By Emma Malinak
Storytelling is changing for writers who center women’s bodies and reproductive rights in their narratives.
For author Sarah Fawn Montgomery, it’s not the stories that are changing. It’s what they mean.
“In the face of powers that seek to silence, women are vocalizing stories that are not necessarily new, but whose utterances now are acts of political protest, calls to action, and shared solidarity,” she said in an interview with the Peak.
Montgomery, whose creative nonfiction essay titled “Stain” is featured in Shenandoah Volume 73.2, said these stories have the power to capture a variety of experiences, from sexual assault to abortion to gender-based pay gaps to menstruation, and preserve them on the page. They are all crucial in an era when “political figures seek to erase women’s stories through legislation—criminalizing speech, sexuality, reproductive autonomy, and many other fundamental rights,” she said.
Her essay comes after two turbulent years of debates over women’s rights. In June 2022, the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and ruled that the Constitution does not protect the right to an abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. In the following months, twenty-one states restricted access to abortion or banned the procedure entirely. New developments surfaced in 2024 as the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos in test tubes should be considered children and as courts determined the future of mifepristone, an abortion medication.
Meanwhile, politicians are relying on hot topics surrounding women’s reproductive rights to bring voters to the polls in November.
It has all added up to shift Montgomery’s outlook.
“One thing that has changed over the years, especially leading up to Dobbs and in the aftermath of the decision, has been my willingness to embrace anger,” she said. “Girls are taught early on to obey orders because our capital comes from pleasing others, and unlearning this has been essential for me personally, professionally, and politically.”
Poet and essayist Jehanne Dubrow said she feels the same urgency as Montgomery—especially because she lives in Texas, a state with a full abortion ban. She said her poem “Tubal Ligation,” which is featured in Shenandoah Volume 73.2, “is based on my own debates with myself about whether or not to have an invasive surgery” to proactively protect her reproductive rights.
“[Abortion] is certainly much more aggressively on people’s minds than it was before,” she said in an interview with The Peak. “My concern is that perhaps not everybody is alarmed enough.”
Her solution is to keep writing about her personal experiences to ensure that the anxiety many women feel about their bodies and health is represented and documented. “Tubal Ligation” is just one poem out of many included in her next collection, The Brief Temple Taken Down, about “the relationship between the health of the body and the health of the body politic,” she said.
Montgomery agreed that life experiences guide her work—which includes essays such as “Stain,” poetry collections, and her memoir, Quite Mad. She said, in each form, she tries to take language “back to the senses” rather than writing about the body “abstractly, intellectually, from a distance.”
“We can’t write about ideas connected to the body without writing about the physical body itself—wound and want, blood and bruise, viscera and vein,” she said. “Women’s bodies are so often shrouded in societal shame that I want to give them room on the page to exist in all their complexity, messy beauty, and immense power. If I second-guess whether a detail belongs in a piece of writing—a flaw, a regret, a supposedly taboo image—that means it stays.”
In fact, the so-called “messy” words associated with women’s bodies have long been lost in literature. According to Google Books Ngram—a data tool that can analyze the proportional use of any given word in any given year of publishing—the use of the word “menstruation” peaked in 1887 and the use of the word “uterus” peaked in 1894. The usage trends of both words have been largely flat since the 1920s.
The word “abortion” peaked in frequency in 1992, but is now back to the same usage levels as the early 1970s.
Without representation in printed words themselves, it’s not surprising that people struggle to name mainstream novels that center “frank, unapologetic depictions” of menstruation and other experiences of the female body, according to The New York Times. Judy Blume’s 1970 novel Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. may be the exception: it’s Goodread’s top work of fiction that features the topic of menstruation, followed by Stephen King’s 1974 Carrie.
Montgomery said women’s experiences—not to mention the experiences of people of color, disabled people, and other marginalized groups—have never been well preserved in the traditional literary canon.
“I’ve always been frustrated by the literary canon, which seems to delight more in excluding others than in innovative work,” Montgomery said.
Durbrow said the literary canon itself is not at fault; rather, the assumption that non-canonical literature is not valuable is the problem.
“I’ve never had an adversarial relationship with the canon because I believe in the value of reading those books as a starting place but, obviously, not as an ending place,” she said. “The way I’ve always seen working in traditional forms is that I’m enlarging that tradition, asserting my excellence through that tradition, and disproving notions that a marginalized voice is not able to participate in that tradition.”
Dubrow said that what matters in the current climate is that writers “who demonstrate that you can work in traditional forms and still say subversive, difficult, feminist things” keep representing their stories in new works and inspire others to use their voices as well.
“Just the fact that people are writing about abortion is really important,” she said. “The more that writers are destigmatizing the subject, the more able people are to engage with it critically and intellectually.”
Montgomery agreed that the path forward lies in the continued increased representation of women’s experiences in “works that blur genre and expectation [and] stories and styles that subvert.”
“I’m most inspired by writers remaking the world with their words, claiming space for stories the canon has long excluded,” she said.
That work is done one story at a time.
“By making ourselves known through storytelling, we write ourselves onto the world and claim the power to shape it,” Montgomery said. “I hope ‘Stain’ reclaims space in the cultural imagination for the stories of girls and women and their bodies, especially those tales we are culturally conditioned to keep secret…In this essay I write about the girls and women I’ve known and loved, and so I write for them, but [also for] so many others like them, who have shrouded their bodies and the choices they have made about their bodies in shame.”