Pity for Evil: Suffrage, Abortion, and Women’s Empowerment in Reconstruction America
Monica Klem and Madeleine McDowell
(Encounter, $45.99. 328 pages)
In Pity for Evil, historians Monica Klem and Madeleine McDowell, provide a well-documented, scholarly but accessible account of how most people, including feminists, viewed abortion in post-Civil War United States. Using the speeches of suffragists and the writings in publications of the time, Klem and McDowell show that the movement for women’s rights, most notably the right to vote but also to own and enjoy private property, were often traditionalist in their views of marriage, sex, reproduction, and abortion. What is most notable in Pity for Evil is that women were often held responsible, along with the abortionist and the father of the children, for ending the nascent life within her. An article in the The Women’s Journal in 1871 said both the mother and man who “betrayed” her are “at least, equal partners in guilt, although often the man is the greater sinner.” In other words, men had an important role in preventing abortion. Pity for Evil illustrates that the greatest beneficiaries of abortion were the men who profited from them as black-market providers and the men who evaded responsibility for caring for his child and the child’s mother. Abortion permitted what the authors call the “sexual double standard” in which society demanded virtuous behaviour of women while ignoring (or even permitting) men from behaving licentiously. When women’s rights campaigners where not part of the anti-abortion movement, they often worked in tandem, Klem and McDowell say, “to improve the condition of society for women and to save the lives of unborn children by decreasing the prevalence of abortion.” Early women’s rights and anti-abortion campaigners saw abortion as not only a personal sin, but societal failure, and both campaigned for a better place for women in society, including higher expectations for men to live virtuously. Unlike modern pro-abortion activists masquerading as women’s rights advocates, early American feminists sought to instill the virtues of chasteness outside marriage and responsibility within, recognizing and respecting the complimentarily of biological males and females. Reconstruction-era feminists would not recognize the feminists of today as advocates of the rights of women.
