PITY FOR EVIL: SUFFRAGE, ABORTION, AND WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT IN RECONSTRUCTION AMERICA

Monica Klem and Madeleine McDowell

(Encounter Books, 2023, hardcover, 328 pages, $34.99)

Reviewed by Maria McFadden Maffucci

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In Pity for Evil, authors Monica Klem and Madeleine McDowell focus on a time after the Civil War when “women’s rights advocates, abortion opponents, and early social scientists all held a common vision of abortion and its intersection with the struggles women faced” (207). Their common vision was that abortion was evil, but that women who resorted to it were not to be condemned, but “pitied.” Abortion was a “dangerous and suicidal act committed by desperate women who had been wronged by individual men or by society writ large, and a social fact that called for civic, legal, and charitable responses” (207). Klem and McDowell’s book explores the beliefs and activism of the 19th-century leaders of the women’s movement—both well-known ones, like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and those less well-known, including pioneering doctors and social activists—all of whom saw the growing abortion rate as an evil. Many of these activists were abolitionists who believed that, as with slavery, “a revolution in public sentiment was a prerequisite for substantive social change . . .” (xv). Women had few of the rights and opportunities of American citizens, and were degraded in public opinion as mentally and morally weak. Early feminists believed that women’s lack of rights and agency—including not only the right to vote but the right to be educated and given the opportunity to work—as well as the imbalance of power and the double standard for women in sexual matters were injustices that created the conditions for the awful crimes of abortion and infanticide.

Though this moment of “common vision” did not last, it was a vibrant and exciting period of progress in civil rights for women and children, yet one largely ignored by historians. The early feminists’ attitude toward abortion has been a great point of contention between activists and academics on both sides of the abortion issue, with most of the arguments focusing on Susan B. Anthony. However, as co-author Monica Klem discovered, there has generally been silence on the larger question of how the early women’s rights movement intersected with the issue of abortion at that time. As Klem noted in an interview in Current, an online journal:

I found histories of abortion in America and histories of women and sexuality and histories of the suffrage movement and allied institutions and trends. But it struck me that there wasn’t much describing the intersections of these areas of study, aside from a few single-line observations in a few influential books that the early women’s rights activists were, without known (or with one possible) exception, opposed to abortion.

I found myself wondering whether that gap represented something or nothing. Had nobody written at length on the question because there was nothing to say or no stories to tell, or was it rather that there had been no interest in investigating the question?

Klem, an independent scholar with a master’s degree in public policy from Pepperdine University, decided to go to the source: The Revolution, the suffragist paper owned by Susan B. Anthony and edited by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and (Mr.) Parker Pillsbury, which was published from to 1868 to 1872. “Lewis and Clark College had digitized the full run of the suffrage newspaper The Revolution,” Klem explained. “So, I downloaded and printed out all those pdfs, bought some highlighters, and started with the issues published under Susan B. Anthony’s direction.” And she reached out to her sister, Madeleine McDowell, a historian of the 19th century whose research has focused on the religious, cultural, and intellectual history of the English-speaking world. Before long the siblings decided to research and write this book together.

And we are fortunate that they did! Pity for Evil is an important book: First, because it is an example of diligent, primary-source historical research, engagingly written and abundantly annotated. Second, it demonstrates the central role misogyny played in women’s resorting to both abortion and infanticide—and in the struggle to prevent both. Third, it invites comparison with our modern struggle against abortion: In a post-Dobbs world, public perception of the abortion issue is distorted, and the quiet strength of the movement is located in those pro-life organizations that seek to change the culture and rescue women as well as their babies.

As mentioned, pro-life and pro-abortion academics and activists have long disputed whether Susan B. Anthony herself was anti-abortion, focusing on her writings and an anonymous editorial some attribute to her. I asked Klem about this in an email, and she responded that because Anthony and the early feminists did not want to criminalize abortion, many argue that they weren’t opposed to it, but that “sells the existing pro-life movement and the early feminists’ efforts against abortion short. . . Anthony was . . . more of an organizer and someone who created spaces for important conversations than she was someone given to making lengthy pronouncements of her own.”

Yet anti-abortion conviction is abundantly evident in both the editorials and the articles published in The Revolution, as Klem and McDowell demonstrate.

An additional and important piece of evidence stems from the type of ads The Revolution refused to run: the most lucrative ads for newspapers at that time were for abortions, using thinly veiled language. The notorious Madame Restell, who performed abortions without medical training, built her hugely profitable business through newspaper advertising. But even though just about all newspapers—even religious ones—ran these ads, The Revolution made a point of refusing them. Editor Parker Pillsbury wrote that “Quack medicine venders, however rich, proud and pretentious, Foeticides and Infanticides should be classed together and regarded with shuddering horror by the whole human race” (41).

I was especially intrigued by the chapter on “Women’s Elevation and the Medical Professions.” While pro-abortion “historians” rate abortionist Madame Restell on par with early women doctors, the real women doctors of the 19th century were appalled by abortion. Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman in America to earn a medical degree, and she took Polish immigrant Marie Zakrzewska under her tutelage, enabling her to go to medical school as well. (Zakrzewska went on to found the New England Hospital for Women and Children.) Both Blackwell and Zakrzewska initially had trouble setting up practices in New York in 1856. Why? Because “female doctor” was associated with “Restellism.” Zakrzewska wrote: “That the honorable term ‘female physician’ should be exclusively applied to those women who carried on this shocking trade seemed to me a horror” (52). Blackwell, Zakrzewska, Charlotte Lozier, and several other women doctors named in Pity for Evil worked courageously to establish true medical education for women, promoting practices that showed a reverence for motherhood.

