Not so, argued 91��ɫ history Professor Stephen Brooke in his 1992 book, . After delving into Labour Party records, he found its working class roots and socially progressive agenda made it ideologically “very distinctive” from other political parties.  

While researching that first book, an extension of his Oxford University dissertation, Brooke discovered a trove of non-party archives many British Labour Party historians had never tapped. They were unpublished records of women’s organizations and pressure groups, working locally and on the political fringes and seeking Labour Party support to press for legal access to abortion, birth control, contraception education, decriminalization of homosexuality and equal rights. It was the 1990s and scholars were beginning to re-examine history through gendered lenses. Brooke began to wonder how the Labour Party dealt with women’s issues, some of the most controversial issues of the 20th century and yet untouched by scholars. 

Fourteen years later, Brooke has completed , just released in Britain by Oxford University Press and to be launched in January on this side of the Atlantic.  

Written for scholars and political and sexual history buffs alike, this 300-page book tells the stories of individuals and local organizations who advocated for birth control, abortion law reform and gay rights from the 1880s to the 1990s. It tells how they turned to the Labour Party – the left, not the right – to push for legal reform. “Mainstream politicians do not want to touch issues of sexual equality and gay rights,” says Brooke. So advocates – from working class housewives to village councillors – were forced to make their case from the margins of politics, as best they could, well into the 1970s.

“One of the things that was so rewarding about working on a book like this is not dealing with the usual suspects,” says Brooke. “The people who were advocating for birth control or access to abortion were not in it for glory or ambition but doing it for the sake of an issue. The cast of characters was amazing – men and women who were not leading politicians, struggling and working for difficult causes with great determination and great integrity.” Such crusaders for gender-related and sexual reform surfaced as early as the 1880s and throughout the next 100 years, the span of this book, and showed great courage and determination in the face of much resistance, says Brooke. “To me that was very moving.”

The 20th-century scope is a very broad sweep because of a natural narrative, says Brooke. In the late 19th century, a revival in socialism coincided with an interest in reform of women’s position and in sexual freedom for women and homosexual men. A century later, in 1997, the New Labour Party under Tony Blair introduced reforms that recognized individuals, no matter what sexual orientation, as equal under the law, and anti-discrimination laws. “There is a mainstreaming of sexual equality in Britain now,” says Brooke.

Sexual politics were not always about an individual woman’s right to choose and her sexual freedom, as it was in the 1970s and 1980s, says Brooke. When working class women in the 1930s called for abortion law reform and access to birth control, they wanted social equality with middle and upper class women who had easier access. They wanted a better life. This is where sexual politics and labour politics merged. As the voice of the working class and progressive social reform, the British Labour Party was the natural party to address this issue. “It was all about vision of betterment,” says Brooke. (Read his introduction to Sexual Politics, . )

He started research on Sexual Politics while teaching at Dalhousie University and continued after joining 91��ɫ’s faculty 10 years ago. A Faculty of Arts fellowship in 2007 (see YFile, Nov. 29, 2007) enabled him to devote a year to digging deep into previously unexplored archives in Britain.

And now for something completely different. Brooke is busy on two new projects – photography in British cities in the 1950s and 1960s, and left wing politics in London in the 1980s.

By Martha Tancock, YFile contributing writer

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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91��ɫ history Professor Marc Stein grew up in the suburbs of New 91��ɫ City in the 1960s and 1970s with a passionate faith in the US Constitution and US Supreme Court as strong protectors of freedom, equality and democracy in the post-war era.

That faith was shaken in the 1980s when the Supreme Court justices upheld state sodomy laws, which he initially attributed to the conservative backlash of the Reagan era. Then, in the early 1990s as a graduate student, Stein stumbled across a 1967 decision upholding the deportation of Canadian citizen Clive Boutilier, which challenged his assumptions about the earlier liberalism of the US Supreme Court.

