The story of abortion and nineteenth-century feminism gets its due
Pity for Evil: Suffrage, Abortion, and Women’s Empowerment in Reconstruction America by Monica Klem and Madeleine McDowell. Encounter Books, 2023. 328 pp., $34.99
The day after the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision reversed Roe v. Wade, President Biden delivered a speech decrying the ruling. The Court, Biden lamented, “made the decision based on a reading of a document (the Fourteenth Amendment) that was frozen in time in the 1860s, when women didn’t even have the right to vote.” He failed to mention, however, that the very women who were demanding the vote in the 1860s were also staunchly opposed to abortion. Finding our way forward as a nation requires an honest and accurate understanding of history. For this reason, the recently published Pity for Evil: Suffrage, Abortion, and Women’s Empowerment in Reconstruction America is a valuable contribution to the national conversation around abortion.
In their book, authors and sisters Monica Klem and Madeleine McDowell present a masterful historical analysis of the Reconstruction-era American feminists’ approach to abortion. The book is a groundbreaking synthesis of meticulous research, the “backbone” of which is The Revolution, a nineteenth-century women’s suffrage newspaper. The authors’ dedication to engaging history on its own terms is admirable; they seem careful to avoid “then vs. now” comparisons. Still, it is impossible to read Pity for Evil without noting the similarities and radical differences between the abortion debate of the 1800’s and that of the past fifty years. In this way, Pity for Evil makes a convincing case that the history of abortion in Reconstruction America, and particularly the early feminists’ role in the abortion debate, remains remarkably relevant as we navigate the post-Dobbs era.
The book’s theme is neatly expressed in the title, Pity for Evil. The provenance of the title becomes apparent late in the book (a quotation describing Charlotte Lozier), but from the start, the authors are clear about their thesis: Although the Reconstruction-era feminists unequivocally condemned abortion, “they saw women who sought abortions as more than victims and more than sinners in need of reformation. They chose to look instead at the fundamental dignity of all women as moral beings, and with sympathy and pity, to call each to more.”
The ensuing chapters explore various facets of this thesis.
Pity for Evil shows that the history of abortion in the nineteenth century holds particular relevance for our time—not because we are regressing to a benighted era of oppression but because our feminist foremothers faced many of the same challenges and questions we do today.
The Reconstruction era was a historical inflection point as Americans navigated a rapidly shifting cultural landscape involving issues such as race, medical and technological advances, and women’s role in society. At the intersection of these issues was a heated debate about the morality, legality, and causes of abortion. The early feminists portrayed in Pity for Evil argued that “true republicanism required that women vote”; so long as women lacked the opportunity to exercise the rights and duties of full citizens, the country was at war with its founding ideals. Meanwhile, anti-abortion advocates were renewing their efforts to turn public opinion against abortion, and the women’s movement lent its own distinctive voice to the cause.
Coming off the Covid-19 pandemic, 2020 protests and counter-protests, dizzying developments in AI and reproductive technology, and major blows to the international order, Americans today feel that we, too, have reached an inflection point. This is particularly true in the debates surrounding feminism and abortion. We sense that the status quo cannot stand—and it is already shifting. Decades of pro-life advocacy culminated in the Dobbs decision, and while some states have since increased abortion restrictions, others have enshrined abortion access in their laws and constitutions. Both sides remain convinced that the soul of our nation is at stake, and we continue to grapple with many of the same questions that nineteenth-century Americans did. How should we view women’s agency in seeking abortions? Do legal restrictions on abortion reduce their incidence? Does abortion empower or harm women? Answering these questions remains as urgent today as it was then.
As if to underscore these echoes of the nineteenth century, a number of state abortion laws dating to the 1800’s sprang into effect after the Dobbs ruling. The media angle was that these laws were relics of all-male legislatures and limited scientific knowledge; however, Pity for Evil tells a different story, suggesting that the anti-abortion movement in the 1800’s gained strength from advances in scientific and medical knowledge and united a diverse cross-section of society—including the nascent feminist movement.
While the relevance of the Reconstruction-era abortion debate lies in the similarities between that cultural landscape and our own, the greatest lessons are to be found in the differences. The most striking difference is that feminists have switched sides in the abortion debate. Pro-life feminists still exist, but American feminism has become nearly synonymous with abortion advocacy. Whereas the nineteenth-century feminists saw abortion as a moral evil to be eradicated using both cultural and legal means, the feminist movement of the past 50 years has made abortion access the lynchpin of women’s liberation, often denying the humanity of the fetus and that abortion constitutes a moral evil at all.
Pity for Evil leaves no doubt that the Reconstruction-era feminists opposed abortion, insisting that women who sought abortions committed a serious sin. Some described abortion as ‘“a crying evil,” “revolting outrages against the laws of nature and our common humanity,” and “slaughter.”’ At the same time, these feminists believed that a society in which women were driven to abortion perpetrated a “moral violence against women” and thus “had great pity and compassion for women who had committed these wrongs.” They considered public sentiment to be more powerful than legal prohibition and at times “expressed doubt about the efficacy and justice of tightening legal restraints on abortion”; however, their overwhelmingly positive response to Charlotte Lozier’s decision to have Caroline Fuller and Andrew Moran arrested for requesting an abortion highlighted that their “preference for civil society, celebrating maternity, and women helping women was not construed to mean that there should be no legal aspect to restraining abortion…” The notion of a legal or moral “right to choose” was incompatible with their thinking.
