Rosalind Petchesky papers

Rosalind Petchesky is a political scientist and activist, producing prominent works on political theory around transnational feminism and reproductive justice and sexual rights. Her career includes nearly 50 years of teaching, of which twenty-five were spent at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she is now Distinguished Professor Emerita of Political Science. She is also a founding member of the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse (CARASA), the successor of the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse (CESA) and a response to the passage of the Hyde Amendment.

Driven by activism in her youth while growing up in a Jewish family in Tulsa, Oklahoma and witnessing racism and the effects of Zionism as a teenager while on a youth trip to Israel, Petchesky participated in the National Conference of Christians and Jews (now the National Conference for Community and Justice) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) before pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Government from Smith College, graduating summa cum laude in 1964.

While earning her M.A. and PhD from Columbia University, Rosalind Petchesky was part of a group of student protestors in 1968 who demanded the university use an unoccupied mansion to provide an alternative community childcare center which operated for ten years. With CARASA, she worked within networks of other feminists and reproductive justice advocates throughout the 1970s and 80s to connect discussion and action around abortion to a much broader range of other health and social justice issues. This work included ending sterilization abuse and providing maternity leave, full access to health care, childcare, safe birth control, sex education, gender equality and sexual rights for LGBTQI persons, youth, and cis women.

Petchesky has written books on the gender, macroeconomic and biopolitical aspects of these issues transnationally and in the United States, Uganda, Haiti, and contexts of war and displacement. She has collaborated in research and advocacy, including at the United Nations conferences of the mid-1990s, with the International Reproductive Rights Research Action Group (IRRRAG, which she founded in 1995), Sexuality Policy Watch based in Rio de Janeiro, the Coalition for Sexual and Bodily Rights in Muslim Societies and the International Women’s Health Coalition, among others.

Her landmark book, Abortion and Woman’s Choice: The State, Sexuality, and Reproductive Freedom (1990 revised) was cited by the United States Supreme Court in its 1992 decision upholding Roe v. Wade (Planned Parenthood of Eastern Pennsylvania v. Casey). In 1995, Petchesky was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (commonly known as the genius award).

Since her retirement from teaching in 2013, Rosalind Petchesky has worked intensively with the New York City chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, participated in two delegations to Palestine, and co-edited/co-authored the book, A Land With A People: Palestinians and Jews Confront Zionism (2021).