Boutilier vs. the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) was one of the Supreme Court's first major gay rights cases, says Stein, an award-winning author, editor and teacher in 91��ɫ's Department of History, School of Women's Studies ���Ի���Sexuality Studies Program, all in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies.

What the Supreme Court justices did in this case did not protect equality and freedom. Instead, they upheld a provision of the 1952 Immigration & Nationality Act that authorized the exclusion and deportation of aliens afflicted with psychopathic personality, which the US Congress, the INS and the Supreme Court interpreted to apply to homosexuals.

Canada had introduced its own version of the US immigration law in the 1950s, but repealed it in the 1970s, a few years after homosexuality was declassified as a mental illness in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The US didn't repeal its law until 1990.

Left: Marc Stein

Although liberals celebrate and conservatives condemn the US Supreme Court of the 1960s and 1970s for its rulings on issues such as abortion and birth control, Stein says, neither is correct in depicting the court of that era as sexually libertarian or egalitarian. He argues this point in his new book , which looks at six major Supreme Court cases – Griswold, Fanny Hill, Loving, Eisenstadt, Roe and Boutilier.

More than half the book is devoted to the Boutilier case. Stein is the first scholar to examine this episode in any depth and to tell Boutilier’s tragic story following the Supreme Court ruling. Boutilier had moved from Nova Scotia to the US with his family in the 1950s and several of his brothers served in the US military. When he applied for US citizenship in the early 1960s and revealed that he had once been arrested, though not convicted, on a sodomy charge in New 91��ɫ City, his legal troubles began.

In doing the research for the book, Stein studied liberal rulings on birth control, abortion, interracial marriage and obscenity, alongside the conservative ruling on homosexuality in Boutilier. What he found was that the sexual rights doctrine adopted by the Supreme Court from 1965 to 1973 was not liberal or egalitarian. In fact, it upheld heteronormative assumptions regarding "the supremacy of adult, heterosexual, marital, monogamous, private and procreative forms of sexual expression," he writes. Marital and reproductive rights were upheld; sexual rights were not. These decisions also reproduced and reinforced social hierarchies based on class, race, gender and citizenship. And liberal and leftist advocates who argued these cases before the Supreme Court "condoned sexual discrimination".

Right: Andrew Boutilier (left), Clive Boutlilier's brother; Joyce Boutilier, Andrew's wife; Clive Boutilier; and Eugene O'Rourke, Clive's partner

Their arguments in birth control and abortion cases, for example, distinguished between laws that interfered with marital and reproductive rights, which they challenged, and laws against adultery, fornication and sodomy, which they said were constitutional, says Stein.

In Boutilier’s case, the ruling concurred with the view that homosexuals suffered from psychopathic personality and so should be deported. After the decision, Boutilier’s case was all but forgotten. The decision against him didn’t conform to popular narratives about the liberalism of the US Supreme Court after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision on racial desegregation, so it was ignored.

Stein adds that many US gay and lesbian activists challenged discriminatory policies and practices during the 1950s and 1960s, but that was also forgotten, giving rise to the popular myth that the gay and lesbian rights movement began in the 1970s. In fact, says Stein, it started much earlier and was quite vigorous, as can be seen by the extraordinary coalition that defended Boutilier, which included immigration advocates, civil libertarians and gay rights activists.

"My book is the first to show that the US gay and lesbian movement of the 1950s and 1960s had a well-developed strategy of turning to the courts to defend sexual rights," he says.

The sexually conservative aspects of the Supreme Court's "liberal" decisions on abortion, birth control, interracial marriage and obsenity in the late 1960s and early 1970s vanished from the public consciousness. Instead, the US public came to believe that the Supreme Court's decisions of that era were sexually libertarian and egalitarian. Decades later, the Supreme Court itself seemed to adopt the public's point of view, declaring in its 2003 decision striking down state sodomy laws that the ruling was consistent with the decisions of the 1960s and 1970s, says Stein.

