On Aug. 26, the 99th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, we remember the vision and suffering of women over three quarters of a century to achieve suffrage.
When male abolitionists attending the World Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840 decided that females in attendance would be silent, William Lloyd Garrison decided that if women could not be heard, he would not speak.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott attended with their husbands, and Stanton became determined to hold a convention for women’s rights. In 1848, she shocked the world by drafting the Declaration of Sentiments, based on the Declaration of Independence, proposing that women should have the right to vote.
It would be years later before Amelia Bloomer of dress reform fame introduced Stanton to a Quaker teacher and abolitionist named Susan B. Anthony. While Stanton is considered the mother of the movement, Anthony became the leader — and publisher of The Revolution.
What would surprise most feminists today is that our foremothers opposed abortion in no uncertain terms.
After their most cherished dream of suffrage and dress reform, anti-abortion sentiments were the third most discussed topic. While Anthony urged the movement to get to the root causes that drive women to abortion, Stanton pointed to “education and complete enfranchisement of women” to address the “murder of children, either before or after birth,” and other societal ills.
Mattie Brinkerhoff explained in 1869 that “When a man steals to satisfy hunger, we may safely conclude that there is something wrong with society — so when a woman destroys the life of an unborn child it is an evidence that by education or circumstances she has been greatly wronged.”
Anthony was not the only publisher of pro-life feminist views. Victoria Woodhull and her sister Tennessee Claflin published Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly. The flamboyant sisters rose from poverty to become Wall Street’s first female stockbrokers. And in 1872, Woodhull became the first woman nominated to run for U.S. president by the Equal Rights Party. (Frederick Douglass was chosen to be vice president but declined the nomination.) As free-love advocates, the sisters had already shocked many in and out of the movement.
Perhaps most surprising is that the sister suffragists also argued against abortion, declaring in 1870 that “the rights of children as individuals begin while yet they remain the fetus.” Later they explained that “Abortion is only a symptom of a deep-seated disorder of the social state.” Celebrating the life-giving capacity of women, they explained, “Childbirth is not a disease but a beautiful office of nature.”
Anthony and Sarah Norton would successfully advocate for the admission of women to Cornell University. And in 1869, in Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, Norton openly dreamed of a better day: “Perhaps there will come a time when an unmarried mother will not be despised because of her motherhood… and when the right of the unborn to be born will not be denied or interfered with.”
As early as 1839, Elizabeth Blackwell documented in her diary the inspiration for her to become the first woman physician: “The gross perversion and destruction of motherhood by the abortionist filled me with indignation, and awakened active antagonism. That the honorable term ‘female physician’ should be exclusively applied to those women who carried on this shocking trade seemed to me a horror.”
All of these remarkable suffragists passed before Alice Paul successfully led the final effort to achieve women’s suffrage that became law on Aug. 26, 1920. She informed FFL co-founder Pat Goltz that Feminists for Life were not the first pro-life feminists. So the efforts began to scour early feminist publications. The author of the original Equal Rights Amendment mourned the linkage of the ERA to abortion. When asked by her long-time friend Evelyn K. Samras-Judge what she thought about linking women’s rights to abortion. She asked, “How can one protect and help women by killing them as babies?” and added, “Abortion is the ultimate in the exploitation of women.”
These women have been treated as a footnote in history. But on the eve of the 2020 Centennial Celebration, adult women in America as well as those in many other countries across the globe can thank our feminist foremothers for the vote — and advocacy for life.
Serrin M. Foster is president of Feminists for Life of America and editor-in-chief of The American Feminist and WomenDeserveBetter.com.
