Susan B and abortion for D

Desperately Seeking Susan
IT’S not fair, I know, but I’ve always had an issue with Susan B. Anthony. Clearly the B stood for killjoy; was there any greater drudge in American history? Even the wonders of springtime Paris could not distract her from her work. Breakfast in bed left her shuddering with guilt. She set foot on a beach for the first time at 67, attended her first football game a decade later. (The verdict? “They just take the ball and then fall down in heaps. It’s ridiculous.”) She gave spinsters a bad name. It came as no great surprise when taxi drivers tossed back the Susan B. Anthony dollars.

Like all healthy grudges, this one is entirely personal. Every morning the school bus carried me past Anthony’s birthplace in Adams, Mass.; it was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The green house at the bend in the road loomed as an official halfway point, the demarcation line between Captain Crunch and algebra. Nor did it help that Anthony’s portrait, firm-jawed and ferocious, hung in the catalog room of the town library. She may well have stood for emancipation, but from the child’s perspective, hers was the pinched, angular face of repression
Now it seems that stalwart Sue has an issue, one that might surprise her. That two-story house, a rich but undistinguished piece of real estate perched on a desolate stretch of highway, was sold at auction in August. It belongs now to Carol Crossed, the founder of the New York State chapter of Feminists for Life. Ms. Crossed made the acquisition on behalf of the national anti-abortion organization, which will manage and care for the house.
It is not the first time that Anthony has found herself leading the charge on this vexed issue. Since 1992 an anti-abortion political action committee has been named for her. On billboards and elsewhere, Ms. Crossed’s group promises to continue her legacy. “Susan B. Anthony was a forward-thinking woman who would feel comfortable with the positions of Feminists for Life of New York,” asserts the organization. Which does rather raise the question: When exactly did Susan B. Anthony — who fought more tenaciously for women’s rights than anyone else in our history — cast her anti-abortion vote?
There is no question that she deplored the practice of abortion, as did every one of her colleagues in the suffrage movement. Feminists for Life cites an 1869 article in her newspaper denouncing “child murder,” labeling abortion “a most monstrous crime,” and advocating its end. “No matter what the motive, love of ease, or a desire to save from suffering the unborn innocent, the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed,” blares the article. “It will burden her conscience in life, it will burden her soul in death.”
What is generally not mentioned is that the essay argues against an anti-abortion law; its author did not believe legislation would resolve the issue of unwanted pregnancy. Also not mentioned is the vaporous textual trail. According to the editors of Anthony’s papers, the article is not hers.

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.

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part 2...Susan B and D
Submitted by oldbeachbear on Tue, 04/01/2008 - 7:34am.

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.
Ms. Crossed has argued that abortion rights are a violation of those for which Anthony fought. To her mind, the right to vote does not bring with it the right to destroy our offspring. This may be true. And then again it may not be. “We demand that woman shall be given the means to assert herself, regardless of whether she ever uses it or not,” pretty much qualified as Anthony’s theme song.

Above all, the drillmaster of the suffrage movement had no patience when it came to dogma. She won few points for her free thinking but forged ahead all the same: “I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.” She cast her vote always for tolerance, acting from a simple conviction: “For a people is only as great, as free, as lofty, as advanced as its women are free, noble and progressive.”

The bottom line is that we cannot possibly know what Anthony would make of today’s debate. Unwanted pregnancy was for her bundled up with a different set of issues, of which only one truly mattered: rescuing women from “the Dead Sea of disfranchisement.” In the 19th century, abortion often was life-threatening, contraception primitive, and a woman as little in control of her reproductive life as of her political one. The terms do not translate, one reason time travel is a risky proposition. No amount of parsing the founding fathers will reveal what they think of the war in Iraq, just as no modern chorus of mea culpas will explain away their slave-holding. To suggest otherwise is to wind up with history worthy of those classic commercial duos, Fred Astaire and his Dirt Devil, Paula Abdul and Groucho Marx.

For what it’s worth, Anthony has ceded her place on the dollar to another steely and resourceful woman, the face of manifest destiny, who — coincidentally? — appears always with a child strapped to her back, the original rendition of backwards-and-in-heels. Sacagawea may have been a crackerjack scout, but she left no paper trail. Who knows what she thought about white men or westward expansion? She’s up for grabs, an icon without a cause. Feminists for Life may want to hurry, before the logging industry gets there first.

Stacy Schiff

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