Judy Hart Smith: Pioneer of Women's Rights and Activism (1944–2013)

Judy Hart Smith, political activist, feminist, family planning advocate, editor, educator, founding member of the Austin Women’s Center and the Austin Women’s Liberation Birth Control Information Center, and one of the women involved in Roe V. Wade (1973),  was born on July 4, 1944, in Durant, Oklahoma. She was the second of three daughters born to Louise Alice (Williams) Smith and Bertrand Leroy Smith. Shortly after her birth, the family relocated to Illinois, and she and her sisters, Linda and Laura Lee, spent their early childhood in Oak Park outside of Chicago. Smith was baptized and raised in the Methodist Church. Her father worked as a school superintendent until his death resulting from a brain tumor in 1957. His unexpected death left the family without much income, and they subsequently moved to Denton, Texas, to be closer to family in Dallas, where Smith’s mother worked as a librarian at Southern Methodist University.

While living in Denton, Smith attended Denton High School and became interested in politics and political activism. Her early activism included joining the junior National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and contacting the American Civil Liberties Union when her school showed a House Un-American Activities Committee-made film. In 1962 Smith graduated from Denton High School and received a full scholarship to attend Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. At Brandeis she pursued a degree in chemistry and also became involved in a number of extracurricular activities. She played for the women’s basketball team, was a member of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and worked to help organize Black neighborhoods in Massachusetts. Her political interests also led her to join with other students in protesting against the Vietnam War and Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg’s war policy when he visited the Brandeis campus in 1966.

Around 1966 Smith finished her time at Brandeis and decided to follow her sister Linda’s lead and join the Peace Corps. Smith deployed to Biafra in western Africa but was only able to spend about a year there before civil war forced her to return to the U.S. in the summer of 1967. Her short time abroad, however, was deeply impactful and reinforced her anti-war beliefs and motivated her to get involved with the Vietnam Summer project when she returned from Africa in 1967. Vietnam Summer was an anti-war coalition started by the American Friends Service Committee that recruited volunteers for canvassing, draft resistance counseling, conducting demonstrations, and circulating literature. After Smith’s volunteerism with the project, she traveled to San Francisco where she worked at a hospital and was a demonstrator in the protest on the Oakland Induction Center, a processing center for army draftees. The protest succeeded in shutting down the center but triggered violent suppression from authorities in October 1967. Ultimately Smith did not care for the atmosphere of the city and was persuaded by her sister, Linda, to move back to Texas.

After a summer backpacking in Europe, the two Smith sisters returned in the fall of 1968 to Austin, Texas, where Linda had been attending the University of Texas (UT) in pursuit of a graduate degree in anthropology. Judy joined the zoology department at UT where she began working towards a Ph.D. in molecular biology. She was convinced by Linda to join her in Austin partially because of copies of a publication called The Rag that Linda sent her while she was living in San Francisco.

Judy and Linda Smith quickly became involved in the activist community on campus. Judy Smith found the sexist behavior of many male national leaders of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) to be “alienating,” and the experience led her and other area female activists to start a women’s liberation group where they talked about issues impacting women in Austin. However, most of Smith’s activist work centered around The Rag, a student-published underground newspaper that contained anti-war, feminist, socialist, and civil rights content. While working for the paper, Smith and the other staffers were able to get more content that was focused on women’s issues and included feminist ideas. The Rag was also where Smith met Jim Wheelis, a Texas native and UT law student, who became her romantic partner. Through her relationship with Wheelis, she met Sarah Weddington, a lawyer working at the law school. Weddington, most notably known as the one of the lawyers who argued Roe V. Wade in the U.S. Supreme Court, said of Smith in her autobiography that she was “articulate in her dedication to causes” and the “first self-described feminist” Weddington met.

In 1969 the Austin women’s liberation group started a project known as the Women’s Liberation Birth Control Information Center (BCIC). Led by Judy Smith, fellow biologists Victoria “Vic” Foe and Beatrice “Bea” Vogel, and others,  the women began offering advice on birth control and safe sex via a hotline set up in The Rag’s offices. They started the group after seeing how difficult it was for unmarried women to receive birth control through health care providers in Austin. Thus, the women of the BCIC set up a hotline that provided callers with information on birth control options available as well as the names of doctors in the Austin area that would not harass them sexually or about morality. The women also placed information about birth control in The Rag and used their platform as a way to dispel myths about unsafe abortion options, a procedure that was illegal at the time.

During the course of the “referral project,” as it was known, Smith and the volunteers constantly educated themselves as the calls that they received evolved. Although it began as a birth control hotline, they also received calls from women that needed help due to rape or pregnancy. Smith once said that “whatever” the group could do they “would be doing it.” Due to the high amount of pregnant women calling about abortion options, the women of the BCIC decided to work on finding doctors and clinics that women in need could go to for a safe abortion. During this period, it was common for desperate women to go to non-professionals to get the procedure or try at-home remedies and suffer from the effects of botched abortions. Smith and the women of the BCIC also worked with the Clergy Consultation Service on Problem Pregnancies to help find reliable abortion specialists and help women get access and money for abortions.

While Smith was working for The Rag, they ran into legal trouble with the university when the university regents banned the sale of the paper on campus in 1969. The ban resulted in a successful lawsuit, New Left Education Project v. The Board of Trustees of the University of Texas, that went to the U.S. Supreme Court on “procedural issues” later that year before returning to the local courts in November. According to historians and Sarah Weddington, this case was what inspired Smith to begin asking questions about challenging Texas’s abortion laws in court. Smith’s questions: “What would it take…to bring an abortion suit much like The Rag’s” and “Do you think it would work in the federal courts?” launched the idea that a “federal lawsuit ought to be filed challenging the constitutionality of the Texas antiabortion statute.” Her proposition ultimately culminated in the landmark case Roe v. Wade, and Sarah Weddington, one of the attorneys who filed the suit, was initially recruited by Smith.

After Smith completed her doctorate at UT, in 1973 she and Wheelis moved to Missoula, Montana, where she became an active participant in the community and a “fixture” in Missoula’s feminist movement. Smith moved to Missoula with the idea of opening an abortion clinic and started a hotline similar to the one in Austin that same year. The hotline developed into a rape crisis hotline, and, as a result, Smith acted as an advocate for rape victims in court. During her forty years in Missoula, she helped found the Blue Mountain Women’s Clinic that provided abortions, birth control, and women’s health care services; Women’s Place, a rape crisis center; Women’s Opportunity and Resource Development; HomeWord; the Women’s Resource Center at the University of Montana; co-founded Women’s Economic Development Group Organization; and Montana Women Vote.

Smith taught classes at the University of Montana School of Social Work and in the Women’s Resource Center. She also worked with the Feminist Forum, later renamed In Other Words, a radio show that her sister, Linda, did with other women on the Montana Public Radio station KUFM. Judy did interviews and was known for her inspirational commentaries on the show. In addition, similar to the inspiration she gave to Weddington with Roe, she is also credited with helping inspire numerous projects and community development initiatives in Missoula.

On November 6, 2013, Judy Smith passed away after a battle with breast cancer. She was survived by her life partner, Jim Wheelis, and her sisters Linda and Laura. Former Montana state senator, Carol Williams, said she believed that “every good thing that happened for women in Missoula and in Montana” was because of Smith’s influence.