Great NYT Op-Ed today by Stacy Schiff, challenging the view that Susan B. Anthony was opposed to abortion, or would be today. Below is an except:
…In her personal life Anthony was clear in her conviction that women were not preordained to motherhood, that sometimes a woman and her womb might go their separate ways. A devoted aunt, she claimed to appreciate her colleagues’ offspring, some of whom even felt warmly toward her. But she had little patience for maternity. At best she was the ever-helpful friend who asks if you realize what you are in for just as you have vomited your way through your first trimester. At worst she was a ruthless scold.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s pregnancies were Anthony’s despair: how was it possible, she wailed,”that for a moment’s pleasure to herself or her husband, she should thus increase the load of cares under which she already groans”? She was equally indulgent toward Antoinette Brown Blackwell, one of the movement’s most gifted orators:”Now, Nette, not another baby, is my peremptory command.”Over and over she needled Stanton, galled that the suffragette dream team had”all given yourselves over to baby making and left poor brainless me to do battle alone.”Stanton was the mother of six : one of whom weighed more than 12 pounds at delivery : when she received those cheering words.
Anthony is not the first to experience a posthumous identity crisis. As Teddy Roosevelt has discovered, you never know when a self-respecting trustbuster might be resurrected as a laissez-faire Republican. You can go to bed as an apostle of liberty, the author of the Declaration of Independence, to wake up as a slave-owning, mealy-mouthed misogynist. Recently The Wall Street Journal anointed Tom Paine : for two centuries now a progressive rabble-rouser : as”America’s founding neoconservative.”
So long as we have written history we have rewritten it, seasoning it with bias, straining it of context, molding it to our agendas. (The French codified this problem years ago by throwing each camp a bone. For years it was understood that conservative historians got the ancien régime, the communists the Revolution, and the socialists everything thereafter.) But Anthony the pro-lifer hails from a different land, the treacherous province of cutting and pasting, of history plucked from both text and time. Now we are Photoshopping rather than airbrushing; with enough slicing and dicing, an argument can be made for anything. The doctorate in sophistry is optional. …
Read the whole thing here.
NB: At Pandagon, Amanda Marcotte has more.
