Dr. Gail Bederman, Ph.D., is an associate professor of history at the University of Notre Dame in the Department of Arts and Letters with concurrent appointments in American Studies and Gender Studies specialization. She holds a Master of Arts degree and Ph.D. from Brown University. Her Ph.D. was conferred in 1992. In 2006 she received The University of Notre Dame’s highest teaching accolade, the Sheehy award. In 2011 she was invited by the Institute for Advanced Studies to participate in their prestigious and exclusive yearlong research program, for which she took a brief sabbatical from Notre Dame.

Her forthcoming publications as of 2022 are the two volumes comprising a series on the topic of the earliest public advocacy for contraception and abortion rights in the United States and Britain. They are entitled The Worst Sort of Property: Population, Marriage, and Sexual Radicalism in England, 1793-1803, and The Very First Reproductive Rights Movement: ‘Preventives,’ Freethought, and Sexual Radicalism in Britain and the USA, 1820-1832.

Ida B. Wells, later known as Ida B. Wells-Barnett, was born into slavery in 1862 in the state of Mississippi, eventually moving to Memphis, Tennessee. Wells recalled hearing her father and grandmother speak about how her grandmother was used by her enslaver for sexual exploitation.