This, he says, is consistent with new theories of "popular constitutionalism," which emphasize the importance of popular understandings of legal rights.

Stein hopes Sexual Injustice will shed light on the implications of some of the Supreme Court’s decisions, as well as the sexual revolution, and help educate the public regarding heteronormative rights and privileges in the past and the present.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin

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A 91��ɫ study has shown for the first time how the drug misoprostol, which has been linked to neurodevelopmental defects associated with autism, interferes with neuronal cell function.

It is an important finding because is similar in structure to naturally occurring prostaglandins, which are the key signalling molecules produced by fatty acids in the brain. The drug is used to prevent ulcers in people who take certain arthritis or pain medicines, including aspirin, that can cause ulcers. It protects the stomach lining and decreases stomach acid secretion.

Past clinical studies have shown an association between misoprostol and severe neurodevelopmental defects including autism symptoms. Those studies looked at cases in Brazil in which women misused the drug early in pregnancy in unsuccessful attempts to terminate their pregnancies.

The 91��ɫ study examined mouse neuronal cells to discover how the drug actually interferes at a molecular level with prostaglandins, which are important for development and communication of cells in the brain.

“Early in the first trimester of pregnancy, neuronal cells reach out to communicate with one another,” says Dorota Crawford, a professor in the School of Kinesiology & Health Science in 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Health. “Our study shows that misoprostol interferes with this process by increasing the level of calcium ions in neuronal extensions, which reduces the number and length of these extensions. It prevents the cells from communicating with each other. If changes in prostaglandin level alter the development or differentiation of cells, it may have a physiological impact.”

Left: Dorota Crawford

Crawford and Javaneh Tamiji, who undertook the research for her master’s thesis in the Neuroscience Graduate Diploma Program at 91��ɫ, co-authored a study published online in the journal Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications: “Prostaglandin E2 and misoprostol induce neurite retraction in Neuro-2a cells”.

There is no indication that women in Canada are misusing misoprostol to terminate pregnancies, and in fact the drug is used safely for other purposes such as treatment and prevention of gastrointestinal ulcers. However, during early neuronal development the drug misoprostol or other environmental factors such as infections or inflammations, which can also increase the level of prostaglandins, may interfere with normal brain function, says Crawford.

Right: Javaneh Tamiji

Crawford and Tamiji focused on the drug misoprostol because they had evidence from clinical studies of the neurotoxic effects of the drug. They used misoprostol and the naturally occurring prostaglandins side by side in their study and found that both compounds produced the same effects on neuronal cell function.

The study shows that misoprostol interferes with the prostaglandin pathway in a dose-dependent manner – in other words, the higher the dose, the greater the problems created.

“What that indicates to us is whether it is infection that will activate it or whether it is the drug, it will cause the same effect,” says Crawford.

Now that it has been shown that misoprostol affects interaction between cells, the next step will be to do animal studies on mice to examine the physiological impacts on particular parts of the brain, she says.

Crawford’s lab is one of very few in the world that has adopted a multidisciplinary approach to the study of autism spectrum disorders, using molecular techniques to understand the link between causative biological factors (genes and environment) and the behavioural expression.

This research was funded by the . The provided equipment used in the study.

It has also received coverage on MedicalNewsToday.com:

A 91��ɫ study has shown for the first time how the drug misoprostol, which has been linked to neurodevelopmental defects associated with autism, interferes with neuronal cell function.

91��ɫ Professor Dorota Crawford, of the School of Kinesiology & Health Science in the Faculty of Science & Enginering, and graduate student Javaneh Tamiji, who undertook the research for her master’s thesis in the Neuroscience Graduate Diploma Program at 91��ɫ, co-authored a study published online in the journal Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications: “Prostaglandin E2 and misoprostol induce neurite retraction in Neuro-2a cells”.

By Janice Walls, media relations officer

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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The clip runs for approximately six minutes and is available on .

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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