Pity for Evil - by Monica Klem & Madeleine McDowell (Hardcover)

About the Book

"After the Civil War, pioneers in the women's rights movement, women's medical education, and in public-private charitable partnerships joined forces to reduce the incidence of abortion in America. Alumni of the abolitionist movement, the analyses they applied to abortion resembled their earlier critiques of slavery"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Klem and McDowell's fascinating book brings us right into the midst of the intricate web of discussion and debate animating the feminist movement of the post-Civil War era. This was a time when the causes of women's suffrage and the protection of the unborn were strongly linked together, seen by activists as two elements in a larger campaign for the comprehensive elevation of women's agency and status in society. Their humane vision deserves to be remembered and reconsidered today."

-Wilfred M. McClay, Victor Davis Hanson Chair of Classical History and Western Civilization at Hillsdale College

"We have long known that the 19th century women's rights advocates opposed abortion. But now, in this meticulously researched and engaging new book, we are invited to enter their world, to view women's travails through their discerning and compassionate eyes. Introducing us anew to the nation's earliest women doctors and other little-known advocates for women and children, Pity for Evil unearths a generation of women leaders whose moral clarity, intelligence, and tenacity will inform and inspire."
-Erika Bachiochi, author of The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision

About the Author

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.