Pity for Evil
Suffrage, Abortion, and Women’s Empowerment in Reconstruction America
In the years following the Civil War, pioneers in the women’s rights movement, women’s medical education, and public-private charitable partnerships joined forces to reduce the incidence of abortion in America. As alumni of the abolitionist movement, they analyzed abortion in ways that resembled their earlier critiques of slavery. Abortion, too, was a structural problem. A self-evidently evil act, it was sustained by the quack doctors and unscrupulous press that it enriched. These advocates believed that women seeking abortions had usually been deprived of their ability to act freely, rationally, and well in the world, almost always by external forces. Thus, they had sympathy for their suffering sisters and pity for their injuries—physical and moral. Early women’s rights advocates worked to raise vulnerable women to their feet, providing them with material and moral resources for “self-extrication” from the depths into which they had sunk.
The authors of this book have approached their subject critically, examining not just the early women’s rights advocates’ publicly spoken words, but the networks and institutions that they built. This previously untold story illuminates the early history of women’s rights and abortion in America.
Monica Klem is an independent scholar whose research has focused on ordinary women’s negotiations of moral questions in private and civic life during the nineteenth century. She holds a Master’s Degree in Public Policy from Pepperdine University and has been published in Philanthropy magazine and the Encyclopedia of American Philanthropy. She lives in Northern California.
Madeleine McDowell is a historian of the nineteenth century whose research has focused on the religious, cultural, and intellectual history of the English-speaking world. She holds a PhD from the University of Notre Dame and lives in Sacramento with her husband and two young sons.
