Not you, ladies
Heather Cox Richardson adds to thoughts I’m having about the first bans on abortion about the mid-1800s:
If you google the history of Mother’s Day, the internet will tell you that Mother’s Day began in 1908 when Anna Jarvis decided to honor her mother. But “Mothers’ Day”—with the apostrophe not in the singular spot, but in the plural—actually started in the 1870s, when the sheer enormity of the death caused by the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War convinced American women that women must take control of politics from the men who had permitted such carnage. Mothers’ Day was not designed to encourage people to be nice to their mothers. It was part of women’s effort to gain power to change modern society.
The Civil War years taught naïve Americans what mass death meant in the modern era. Soldiers who had marched off to war with fantasies of heroism discovered that long-range weapons turned death into tortured anonymity. Men were trampled into blood-soaked mud, piled like cordwood in ditches, or transformed into emaciated corpses after dysentery drained their lives away.
The war changed how women saw their second-class status in this country:
Women had bought bonds, paid taxes, raised money for the war effort, managed farms, harvested fields, worked in war industries, reared children, and nursed soldiers. When the war ended, they had every intention of continuing to participate in national affairs. But the Fourteenth Amendment, which established that African American men were citizens, did not mention women. In 1869, women organized the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association to promote women’s right to have a say in American government.
From her home in Boston, Julia Ward Howe was a key figure in the American Woman Suffrage Association. She was an enormously talented writer, who had penned The Battle Hymn of the Republic in the early years of the Civil War, a hymn whose lyrics made it a point to note that Christ was “born of woman.”
Howe was drawn to women’s rights because the laws of her time meant that her children belonged to her abusive husband. If she broke free of him, she would lose any right to see her children, a fact he threw at her whenever she threatened to leave him. She was not at first a radical in the mold of reformer Elizabeth Cady Stanton, believing that women had a human right to equality with men. Rather, she believed strongly that women, as mothers, had a special role to perform in the world.
Stanton had helped organize the Seneca Falls Convention ahead of the Civil War in 1848. The Industrial Revolution was already changing womens’ roles, Sara Robinson reminds me. Fewer wives worked alongside their husbands as they had traditionally. With the formation of the AMA and the establishment of medical schools in the 1840s, the medical community sought to eliminate competition from “homeopaths, herbalists, and especially midwives.”
Women as a growing economic and nascent political force became a threat to men’s hegemonic control as modernization slowly redefined family and gender roles. Criminalizing abortion contributed to keeping women in their traditional places. Where once accepted by common law before “quickening,” criminalization of abortion grew in the 1800s. Was it just medical advances, or did the growing suffrage movement influence the growing number of anti-abortion laws?
Conservatives on the Roberts Supreme Court seem determined to roll back the clock not just to the mid-20th century but to the mid-19th. Back to a time when women were the delicate, little flowers not the insecure, testosterone-fixated men today trying to keep everyone else from challenging their primacy.
Update: Also…
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 4th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.