Felicia Kornbluh | Vermont Conversation

In June 2020, the US Supreme Court struck down Louisiana’s attempt to severely limit abortions. This came as a shock to many because Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the liberal majority, seemingly reversing an earlier stand that he took against abortion rights. Professor Felicia Kornbluh, a scholar of abortion rights, attended the oral arguments and discusses what she saw in the Supreme Court, and the future of abortion rights. She also talks about her concerns about returning to campus to teach students during the COVID-19 pandemic, and her posthumous discovery about her mother’s crucial activism that led to winning reproductive rights in New York State in the 1970s. Kornbluh is currently at work on a book, How to Win a War on Women: My Mother, Her Neighbor, and the Fate of Reproductive Rights and Justice. (July 22, 2020 broadcast)

Felicia Kornbluh, Professor of History and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, University of Vermont

Has welfare reform, passed in 1996 with bipartisan consensus between Pres. Bill Clinton and a Republican Congress, been an attack on women? That is the argument made by Dr. Felicia Kornbluh in her new book, with Gwendolyn Mink, Ensuring Poverty: Welfare Reform in Feminist Perspective (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). Kornbluh is Associate Professor of History and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Vermont. She is a member of the board of directors of Planned Parenthood of Northern New England and has served as a member of the Vermont Commission on Women. Kornbluh argues that welfare reform has actually shortened women’s lives, and that its new incarnation under Pres. Donald Trump will make matters worse. She discusses her role as a scholar-activist and the new book that she is writing about her mother’s efforts to win abortion rights in the 1970s. (November 28, 2018 broadcast)

Dr. Felicia Kornbluh, professor, University of Vermont, author, Ensuring Poverty