The modern American may struggle to comprehend how these feminists could condemn abortion while still pitying and championing the women who sought it. We live in the era of cancel culture, not forgiveness and second chances. To the minds of the Reconstruction-era feminists, however, this approach made perfect sense.
One of the book’s fundamental insights is that feminists “contributed distinctively to the national conversation about abortion by beginning their analyses by considering women first and foremost as moral beings.” Driven by an understanding of rights as flowing from duties and the inherent dignity of every human being, these feminists “were interested not only in discovering what women’s rights and duties were, but also in what aspects of society made it harder or easier for women to fulfill their duties and use their rights well.” In their view, withholding rights such as suffrage morally degraded women, preventing them from full development as human persons and citizens. In contrast with other anti-abortion advocates, they emphasized the need to address structural causes such as the sexual double standard, economic conditions, ignorance of biology, and sexual abuse—not because they wished to cast women as passive victims but “because they wanted to offer individual women the possibility of choosing a better way.”
The early feminists’ anti-abortion stance is inconvenient for Americans on both sides of the political-cultural divide. Most obviously, it is problematic for mainstream feminists who treat abortion access as a fundamental right. Perhaps recognizing this, prominent feminist voices routinely ignore this bit of history. For example, the top result of a Google search on “history of abortion” is a Planned Parenthood webpage that fails to mention the role of the nineteenth century women’s movement in anti-abortion advocacy:
Starting around the time of the Civil War, a coalition of male doctors—with the support of the Catholic Church and others who wanted to control women’s bodies—led a movement to push state governments to outlaw abortion across the board. The male-dominated medical profession wanted to take authority from the female-dominated profession of midwives, including the authority to provide abortion.
With sources like these, many American feminists likely do not realize that heroes of the women’s movement such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton opposed abortion.
The early feminists’ pro-life credentials are also a challenge to modern anti-feminists. In some corners of the right, it has become fashionable to reject all of feminism, including the “first wave” that took off during the Reconstruction era. Such anti-feminists are not arguing that the term “feminist” is misapplied to nineteenth-century women’s rights advocates; rather, they oppose both the ends and means of the early women’s movement itself. Some anti-feminists openly “defend life before suffrage” or call for repealing the nineteenth-amendment. At the same time, anti-feminists tend to oppose abortion, placing them in the uncomfortable position of disowning the early feminists while also campaigning for a cause they staunchly supported.
Of course, mainstream feminists and anti-feminists might reasonably embrace some aspects of the early women’s movement while rejecting others. However, the Reconstruction-era feminists’ opposition to abortion was not accidental; rather, it stemmed from a cohesive vision of rights, duties, and virtue that also inspired their stance on education, marriage, motherhood, women’s suffrage, the sexual double standard, and working women’s rights. If they were correct to see these issues as intertwined and rooted in women’s duty to seek human excellence, it becomes much more difficult for both modern feminists and anti-feminists to pick and choose their points of agreement with their nineteenth-century sisters.
Pity for Evil’s portrayal of female doctors such as Charlotte Lozier, Anna Densmore French, and Anita Tyng adds an additional complication. Their opposition to abortion disrupts the feminist narrative that nineteenth century abortion restrictions were a male attempt to suppress women in the medical profession; at the same time, their ability to combine the roles of professional woman, feminist, pro-life advocate, and, in some cases, wife and mother counters anti-feminist assertions that woman’s place is in the home. Pity for Evil may not convince pro-choice feminists to oppose abortion or anti-feminists to celebrate the accomplishments of first-wave feminism; however, it will challenge readers’ assumptions and invite them to be intellectually honest when assessing the relationship between abortion and women’s rights.
Pity for Evil is fascinating, but also tragic. The authors emphasize that their work depicts a “narrow moment in time when support for women’s suffrage and opposition to abortion were intrinsically connected and publicly allied.” This moment soon gave way to the rise of eugenics within the feminist movement and the decentering of women and children in the abortion discourse, even as “the republican emphasis on virtues and freedom . . . lost resonance . . . and the dignity of the individual human person—unborn or born, female or male—lost significance.” Today, roughly one in four American women will undergo an abortion, and many of the structural causes of abortion identified by the early feminists remain. The suffragists’ faith that granting women the vote would bring women’s interests to the fore and raise the nation’s standard of public and private virtue might seem naïve.
Nonetheless, this story is not truly a tragedy because it is not finished. American women—and men—are the heirs to this history, and many of them are picking up where the Reconstruction-era feminists left off. In my view, the growth of the sex-realist feminist movement and of organizations devoted to aiding abortion-vulnerable women are particularly hopeful signs. As we struggle to create a culture that upholds “the dignity of the individual human person—unborn or born, female or male” in this post-Dobbs era, we would do well to look to the nineteenth century for inspiration and perspective.
Siobhan Heekin-Canedy is a freelance writer with a background in international affairs. She represented Ukraine as an elite-level ice dancer from 2008 to 2014, including at the 2014 Winter Olympics, and served as the North America Regional Director of the World Youth Alliance from 2020 to 2022.
Image: From Louisa May Alcott, Work: A Story of Experience, 1873