Laura Briggs - How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics

This book emerged out of many conversations, including ones on playgrounds and in doctors offices, with family and friends. It particularly came from conversations with students in my Politics of Reproduction course at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who have been invaluable in helping me think through the arguments of this book. They have been every professors dream studentsthoughtful, committed, and curious in ways that have pushed me and taught me. Their research has inspired my own, and our work together is truly represented on every page. I have been exceedingly lucky in my colleagues as well; the scholars and faculty associated with the Five College Reproductive Rights, Health, and Justice Certificate provided an intellectual community that made it possible to conceive and to write this book. If it makes any sense at all, its because of that smart group of faculty. The book also received a remarkable amount of help from a Facebook community, for which I am quite grateful, particularly since such support was so unlooked for.

I am also indebted to those who read one of the many versions of the manuscript (and some who read two or more), including Dna-ain Davis, Alexandra Stern, Lynn Morgan, Doug Hornstein, Rickie Solinger, Mimi Petro, Angie Willey, and students in WGSS 187, Gender, Sexuality, and Culture. Niels Hooper of University of California Press first persuaded me that there was a book here, one day over many drinks in Puerto Rico. He offered friendship, encouragement, and support in the much-longer-than-expected process of getting this book written. Martha Balaguera was an ideal reader and a brilliant research assistant, who performed heroics with footnotes at the very last minute. Zaynah Shaikh also provided help with research.

Audiences at the National Womens Studies Association, the American Studies Association, Radcliffe Institute, the Boston Seminar on Women and Gender, Vermont Law School, and Yale University offered smart commentary that made this a better book.

I wrote this while being the chair of the Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies Department at UMass Amherst, which meant that everyone I worked with had to live with this book, including my Friday disappearing act and other moments of absence (physical and mental). Ive been incredibly fortunate to have colleagues who not only put up with it but actively supported the thinking that produced this book, all brilliant intellectuals in their own right: Banu Subramaniam, Miliann Kang, Svati Shah, Angie Willey, Abbie Boggs, Jacqueline Luce, Lezlie Frye, Alexandra Deschamps, Tanisha Ford, Kirsten Leng, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, and Kiran Asher, as well as Linda Hillenbrand and Karen Lederer, who kept everything going.

This is a book about households and reproductive labor, and my own nurtured and inspired this book. I am endlessly indebted to my partner, Jennifer Nye, who was the intellectual companion for so much of this book; our work together to figure out reproductive labor and the public policy that surrounds it was both theoretical and practical, from yelling at the newspaper to juggling our own crises of work and home. Jackson has lived with this book nearly his entire six years of life, and has felt the sacrifices it demanded of him acutely in every marble run I didnt help build, even as his invitations to play hooky from it inspired dance parties and window box gardens. Its ruined him permanently, though, as he has started writing books of his own. This book also had nonhuman companions: Toby the dog, who positioned himself under my desk for nearly every minute of its writing, and Ramona, a cat, who sat on my head when she could. Our other resident feline, Sophie, cared not one whit about this book or my labors, feeling that such things were not the affair of cats. I couldnt have done it without all of them.