Historians with a pro-abortion agenda pick and choose whom to remember, with one of their favorite villains being Dr. Horatio Storer, a major antiabortion activist who also (as Klem and McDowell write) represented many of the “patriarchal and patronizing” (48) views of women popular at the time. He did not believe women could or should study medicine. But though “Historians commonly point to Horatio Storer’s misogyny as proof of an inherent and unavoidable opposition between women’s rights and the antiabortion movement” (48) these pioneering women doctors “agreed with Storer’s condemnation of abortion” (49) but saw it as an important reason why women should study medicine. They viewed women’s degradation and their lack of agency when it came to sexual relations as the root cause of the problem of abortion. Not only was a woman who became pregnant out of wedlock shunned as immoral (while the man involved remained unscathed), but many married women became pregnant under conditions that led them to seek abortions as well. In one of a series of editorials in The Revolution about “Child Murder,” writer and women’s rights activist Matilda Joslyn Gage revealed “a subject which lies deeper down into women’s wrongs than any other. This is the denial of the right to herself” (29). Though it is shocking to us today, marital rape was not then illegal. Gage declared “Enforced motherhood” a “crime against the body of the mother and the soul of the child” (29). “Tens of thousands of husbands and fathers throughout the land are opposed to large families” but “so deeply implanted is the sin of self-gratification, that consequences are not considered while selfish desire controls the heart”(30). In addition, women were not taught about their own reproductive cycles or about fetal development. In 1868, Dr. Anna Densmore held a series of public lectures on physiology. “Densmore’s audience was shocked to learn that a fetus’s life began before quickening; one attendee reported that several women had fainted at the realization that they had participated in ‘premeditated child destruction before birth’” (82).

A woman who became pregnant out of wedlock was considered irrevocably ruined. In desperation, she might seek an abortion (as dangerous as it was then), or in many cases the man who impregnated her would coerce her into having one. A shamed woman with a child had scarcely any legitimate ways to support herself and her baby, and often turned to prostitution simply to survive. Women seeking a better society in that era saw abortion as a pathway to prostitution or death, and they lobbied for the opening of foundling homes for abandoned and destitute infants, efforts described in Chapter 7, “Helping Destitute Mothers and Infants.” Although their critics argued that such homes would encourage vice, activists responded that reaching out to help desperate women would result in lower infant mortality as well as a lower prostitution and abortion rate. By seeking to restore “fallen” women’s sense of dignity and self-worth, activists would enable them to be better mothers for their children.

This attitude is shared by those who run pregnancy care centers in the U.S. today—centers that, tragically, are being demonized as anti-women by proabortion activists and their allies in government. The startling difference between then and now is that 19th-century feminists believed women’s rights would bring relief from abortion; today, the rallying cry is that abortion is a woman’s right—maybe her most important.

One thing hasn’t changed: Abortion then and now is a hugely profitable business—and protected as such. And misogyny? In significant ways it has simply gone underground. As Pete Buttigieg recently said, men are “more free” when abortion is legal. And now women are convinced that they also need access to legal abortion so that they can . . . be like men? Have sex without responsibility? Climb a career ladder without being encumbered by their fertility? Apparently corporations, healthcare, and the government find it more profitable to encourage abortion than to make better accommodations for pregnant women and parents.

True pro-life conviction must include the belief that women are equal in dignity to men. Every time a pro-life spokesman engages in demeaning behavior or patronizing language towards women, sometimes without pushback from prolifers, the movement takes a hit. See? (the narrative goes), prolifers are just trying to keep women down, or “they” only care about the babies. Unfair as it is, this is catnip for the secular media, and it hurts the integrity of the movement.

Perhaps the biggest difference between then and now is an agreed-upon understanding of morality. The early women’s rights activists believed that rights would better enable women to be virtuous—and to help their husbands and children to be virtuous, thereby improving society. Equality in marriage—including voluntary motherhood—would enable men and women to be partners in having and raising children, and children would be ennobled by the respect husbands and wives would have for each other. Today, “virtue” is an old-fashioned word. Morality has to do with asserting one’s own rights—and not stepping on anyone else’s—unless of course you are unborn, disabled, religious, or critical of the secular culture.

It is true that in the 19th century there were women who sought abortions for selfish reasons: for wealth or social standing, for example. Still—then as now—most women who seek abortions are at best conflicted and often desperate. Pro-life feminists today want to make abortion unthinkable by helping, not condemning, women. The early feminists’ attitude toward abortionminded and post-abortive women reminds me of the best groups we have ministering to women today—groups like the Catholic Sisters of Life, and Walking with Moms in Need, and the Evangelical program, Embrace Grace. They understand that giving women love and acceptance and insisting on their own worth and dignity are the best ways to fight the conditions that lead to abortion.

The authors would agree: “The women described in this book were not, by and large, widely known personalities even during their own lifetimes—yet they quietly dedicated their lives to supporting vulnerable women and their children. To the women doing the same in our own time, this book is dedicated.” A fine dedication for a remarkable book.