Annabelle Duval '23

This interview has been collected and condensed by Kelly Lin-Kremer.

Class of 2023, History

Tell me a little about yourself and what you're doing now.

My whole life I've always been interested in reading, writing, and the humanities. I explored a lot of different kinds of classes. Originally I was thinking of SPIA as my major, but I had taken Latin since the sixth grade, so I was also thinking about Classics, as well as English and linguistics. I had a lot of different areas of interest, and I was not really sure how I was going to narrow that down.

Professor Wendy Warren was my adviser freshman fall, and since I was interested in SPIA, she recommended that I take HIS 380: U.S. Foreign Relations with Professor Fronczak, because SPIA has a history prerequisite. I was a bit intimidated since I was only in my first semester at Princeton and she was recommending a 300-level course, but she told me it would be fine, and I found that I really loved it.

We had to get one of those giant Pequod packets, which is kind of intimidating because they're so large, but I ended up really loving diving into the historical sources. I enjoyed the primary sources more than I did the foreign relations aspect of the class, so I took another history class, HIS 210: The World of Late Antiquity with Professor Tannous, and that set me on my history path.

I've always loved close reading, diving into personal narratives and memoirs, and looking at broader stories and trends through the perspective of one person or a few people. I was able to find that in my study of history and in those first few classes.

Tell me about some of your favorite history courses.

The next history class that I took was HIS 280: Approaches to U.S. History[1], which was great. It focused on methodology and how we need to be conscious of what stories we are telling and how we're telling them, how we craft historical arguments, and what sources we're relying on most. I liked thinking through those questions.

The Approaches class covered three historical moments: the Little Rock Nine, the Indian Removal Act, and the Salem witch trials. The section on the Salem Witch trials was really engaging to me, because it was such a different time. The language of the sources, the way they wrote, the names, the community and culture, all those small details were so different. I liked getting to know the historical players at such a close, detailed level.

It showed me that history could use the forms of reading and thinking that I found so compelling in other humanities classes. When we read the transcripts from the Salem witch trials, women's statements about whether or not they said they had engaged in witchcraft, we would read the statement very slowly and talk about how they were presenting themselves and why. It almost felt like picking apart a poem or a close reading of a passage for an English paper.

Then in my sophomore year I took Professor Canaday’s class on Gender and Sexuality in Modern America (HIS 384), which I absolutely loved. It was during COVID when we were all shut in our rooms and couldn't really do anything, which was also a very politically charged time. A lot of my peers were engaging in political activism on social media, so I really appreciated learning about radical feminists and their forms of protest in Professor Canaday’s class. There was one radical feminist group called WITCH that went out dressed as witches, and they would hex men on Wall Street and right on the steps of Congress. There was a lot of spirit and energy and a go-getter attitude in those radical feminist early groups in the late sixties and early seventies, and I got really into that.

What was your thesis about?

The summer before my senior year, the Dobbs decision came down from the Supreme Court, overturning the federal right to abortion. I was in DC that summer, and I went to protest at the Supreme Court with one of my best friends from Princeton, and that inspired me to write my thesis about underground abortion networks pre-Roe.

Specifically I wrote about this group called the Association to Repeal Abortion Laws (ARAL). Most underground networks or grassroots organizations don't have records because they're an illegal organization. It makes them difficult to write about. But ARAL actually kept records. I think roughly a thousand letters are in the ARAL archive in Harvard's Schlesinger Library, which is the women's history library.

ARAL was based in San Francisco, and the way that it functioned was that it would refer women to illegal providers across the border in Mexico, in little border towns. Then the women who went to have their abortions would write letters back to the organization, describing their experience, like if the doctor was kind, if the price was as advertised, if they had any complications. Sometimes the provider would change the price at the last minute, or the place where they were having the abortion done wouldn’t be clean, or there would be complications and infections.

The leaders of ARAL read through all those letters, and they maintained a list of all the abortion providers that they had records on, and they knew who was a safe provider. If a provider wasn't performing the abortion correctly, or was treating women poorly, then they would take that provider off their list. So this organization basically was able to regulate an unregulated illegal industry, because abortion was illegal in Mexico at the time as well.

They were also different from a lot of other organizations because they blatantly advertised what they were doing. They wanted to be arrested because they wanted to start a test case in California's state courts and repeal California's abortion laws.

