Dates

• Existence: 1947

Biography

Frances “Francie” Hornstein was born in 1947 to a Jewish family in Omaha, Nebraska. She attended the State University of Iowa (today the University of Iowa) from 1965 to 1968. Hornstein became active in reproductive rights in her first year when a fellow student in Currier Hall needed an abortion, which was an illegal procedure in Iowa at the time. After college, she left the United States and briefly lived on a kibbutz in Israel but returned to Iowa in 1969.

In Iowa in the early 1970s, Hornstein became involved in women's liberation in Iowa City. She helped found daycares in the area and contributed to the feminist newspaper Ain't I a Woman. In 1971 she met Carol Downer and Lorraine Rothman at a Cedar Rapids NOW sponsored Self-Help Clinic. Downer and Rothman were central figures in the self-help movement, which aimed to give women more control over their reproductive health through education about female bodies and clinics that taught women how to perform cervical self-exams and menstrual extraction.

In 1972, Hornstein moved to California, where abortion was legal, to help Downer and Rothman found the Feminist Women’s Health Clinic (FWHC), Self Help Clinic One. Maintaining her network in Iowa, Hornstein returned to the state multiple times for self-help clinics. In 1973, with the advent of Roe v. Wade, women from Iowa visited the Feminist Women’s Health Clinic in Los Angeles to learn how to run a reproductive health clinic prior to founding the Emma Goldman Clinic in Iowa City.

Hornstein became the co-director of the Feminist Women’s Health Center as it expanded to include multiple clinics. In her role, she contributed to women's health literature including the Federation of Feminist Women's Health Center's book A New View of a Woman's Body and her own article on lesbian health care. Hornstein left the Feminist Women's Health Center in 1980 and pursued a career in medical social work after earning a degree at the University of California, Berkeley's School of Social Welfare.

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