Alice Wolfson

Wolfson gained prominence for her role at the Nelson Pill Hearings on Capitol Hill, where she and other soon-to-be prominent health feminists were galvanized by their success at warning women of the Pill's dangerous side effects.^[1] Wolfson invited fellow feminist Barbara Seaman to testify at the hearings, and worked with her to eventually form the National Women's Health Network.^[2] Wolfson's group consistently made national news at the time, and led to the public's outrage about women's health misconceptions.^[3] Wolfson's activism is credited with opening up the FDA to consumer observers in order to better ensure that women's health would be addressed.^[4] Her efforts also led to the FDA requiring medication package inserts with birth control pills, the first ever prescription drug insert in the United States.^[5]

Wolfson is also notable for her discovery on intersectionality between race, class, and healthcare in the late 1960s to early 1970s.^[6] Through her efforts in the D.C. Women's Liberation Movement (DCWLM), she was able to realize that women of color and/or women of lower social classes were more likely to seek out unsafe abortion methods because of inequalities in the healthcare system.^[7]

In 1968, Wolfson signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.^[8] In 1970, Wolfson was one of 17 women that contributed to writing the first issue of the impactful feminist paper, Off Our Backs.^[9] In the 1990s, she worked to obtain damages for women adversely affected by breast implants.^[10]

Wolfson was featured in the 2014 documentary film She's Beautiful When She's Angry, where she advocated for "changing the whole paradigm" of under-represented women's rights in society.^[11]

Women's health

In the first issue of Off Our Backs, Wolfson writes about how the FDA had suppressed information from a study done about the pill's potentially fatal effects on women, which raised many safety concerns about the contraceptive.^[12] Wolfson also argues that the choice of birth control method belongs to the individual woman, as they would be the one affected by its failure.^[13] She has stated that the "work and toil put in by her generation" would be undone if Roe v. Wade was ever overturned.^[14]

• Wolfson was the recipitent of the 2021 Millicent Carey McIntosh Award for Feminism^[15]

• Birth control in the United States
• Women's liberation movement