Read by Lauryn Altman
13 hours, 15 minutes
Published September 2023 by Penguin Publishing Group
Publisher's Summary:
Chicago, early 1970s. Who does a woman call when she needs help? Jane.
The best-known secret in the city, Jane is an underground health clinic composed entirely of women helping women, empowering them to embrace their futures by offering reproductive counseling and safe, illegal abortions. Veronica, Jane's founder, prides herself on the services she has provided to thousands of women, yet the price of others' freedom is that she leads a double life. When she's not at Jane, Veronica plays the role of a conventional housewife-a juggling act that becomes even more difficult during her own high-risk pregnancy.
Two more women in Veronica's neighborhood are grappling with similar disconnects. Margaret, a young professor at the University of Chicago, secretly volunteers at Jane as she falls in love with a man whose attitude toward his ex-wife increasingly disturbs her. Patty, who's long been content as a devoted wife and mother, has begun to sense that something essential is missing from her life. When her runaway younger sister, Eliza, shows up unexpectedly, Patty must come to terms with what it really means to love and support a sister.
In this historic moment, when the personal was nothing if not political, Veronica, Margaret, and Patty risk it all to help mothers, daughters, sisters, and friends. With an awe-inspiring story and appealing characters, All You Have to Do Is Call celebrates the power of women coming together in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.
The best-known secret in the city, Jane is an underground health clinic composed entirely of women helping women, empowering them to embrace their futures by offering reproductive counseling and safe, illegal abortions. Veronica, Jane's founder, prides herself on the services she has provided to thousands of women, yet the price of others' freedom is that she leads a double life. When she's not at Jane, Veronica plays the role of a conventional housewife-a juggling act that becomes even more difficult during her own high-risk pregnancy.
Two more women in Veronica's neighborhood are grappling with similar disconnects. Margaret, a young professor at the University of Chicago, secretly volunteers at Jane as she falls in love with a man whose attitude toward his ex-wife increasingly disturbs her. Patty, who's long been content as a devoted wife and mother, has begun to sense that something essential is missing from her life. When her runaway younger sister, Eliza, shows up unexpectedly, Patty must come to terms with what it really means to love and support a sister.
In this historic moment, when the personal was nothing if not political, Veronica, Margaret, and Patty risk it all to help mothers, daughters, sisters, and friends. With an awe-inspiring story and appealing characters, All You Have to Do Is Call celebrates the power of women coming together in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.
My Thoughts:
It didn't take me very long to figure out why my friend had recommended this book to me. She is well aware of my feelings about this subject and knows how I love a book that ties the past to events currently happening.
She also knows how much I love to learn something new when I'm reading. Here I learned about the Jane Collective which was, according to Wikipedia, an underground service in Chicago, affiliated with the Chicago Women's Liberation Union, which sought to address the increasing number of unsafe abortions performed by untrained providers. As in the book, the service was started by a woman who went with another woman when she got an abortion and then began helping other women to get safe abortions. Eventually, when demand became too great for her to handle alone, she brought in others to help. Eventually, many of the women in the collective learned how to do D&Cs so that they could provide services to women who were too poor to afford other services and to women of color.
In this book, we see the toll that kind of work would have had on the women involved. At a time when abortion was illegal, secrecy was paramount as so much was at stake. None of it would have been possible without the bond the women involved created, a great deal of strategy to keep things as secret as possible, and the help of officials and medical professionals who supported the work. It was a great deal of stress and we see how that plays out in the lives of these women, both those who provide the service and those who need to use it.
The book is filled with interesting relationships between women: Veronica's with Patty, who doesn't know about Veronica's work and wouldn't support it; Siobhan's relationship with Veronica as they work together to provide the kind of care that Siobhan didn't get; Margaret's relationship with Phyllis, the work colleague who opens Margaret's eyes to life as a black person at that time and to the group she has become so passionate about helping; and Patty's relationship with Eliza, the sister who disappeared after their father died and who balks at Patty's attempts to mother her.
To an extent, Maher is preaching to the choir with this book - I don't know that any reader who isn't already open to the idea would pick it up and have their mind changed. But I loved learning this history and being reminded of what life will once again be like for so many women if the country returns to a time when safe abortions are no longer legal. Kudos to Maher for tackling this piece of history.
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