Pity for Evil
eBook - ePub

Pity for Evil

Suffrage, Abortion, and Women's Empowerment in Reconstruction America

  1. 360 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Pity for Evil

Suffrage, Abortion, and Women's Empowerment in Reconstruction America

About this book

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.

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Yes, you can access Pity for Evil by Monica Klem,Madeleine McDowell in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Storia & Storia della guerra civile americana. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Dedication
  5. Contents
  6. Preface
  7. Introduction: ‘Investigators of Women’s Duties’
  8. Chapter One: Abortion Shifts in the Public Imagination
  9. Chapter Two: The Revolution and ‘Restellism’
  10. Chapter Three: Women’s Elevation and the Medical Profession
  11. Chapter Four: Reshaping Public Opinion in New York
  12. Chapter Five: Death or Dishonor: Women’s Rights, Economic Equality, and the Sexual Double Standard
  13. Chapter Six: The Creation of the Massachusetts Infant Asylum
  14. Chapter Seven: Helping Destitute Mothers and Infants
  15. Chapter Eight: Losing Sight of Women and Children
  16. Conclusion
  17. Endnotes
  18. Index