved the life quality of the entire community, particularly in poor communities where even basic health care requirements remained unmet. Problems like sanitation, housing, clothing, transportation, and food were all necessities that had to be provided to make women's health a real possibility. The Delta Health Center organizers responded by linking reproductive health to larger public health and development solutions in Bolivar, Coahoma, Sunflower, and Washington counties, four of the poorest counties in Mississippi and in the nation.