Health Rights Are Civil Rights: Peace and Justice Activism in Los Angeles, 1963–1978. By Jenna M. Loyd. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. xvi, 344 pp. Cloth, $75.00, Paper, $25.00.)

Book Reviews,

The geographer and public health professor Jenna M. Loyd has produced an ambitious and important volume on activism in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s. Health Rights Are Civil Rights explores the joined histories of many “vibrant . . . people’s health projects,” including those sponsored by the African American movement, the War on Poverty, welfare rights, anti–Vietnam War activism, and the women’s health and women’s peace movements (p. 4). Loyd argues that all of these efforts touched on matters of health and that they can be fully understood only by examining them in a single locale. She suggests that the most significant challenges to people’s health were addressed by the organization Women Strike for Peace and the Vietnam Moratorium Committee, and, therefore, that a study exploring health care without also addressing the Cold War could hardly be complete.

Health Rights Are Civil Rights is an excellent intellectual provocation. In part by recapitulating the thinking of her radical historical subjects Loyd encourages readers to reconsider their understandings of “health.” She offers wise turns of phrase, such as “metropolitan geopolitics” and “the body politics of austerity,” as aids to imagining health as inextricable from the social structures of the Cold War, including the Vietnam War–era draft, the underfunding of social infrastructure in favor of “defense” production, and racialized martial masculinity (pp. 208, 224). In welcome efforts to make gender integral to this history, Loyd locates a “mothering underground”—an alliance between the women’s peace and welfare rights movements—but she overstates its depth (pp. 105–26). Loyd instructively roots reproductive justice activism “in struggles against state violence—sexist and racist sterilization and abortion laws, welfare repression, and war” (p. 179).

Health Rights Are Civil Rights is not a historian’s monograph. I expected the book to resemble the discussions of health, race, class, and cities in Brian Purnell’s Fighting Jim Crow in the County of Kings (2013), a study of the Congress of Racial Equality in Brooklyn, or Wendell Pritchett’s treatment of the Beth-El Hospital workers strike of 1962 in Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto (2002). I had hoped Loyd would map the impact of activism on the history of Medicare and Medicaid and the demand for national health insurance that drove Massachusetts senator Edward Kennedy’s Democrat-ic primary challenge to President Jimmy Carter in 1980. Loyd touches upon this material, but her interest in what we usually understand as health care flags and her attention wanders from Los Angeles history and toward national and global events. Her most ambitious arguments appear apart from her archival sources.

Before reading Loyd’s book my main source of enthusiasm about it was its replication of my argument: the contours of “civil rights,” historically and theoretically, have included substantive and social welfare–related demands as much as demands for access to the ballot box and freedom from discrimination at work (Felicia Kornbluh, “Food As a Civil Right,” Labor, Dec. 2015, pp. 135–58). Loyd’s primary concerns, however, are quite distinct from mine. Nonetheless, Health Rights Are Civil Rights will enrich the work of all historians of post–World War Two U.S. activist movements, especially in the ways Loyd persistently reminds us that the lines typically drawn between “foreign” and “domestic” policy are artificial constraints upon our political and analytical imaginations.