Citation for Loretta Ross

Feminist. Activist. Visionary. Warrior for reproductive justice. “I want to share what I've experienced with emerging activists,” you said recently, “in the hopes these activists will join the transformative human rights movement that has changed the world.” Rest assured: Your teachings, your thinking, and the movement you helped create will continue to change the world for generations to come.

You have been on the front lines of the fight for reproductive justice and systemic change since the earliest days of your career, working at the first rape crisis center in United States history. Like many of the best movement leaders, your work is rooted in personal experience. You have taken your own encounters with a broken, unjust system, and used them to drive change. Your victory over the Dalkon Corporation and A.H. Robins was not only a landmark win, but also an inspiration to Black women across the country in taking on corporate power and institutional racism.

Your activism, advocacy, and thinking — from NOW, to the First National Conference on Third World Women, to the March For Women’s Lives, to the founding of SisterSong — are seminal to the movement we know today. Again and again, you have helped organizers and activists see the bigger picture, evolving what was an issue-specific campaign to the broader reproductive justice framework we know now.

You have helped millions understand the intersectionality of our fights: How progress on issues like reproductive justice and equal pay cannot exist in a silo, especially in a society with pervasive poverty and mass incarceration disproportionately hurting women of color. You have been at the forefront of a new kind of mass movement that unites women and human beings across all backgrounds in a common fight for justice.

That point-of-view has never been more critical than it is now. Every day, we wake up to the rights of women under attack. We see women of color still held back by the same issues that have defined the past generation’s fight. Yet with your thinking and leadership, we now have the blueprint to respond: a grassroots movement of women and all people, working and winning in solidarity.    

Loretta Ross — for being a champion of women of color, and all women; for connecting all of us in common purpose; for ensuring that the next generation has the tools to continue this fight for as long as it takes —  it is our honor to present you with this 2023 Barnard Medal of Distinction. Congratulations.