Dr. Jennifer L. Holland is a teacher and historian.
She is an expert on abortion history and specializes broadly in histories of gender, sexuality, 20th century conservative movements, and the American West.
Her book, Tiny You: A Western History of the Anti-Abortion Movement (University of California Press, 2020) is a history of the intimate and everyday activism of the anti-abortion movement in four western states.
From the late 1960s onward, activists brought their anti-abortion arguments and fetal imagery into the daily lives of many Americans, ultimately making these politics feel personal and urgent to many white religious people.
This cultural work, in turn changed the partisan politics of much of the American West and the nation as a whole.
Tiny You has won four prestigious book awards to date.
Her new book, Special Rights, tells the story of the anti-LBGTQ movement from before Anita Bryant to the era of DOMA. Socially conservative activists envisioned abortion and homosexuality as the greatest threats to modern society, both touching off anxiety about those who failed to reproduce in traditional ways. Large numbers of white Americans, in the middle of economic and cultural whiplash, were compelled by that vision.
Jennifer Holland has spoken about Tiny You and abortion politics to journalists in television, radio, podcast, and print media venues, including PBS Newshour, CBS News, NPR, the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Guardian, and the Associated Press.
She is L.R. Brammer Jr. Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma. A product of California public schools, she went on to receive her bachelor’s degrees from the University of Michigan, her master’s degree from Utah State University, and her PhD from the University of Wisconsin. She is also the book review editor for the Journal of Women’s History and the director of the Summer Institute for Teachers of Oklahoma History at OU.