UC Berkeley Professor Ula Taylor reads excerpts from her book project on the pioneering Black feminist whose life and politics helped shape modern social justice movements.
By Anne Brice
July 24, 2026
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.
