Serene Williams: Can you share a little about your background and what got you interested in becoming a historian? 

Daniel Williams: I was interested in history even when I was six years old, in 1st Grade. I went to the school library and discovered presidential biographies for kids. I began reading those and over time that transformed into a larger interest in history. By the time I was eight I remember reading about the history and geography of other countries as well as the states. I was interested in reading biographies much more broadly. In middle school I began participating in the National History Day competition which I participated in through high school. I found that very transformative. I found it really intellectually exciting to take a topic of personal interest and research that for several months. I was doing media presentations, so I would use 35 millimeter slides, which are long gone. I would spend a lot of time reading books, creating a script, finding primary and secondary sources, creating a story and then illustrating it. I found that to be one of the most enjoyable activities that I participated in as far as an academic or extracurricular activity growing up. 

So when I went to college I knew that I would study history. I was not entirely sure if I would go into history as a teaching profession, either at the secondary level or the higher ed level. I thought I might go into journalism, so I did an internship with my local newspaper. But ultimately I decided what I was most interested in was archival research and telling the stories that I wanted to tell, rather than working for some other entity that would dictate what I could research. I enjoyed doing all sorts of research, and probably would have enjoyed all other jobs that enjoyed research, but there’s something unique about being able to study the topics that you want to study. 

The career of college teaching allowed me to pursue research that could be transformed into writing and teaching, as well as engage in intellectual conversations inside the classroom. I really enjoy both those things. So I decided to go to graduate school and get hired, to continue to do this work. Today, with the academic job market not being very good, there are a lot of people who would like to become professional historians that haven’t had the opportunity, so I consider myself very fortunate to have had the opportunity. 

Serene Williams: That’s so interesting, this year I am grading National History Day projects. For the first time I will be grading the national projects this summer in Maryland. It’s such a wonderful program for students. Can you tell us how you got interested in writing about the pro-life movement before Roe v. Wade?

Daniel Williams: I found this project really grew out of my previous project which was my first book, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right. That project began out of graduate school. When I was in graduate school I knew that I wanted to write about the history of American politics. I became very interested in the question of how religious values impact our political decisions. I was initially interested in African American Christians and white Evangelical Christians. Both of whom read the same Bible and have common religious roots. They can both trace their ancestry back to the First and Second Great Awakening of the 18th and 19th century. So you might think that theological traditions that share common hymns, common scriptural texts, common genealogical origins, might have some shared political influence. But actually, as we know, African American Christians by and large have voted very differently from white Evangelical Christians. So that was on the top of my mind as I was studying the sources that made it into my first book. In the course of that research, I realized that there was one political issue that has gotten lumped into the Christian right that has a different trajectory from other issues of the Christian right. On most issues of the Christian right, at least at the time I was writing the book, it was published in 2010 at the beginning of the Obama presidency. At that time it was pretty clear that the Christian right was losing ground. On most political issues, for example same sex marriage, it was pretty clear where the trajectory was going on that issue. School prayer had pretty much been a lost cause by that point for the Christian right. They were very interested in that issue in the 1980s but obviously they hadn’t been able to pass a constitutional amendment overturning the school prayer decision from the early 1960s. So at least at that moment in time, it looked like most issues on the Christian right fit this standard narrative where you might have a progressive cause on the left, a backlash, culture war conflict for a few years, maybe even a couple decades, and then mostly a resolution in favor of greater expansion of rights in a progressive direction. 

But abortion seemed to be a different case. At that moment, a fairly liberal movement in American politics by at least our contemporary standards, it appeared that the pro-life movement was actually dead in the ground. And that would become even more evident over the next few years. The years from 2014 on saw hundreds of state restrictions on abortion getting passed. So that didn’t seem to fit this trajectory. So I thought there might be a deeper story there, I was curious to find out what that was. 

So having just written this comprehensive history of the Christian right, I thought maybe I’d write a parallel comprehensive history of the pro-life movement. When I started researching this, I found that this early time period, which was initially just going to be one chapter in my book, the years before Roe v. Wade, that story proved to be so fascinating it almost became the entire book. The reason it became almost the entire book was because few people knew that story. Most histories of the abortion debate portrayed the pro-life movement as a backlash that occurred after Roe v. Wade. Secondly, I found it was that story that gave me an answer to that question I had which was why was the abortion issue different. 