I went through every box of the records for this organization. Only one historian, Leslie Reagan, had ever written about this group before, so it felt pretty cool to be able to go through all those records and know that I was one of the few historians who had looked at them.

What I thought was interesting about this group was that they had these very radical tactics. They were breaking the law, and they were doing it blatantly, which is typical of radical feminists, but their ultimate goal was legal change, which is not typical of radical feminists. That was more typical of the earlier generation of liberal feminists who sought more traditional change through legal pathways. Their work also contrasted to other underground abortion networks that were very intentionally secretive and tried to stay out of the way of the police.

ARAL also ran a healthcare center where women could get checkups afterwards, and they could get pregnancy tests, which were not as readily available then as they are today. They also offered classes that covered basic sex education, contraception, and self-inducing abortion, which was a pretty radical thing to teach at the time. They advertised the classes, which was part of their strategy to be arrested and then start their test case.

They used these services to then radicalize women and get them to advocate for change in the laws. Part of their requirement of using their referral service was that you also had to write letters to your state representatives, asking them to change the law and decriminalize abortion.

My ultimate argument was that while they used these techniques from radical feminists, ARAL was more aligned with the traditional liberal feminists. Their ultimate goal was to change the law, whereas many other underground abortion organizations at the time were really just trying to stay under the radar and not get caught.

All of that solidified my interest in women's law and women's issues. Reading all those accounts of women having illegal abortions really inspired me to fight for that right back.

Did they ever get arrested? Were they able to start a test case?

They did start a test case. For at least a year or two, they tried to get arrested. They'd go to different cities around California, and they would invite police to come to their classes or whatever events they were having where they would be breaking the law, and the police wouldn't arrest them. The police didn't want to get involved and didn't want to entertain what they were doing, but then eventually they did get arrested. They appealed it up to the California Supreme Court, but then the Roe v. Wade decision came down, so their case became moot.

What made you choose History instead of something like Classics or English?

History helped me to understand the world around me and how we got here. Seeing Dobbs happen and that women’s rights were being rolled back just as I was becoming an adult was really scary. But having studied history, I knew that controlling women’s bodies through the law has always kind of gone in waves. Having that perspective has been really valuable.

There have been times when abortion has been very explicitly outlawed and highly regulated, and other times when it's kind of been allowed to fly under the radar, and it's not been so explicitly regulated or controlled.

Having that awareness that women have always found ways to control their own bodies or support one another and find community, even when the law restricted it, was really comforting. Having the big picture perspective that history provides is comforting during such a politically turbulent time.

What have been some of the biggest lessons that you learned post graduation?

The skills that I learned in the History department are very applicable to everything that I do in my work today. For history, we look at a huge amount of primary and secondary sources, take tons of notes, and then have to take a step back and try to think about, How do I organize this? How do I put this into a coherent narrative and build an argument that’s plausible and accurately captures this time?

Now, working at the U.S. Attorney’s office, I work on a lot of civil rights investigations, and it's kind of a similar process. You get tons of documents related to your investigation, and you interview key stakeholders, and then you look at all the evidence that you have, and then you apply a legal framework to that instead of a historical perspective. But I think the process of gathering all that information and reading and taking your time with the evidence, and then piecing it together translated so easily to the legal field.

So what's ahead in the future for you?

Upon graduation I wasn't entirely sure what I wanted to do, whether I wanted to do a Ph.D. in history, or go to law school, or do a J.D.-Ph.D. So then I got a job at the US Attorney's office for the Eastern District of New York as a paralegal. I'm in the civil division, and I work on civil rights and environmental justice cases. I've had a great experience, and it's totally solidified my interest in law school, so I'm applying to law school now.

After that, I'm not entirely sure. I'm definitely interested in women's rights and reproductive justice. I've really enjoyed working on civil rights cases at the US attorney's office, and I could see myself working in public service. I know that I want to be asking these kinds of questions in the area of women's rights and civil rights, but exactly how I would do that I'm not entirely sure.

The ACLU has a women's rights branch and reproductive justice teams, and there's the National Women's Law Center, so there are a lot of different ways to work on these kinds of cases, and I can see myself taking a few different paths within that area.


[1] Now renamed “The Historian’s Craft: Approaches to American History.”

Photo credit: Isabela Alvarado