By documenting the history of the abortion dispute in the country, the exhibit seeks to remind people that the politics around women’s reproductive rights has always been complicated, but there are lessons to learn from past struggles.

“We tend to feel helplessness and inevitability when we think about contemporary abortion politics; helplessness in the sense that the Supreme Court has done what it has done, and people feel, regardless of their views on the issue, that they don’t have a whole lot to say about the matter; and inevitability in the sense that people feel that there’s not much politically they can do,” said Ziegler.

“The exhibit hopefully will show people that that idea of inevitability is wrong, and that sense of powerlessness is misguided because historically, people, on either side of this issue, have managed to change things when things seemed unchangeable.”

For Kamensky, the Schlesinger library faculty director, the exhibit also seeks to contribute to the public debate about abortion and women’s reproductive rights, arguably the most polarizing topic in American politics.

“We know that legally, politically, institutionally, intellectually, rights around pregnancy are more unsettled than they’ve been in half a century in the reproductive lifetimes of pretty much everyone alive today,” said Kamensky. “There’s no family in America to whom the Roe decision did not speak in some way or another and to whom the Dobbs decision does not speak in new ways.”

The exhibit also highlights the library’s strategic initiative to collect records of anti-abortion organizations and individual papers of women who took part in that movement to offer a more complete picture of the history of the issue in the U.S.

“It’s a positive good in and of itself because scholars desperately need those records to be able to tell difficult and complicated stories from the inside out, as experienced by the actors who lived them” said Kamensky. “And it is also a good example of the kinds of spaces that libraries can and should be. We want Radcliffe to be, and I think we are, a space where people can have difficult conversations civilly and robustly.”

Along with “The Age of Roe” exhibition, which will continue until March 4, 2023, the Radcliffe Institute will host a major public conference to probe the legacy of Roe v. Wade on Jan. 26-27. Nearly 30 experts from different disciplines, including law, history, and medicine, will take part.

“I hope the conference will have attendees who are very certain in their positions on any side of the abortion ideology landscape, and people who are less certain and are looking for answers in a moment of flux,” said Kamensky. “I hope everybody can come away saying, ‘I hadn’t thought of this point that way.’”