Abstract
This autobiographical essay sets up a white middle-class young woman’s emergence as a rights-bearing, choice-making exemplar of sexual freedom and as a holder of intimate racial capital in the 1970s. At the same time, elites and various professional authorities were re-stamping this young woman’s Black peers with slavery- and Jim Crow–era tropes, as sexual criminals, bad choice-makers, producers of worthless and expensive children, not citizens. The essay considers the roles played by Roe v. Wade, the availability of contraception, “modern” midwifery services, the “sexual revolution,” welfare policy, public rhetoric, and public policies in locking in new iterations of racism and racial difference in the post–civil rights era, and the importance of female sexuality, pregnancy, and maternity in constructing arenas for deploying these developments.
