Pro-Life feminists have consistently pointed to the opposition to abortion by 19th and early 20th century woman’s right advocates. A few months ago, a Feminists for Life member purchased Susan B. Anthony’s home and has put it in the care of FFLA for care and management, something that greatly irritates the writer of yesterday’s NYTimes op-ed that tries to reclaim Anthony:
There is no question that she deplored the practice of abortion, as did every one of her colleagues in the suffrage movement. Feminists for Life cites an 1869 article in her newspaper denouncing “child murder,” labeling abortion “a most monstrous crime,” and advocating its end. “No matter what the motive, love of ease, or a desire to save from suffering the unborn innocent, the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed,” blares the article. “It will burden her conscience in life, it will burden her soul in death.”
What is generally not mentioned is that the essay argues against an anti-abortion law; its author did not believe legislation would resolve the issue of unwanted pregnancy. Also not mentioned is the vaporous textual trail. According to the editors of Anthony’s papers, the article is not hers.
In her personal life Anthony was clear in her conviction that women were not preordained to motherhood, that sometimes a woman and her womb might go their separate ways. A devoted aunt, she claimed to appreciate her colleagues’ offspring, some of whom even felt warmly toward her. But she had little patience for maternity. At best she was the ever-helpful friend who asks if you realize what you are in for just as you have vomited your way through your first trimester. At worst she was a ruthless scold.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s pregnancies were Anthony’s despair: how was it possible, she wailed, “that for a moment’s pleasure to herself or her husband, she should thus increase the load of cares under which she already groans”? She was equally indulgent toward Antoinette Brown Blackwell, one of the movement’s most gifted orators: “Now, Nette, not another baby, is my peremptory command.” Over and over she needled Stanton, galled that the suffragette dream team had “all given yourselves over to baby making and left poor brainless me to do battle alone.” Stanton was the mother of six — one of whom weighed more than 12 pounds at delivery — when she received those cheering words.
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The bottom line is that we cannot possibly know what Anthony would make of today’s debate. Unwanted pregnancy was for her bundled up with a different set of issues, of which only one truly mattered: rescuing women from “the Dead Sea of disfranchisement.” In the 19th century, abortion often was life-threatening, contraception primitive, and a woman as little in control of her reproductive life as of her political one. The terms do not translate, one reason time travel is a risky proposition. No amount of parsing the founding fathers will reveal what they think of the war in Iraq, just as no modern chorus of mea culpas will explain away their slave-holding. To suggest otherwise is to wind up with history worthy of those classic commercial duos, Fred Astaire and his Dirt Devil, Paula Abdul and Groucho Marx
Serrin Foster of FFLA responds:
In her Oct. 13 New York Times opinion piece, Stacy Schiff admitted that Susan B. Anthony opposed abortion and devoted herself to fighting for women’s rights: “There is no question that she deplored the practice of abortion, as did every one of her colleagues in the suffrage movement.”
Schiff’s summary of the early feminists’ beliefs parallels my own statement: “Without known exception, the early American feminists condemned abortion in the strongest possible terms.”
Our feminist foremothers sought to consistently defend human beings through their efforts for suffrage and for abolition of slavery. The basic tenets of feminism, which we have received from the early feminists, are nondiscrimination, nonviolence, and justice for all. Abortion violates all three.
The spirit of FFL’s mission to create holistic solutions to the challenges faced by pregnant women and parents is perhaps best expressed in Anthony’s own words: “Sweeter even than to have had the joy of caring for children of my own has it been to me to help bring about a better state of things for mothers generally, so their unborn little ones could not be willed away from them." (Susan B. Anthony, quoted in Frances Willard’s Glimpses of Fifty Years: The Autobiography of an American Woman, Chicago: Women’s Temperance Pub. Assoc., 1889, 598)
As Mattie Brinkerhoff wrote in Anthony’s newspaper: "When a man steals to satisfy hunger, we may safely conclude that there is something wrong in society—so when a woman destroys the life of her unborn child, it is an evidence that either by education or circumstances she has been greatly wronged." (The Revolution, 4(9):138-9 September 2, 1869)
Feminists for Life’s goal is to eradicate the root causes that lead to abortion, because women deserve better. Schiff’s portrayal of Anthony as a “killjoy” and as “the drillmaster of the suffrage movement” seems to be personality rather than philosophical analysis, irrelevant to Anthony’s views.
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