It’s different because it did not originate with the same Christian right movement that gave rise to some of the other culture war issues. It originated among politically liberal Catholics who shared a human rights vision that was in many ways parallel to the New Deal or the Great Society. So because of that liberal origin of the pro-life movement, it gave the abortion issue the staying power that some of the other issues did not have an understanding that was the key to understanding so much about the late culture war politics of the late 20th century and beyond.

Serene Williams: One of the very interesting stories you tell in your book Defenders of the Unborn is about how Catholics “…began to realize that they probably would not be able to stave off the forces of liberalization much longer…They had a moral duty to continue the fight they felt, but they expected to lose” (68). This is in reference to February 1966. Catholics were ultimately successful in lobbying to overturn Roe v. Wade which legalized abortion. Was this story surprising to you as you conducted your research?

Daniel Williams: I think there were surprises in the story. The presence of such a large and vibrant movement before Roe v. Wade was a bit of a surprise. And so was the trajectory of that debate before Roe v. Wade. There were at least two phases in the pre-Roe period that I highlight. One was from 1966-1970 where it looked like the pro-life cause was on the defensive and was losing battle after battle in state legislatures. And the second phase was from late 1970-January 1973. During that two year period, the opposite seemed to occur. Pro lifers won nearly every political battle. That last part in particular was something that I thought was not covered in the previous literature. Most of the scholarship that I had read on Roe v. Wade before then had simply read that as following the national trend lines of public opinion. 

There is a way to tell the story that would suggest that, but if you look at the state legislative battle a very different story emerges. And that helped me understand why Roe v. Wade resulted in so much political polarization rather than being the natural end result of the direction of public opinion. It was interrupting a political debate that pro-lifers seemed to be winning.

Serene Williams: It was also interesting to learn that Catholics made the argument that the right to life is protected both in the Declaration of Independence and in the 14th Amendment. Do you see those same arguments being made today?

Daniel Williams:It’s definitely still being made today. Students for Life, for example, still has that posted on their website. The Heritage Foundation has an article that’s making the 14th Amendment argument. I think for years it was more of a theoretical argument than something that could practically be applied to court battles because as long as Roe v. Wade was in fact it was difficult to imagine how a legal trajectory could work with a 14th Amendment legal argument. After Dobbs it opened up hope for some pro-lifers that they could succeed with that argument. Given the current political opinion on abortion in the United States I’m not sure that even a very conservative Supreme Court is interested in entertaining that particular argument right now. But it does say something important to pro-lifers even if they never win a court decision using this argument. If they can make the case to themselves and to others that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution protect the right to life then that says something about the American founding and American identity. So many of our debates are not just about policy, they are also about the identity of this country which tells us who we are as Americans.

If you talk to people on either side of the abortion debate it is very important for them to connect their particular moral viewpoints on that issue with the American founding, with the American political system. Certainly the Declaration of Independence says something about our founding, our birthright as a nation. The 14th Amendment, while not part of the original Constitution of course, is arguably one of the most important amendments that was ever passed after the Bill of Rights. Certainly in legal terms it has played an enormously outsized role in nearly all of the major rights debates in American history. By laying a claim to those constitutional principles, the pro-life movement is linking itself and in many ways consciously linking itself to other civil rights movements in American history.

Serene Williams: In your chapter “A New Image” about the fight for legal abortion in New York in the early 1970s, you mention how, “The chaos in New York bolstered the pro-lifers’ argument” (143). This is such an interesting story and rarely discussed in high schools. What made you come to research the New York campaign?

Daniel Williams: There were several reasons why New York is an important part of the story. First, it was the state that had by far the largest number of legal abortions before Roe v. Wade. Even before 1970 it had been a center for illegal abortion providers for a long time. So if you’re telling a national story about the abortion debate New York has to figure into that. It is also a state with a large number of Catholics, not a Catholic majority, but a very large Catholic minority, so one would expect that Catholics would have something to say about this and indeed they did.

I knew that there would be a lot of discussion of abortion on all sides in New York before Roe v. Wade. It was an important place to look for archival material on the pro-life movement and abortion in general. Also, not surprisingly, because it was such a center of abortion activity and with such a large Catholic population, it also gave rise to some of the earliest right to life organizations. Both at the diocean level but also at the grassroots level there was a lot going on in New York. New York has always been important for the Catholic hierarchy. The Archbishop of New York by some standards is the most important Catholic leader in the United States. 

