Abortion in the American Imagination: Before Life and Choice, 1880-1940

The public debate on abortion stretches back much further than Roe v. Wade, to long before the terms "pro-choice" and "pro-life" were ever invented. Yet the ways Americans discussed abortion in the early decades of the twentieth century had little in common with our now-entrenched debates about personal responsibility and individual autonomy.

Abortion in the American Imagination returns to the moment when American writers first dared to broach the controversial subject of abortion. What was once a topic avoided by polite society, only discussed in vague euphemisms behind closed doors, suddenly became open to vigorous public debate as it was represented everywhere from sensationalistic melodramas to treatises on social reform. Literary scholar and cultural historian Karen Weingarten shows how these discussions were remarkably fluid and far-ranging, touching upon issues of eugenics, economics, race, and gender roles.

Weingarten traces the discourses on abortion across a wide array of media, putting fiction by canonical writers like William Faulkner, Edith Wharton, and Langston Hughes into conversation with the era's films, newspaper articles, and activist rhetoric. By doing so, she exposes not only the ways that public perceptions of abortion changed over the course of the twentieth century, but also the ways in which these abortion debates shaped our very sense of what it means to be an American.

Author: Karen Weingarten
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: 07/11/2014
Pages: 204
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.67lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.47d
ISBN: 9780813565293

Review Citation(s):
Choice 12/01/2014 pg. 613

About the Author
KAREN WEINGARTEN is an assistant professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York.