Frances M. Beal: The making of a pioneering Black feminist
In 1957, a terrified 17-year-old girl lay on a Harlem kitchen table undergoing an illegal, backstreet abortion. Nearly dying from complications, she was rushed to a hospital ward where nurses badgered her and demanded to know what she had done. That teenager was Frances M. Beal.
Long before she would write the seminal 1969 manifesto "Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female" or co-found the Third World Women's Alliance, Beal was navigating the violent realities of being young, Black and female in America.
In this episode of Berkeley Talks, Ula Taylor, a UC Berkeley professor and chair of African American studies, presents her latest book project, which reconstructs Beal’s political radicalization brick by brick. Blending first- and third-person narrative, Taylor explores how Beal’s life — from the pressures and policing of her early years to unappreciated domestic labor and single motherhood — helped shape her pioneering work in social justice feminism.
“Black feminism for Fran was not a politic that came from one experience or one moment in her life,” Taylor says. “It was a culmination of the brick of girlhood frustrations, the brick of early adolescent battles, the brick of teenage gendered expectation, the brick of abortions, the brick of sexual pleasure, the brick of housework and the brick of single motherhood. All and so many other theoretical and practical life bricks informed the construction of her Black feminist house grounded in social justice feminism.”
Taylor’s lecture, which took place on Feb. 19, was hosted by Berkeley’s Social Science Matrix and co-sponsored by the Department of Gender and Women's Studies and the Department of African American Studies.
Watch the lecture, listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-talks): https://news.berkeley.edu/2026/07/24/berkeley-talks-the-making-of-visionary-activist-frances-m-beals-black-feminist-house/
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