All of these things coming together in one state meant this was definitely something that needed to be explored. And indeed it does figure very much into the politics of this. What I hadn’t realized until I started researching this was how much national backlash there was to what was happening in New York even among people who were moderately sympathetic to maybe limited abortion law liberalization. It played into the trajectory of the abortion legalization movement after 1970. In some ways, New York was almost a limited victory for the abortion rights campaign. They were able to get the most permissive abortion law in the nation at the time but that gave greater ammunition to the pro-life side to argue in legislative debates very successfully that this was not what we want in our state. That’s something that is not as familiar and it wasn’t to me until I started researching this. 

Serene Williams: In that same chapter you mention how there were resemblances between feminists of the 19th and early 20th centuries which celebrated gender differences and pro-life women in the mid-20th century (pgs. 151 & 152). There are obviously parallels to this story today in executive orders that have recently been signed by President Trump. What do you think high school students should know about the promotion of feminism by pro-life activists such as Mary Winter?

Daniel Williams: This is a really important theme and arguably could become an important throughline in a women’s history course on a much broader level. The history of women’s rights activism has featured some activists who tend to focus on the commonalities between men and women and have argued that laws or social traditions that limit women are unfair because men and women are essentially the same when it comes to what really counts–the mind, the capabilities that men and women should be viewed as individual citizens. Fully capable of doing anything that they as individuals demonstrate the capacity to do. Betty Friedan, for example, was very much one of those feminists who emphasized full egalitarianism and minimized any sort of gender difference. And that was the dominant strand, not the exclusive strand, but the dominant strand of second wave feminism. But also in American history there has been a very large number of people who have made a different argument for women’s rights and that was perhaps the dominant strand in the first wave of the feminist movement and it was one that would be the dominant strand in the pro-life movement as well. That strand emphasizes gender difference and argues laws that restrict women are unfair not because women are capable of doing the same things that men are capable of, but because there is a great difference between the male and female sex and that these differences should be celebrated, encouraged and honored in the law. And that women’s unique capacity to do a number of things that men are completely incapable of doing, or are less capable of doing on average, should give rise to greater respect for women. And that women’s voice in the political sphere is important, not simply because they are individuals capable of doing what men can do, but because they bring in a unique perspective that deserves to be heard. So women’s leadership should be honored and encouraged based on that gender difference. That we should hear from all people from all perspectives and women have a unique perspective to bring. So they argue a genuine feminism does not treat women as men, and instead protects their right to be mothers, which means they would get support during pregnancy, to seek ways to have women involved in the workforce, this strand of feminism is going to find ways to honor women’s ability to conceive and give birth, by expanding child care opportunities, by expanding maternal leave, by expanding a social safety net to protect women rather than trying to fit them into the mold that essentially says that male behavior is the norm and women have to fit that category. 

So many of the pro-life activists argued that they were feminists. But their feminism was very different from the feminism of the National Organization for Women.

Serene Williams: Do you support the creation of an AP U.S. Women’s History course? If so can you share why you support it?

Daniel Williams: I think it’s important to study history, certainly, and women are an important part of American history, world history as well but since we are talking about American history. They have certainly been key players in that history and half of the people in the United States were women. So often in U.S. history, women’s history and women’s voices have not been given the space that they deserve. While I think that has changed in the past few decades to a certain extent, there is certainly more coverage of women’s history today than there was in the 1950s or 1960s, one could argue that to really do the subject justice and not just have token coverage at certain times that women’s history would be useful. 

It is also the case that at the college and university level, women’s history courses have been offered since the 1970s. So for the past fifty years, college students have been getting credit for studying women’s history at the survey level. So one could say that maybe it’s time that AP courses recognized that and offered a course that could be transferred to most colleges across the country. 

I do think it’s important about how it is designed. I think women’s history courses have sometimes been criticized for an ideological homogeneity and stereotyped as classes that only women would want to take or teach history from a particular point of view, if you’re more conservative then it might not be the course for you is often the message that is given. I think it is really important, and you are doing this as best that I can tell, that you try to make sure the course does not conform to those stereotypes. It should be ideologically balanced, it should represent the full range of women’s perspectives. There have been a lot of different viewpoints among women, women who have been religious while some have not, women have held every conceivable viewpoint in American history. So a course that does justice to that and is not simply studying the advancement of women’s rights and the backlash against that but is instead looking at the complexity of women’s history and conflict amongst different women based on race, ideology, region and more could be a really rich and meaningful course. If you can do that in this course, which I think you’re trying to do, it could be a very valuable experience for students. 

Serene Williams: Thank you so much for your time, we really appreciate it.