Prurience has always been a feature of anti-choice enforcement.
This is the first post for Pandagon’s new book club and our first selection is When Abortion Was A Crime by Leslie Reagan. Okay, now for the most important issue: Who else was excited to see Michael Bérubé name-dropped in the book?
With that out of the way, now for the important stuff. For those who haven’t read it, the book is a history of the century prior to Roe vs. Wade, when, as you can tell from the title, abortion was a crime. As Reagan demonstrates, though, the exact nature and meaning of the offense varied dramatically depending on the social circumstances, and most interestingly to me, depending on the levels of social interest in restoring and maintaining traditional gender roles. The crackdown on abortion rights in the late 19th century coincided with both a strong medical interest in shutting down midwifery and social panic about the trend of single young women moving to the city to live alone and work. Some things never change—wind up an anti-choicer for a rant and within roughly 5 minutes, she will end up invoking the wingnut symbol of pure evil, the TV show “Sex and the City”. In fact, I was deeply impressed at how the hysteria about abortions and single women in the 19th century resembled the same hysteria now; it’s not a coincidence that abortion rights are on the chopping block right as the country has tipped into the majority of adult women living without a husband.
The section on the 19th century also neatly refuted the claims made by Feminists For Life that because prominent, mainstream feminists of the era were opposed to abortion meant that “real” feminists should oppose abortion. Reagan shows how the anti-abortion sentiment from feminists showed the limits of their thinking; they bought into the belief that abortion was caused by men who couldn’t keep it in their pants and didn’t spend much time considering the fact that women might actually want to terminate pregnancies for their own reasons. Once it became understood that women terminate pregnancies for their own reasons, feminist thought on the issue did a complete about-face. These sort of changes over time don’t demonstrate a weakness of the movement, but its strength that it can change and grow over time with new information.
What was most fascinating about the book was the way that looking through the lens of abortion law and the enforcement of the law really tells you a lot about various eras of history. And therefore why it’s foolish to treat “women’s issues” as a minor concern that can be abandoned without hurting other liberal causes. People who wish to ban abortion tend to have an overall capitalist, racist, patriarchal package that they feel abortion bans promote.
For instance, abortion became almost quasi-legal in the 30s, and it was the direct result of a national shift to the left on economic issues. As Reagan details and regular readers of feminist history already know, the birth control movement does owe more to socialist feminists from the 19th century than to mainstream suffragists, because socialist feminists were more able to bring a class analysis to the issues and see how the abstinence-based “voluntary motherhood” viewpoint of the suffragists was subtly classist, in that it meant that people who had economic reasons to limit their children would have to limit their love-making more than the wealthy. Nowadays, all but the most ostrich-head-in-the-sand liberal can see how conservative morality pagents like promoting abstinence, opposing gay marriage, abortion bans and the war on drugs are blatantly classist and pretty much designed to hurt the working class while sparing the wealthy. In the 30s, this socialist analysis really became the common wisdom, in the practice of people, if not the officially mentioned understanding. There was a surge in the national tolerance for premarital sex—I’ve read some writers who blame WWI for this fact, because “our boys” learned all sorts of naughty things from the Europeans, but I think Reagan’s suggestion that people simply understood that people shouldn’t have to forgo sexual pleasure because marriage and children had been priced out of so many Americans’ reach. Grounded in other cultural markers, you can see how Americans set aside the Puritan work ethic for a decade or so there and really began to embrace the pleasure principle as a right—people had less money then, but they had more radios and went to the movies more. In practice, a worker-oriented social mentality would treat joy as a necessity, not a privilege or a luxury. The widespread tolerance of contraception and abortion in the 30s fits into this viewpoint, in my opinion, based on Reagan’s research in this book. Of course, there’s also the fact that it was just commonsensical to reduce the birthrate in an economic depression.
What I appreciated was that Reagan showed that people were very aware at the time of the way that reproductive rights are part of the whole cloth of economic and social justice. For instance, opponents of abortion rights were huge red-baiters. The rapid escalation of extremely invasive enforcement of abortion laws that started up in the 40s was pretty explicitly linked to the across-the-board backlash against the leftward tilt of the country in general. The detail I found interesting and telling was that men were implicated in the early stages of the backlash, too, with the arrests of men who impregnated unmarried women who later got abortions. The paranoia about gender roles that led up to the almost cartoonishly gendered 50s was such that even men were getting legal punishment as gender transgressors for not getting married. The connection between opposition to abortion and elitist, capitalist interests is still pretty explicitly linked, at least on the right. There are plenty on the left who are still fearful of calling out the bullshit about concern over the personhood of zygotes.
As a final note, I really appreciated how Reagan contrasted official morality with other kinds of morality, especially the common kind in practice amongst the people. The Bill Donohues of the world deny outright that the vulgar masses have morality at all, and instead we have to have it shoved down our throats by the church and the economic elite. Reagan pretty neatly demonstrates that tolerance of early term abortion was part of the common morality throughout our history, and that winning abortion rights was most certainly a victory that belongs to the people, both the everyday feminists who fought for it and the medical personnel who began to agitate because they were sick and tired of the real immorality they saw every day in the septic abortion wards. The contrast between the official moral anti-abortion stance and the popular pro-abortion stance of the time reminds me of the struggle between institutional opposition to sex education and contraception coming from the Christian right and institutional Catholicism and how different it is from the common people’s moral acceptance of these things. In fact, more than moral acceptance; in practice, most of us view birth control as the right thing to do.
It’s a perfect symbol therefore of how the American right has managed to repackage elitist ideals and pretend that they are populist ideals. How many times have you heard that abortion rights were “shoved” on Americans by an elitist court? That story is the exact opposite of the truth, and the truth is that the court bent to the will of the people, who were getting increasingly loud about seeing the common view of abortion as morally acceptable enshrined into law.
So, a couple questions to get things going: What did you learn from the book that startled you the most? Any quarrels with Reagan’s ideas or history? What do you think of her strategy of focusing just on the Chicago area? Or whatever other questions that you want to address in comments—this is a book club, so have at it.
51 Responses to “Pandagon Book Club: When Abortion Was A Crime”
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It was so painful to read how these rights were eroded that I skipped much of the parts you focused on. As someone who figured out within about in about 15 minutes’ of casual library research that if I wanted to be in charge of my children’s birth, I’d better go with a lay midwife, the part in which the male doctors abrogated the territory formerly occupied by midwives who then as now are *much* cheaper by demonizing them as abortionists particularly resonated.
What was once normal and expected—having your children at home—is still so unusual that something like one in only ten thousand american women do it. Distressing as the erosion of reproductive rights is, particularly abortion availability, I see those as potentially recoverable.
Though the doctors eventually realized their mistake about abortion, because they pushed hospitalized birth to take this profitable service from midwives, (who are still, today, increasingly criminalized) it looks as if medicalized childbirth is here to stay, forever.
Bummer.
(I think it’s great that high risk women can and should have hospital births, but this whole nurse-midwife thing strikes me a poor substitute for home birth.)
I haven’t read the book (curse you lwa school taking all my time) but did anyone else have severe mental discomfort from all the “Reagan” in the post? Since everything that is attributed to her is the exact opposite of what St. Ron would have done or said
I’ve done a lot of work in history of medicine, so much of the material in the book was already familiar to me. (and if anyone has any medical-historical questions, just sling them in and I’ll try to drop by later to answer them.)
One point that struck me about the relatively more accepting pre-WWII and pre-WWI periods is that unmarried women often were accompanied by their guy when they went to the abortionist, but that married women were not. I don’t think we have a clear idea yet why this was.
The traditional (pre-1900 back to the Greeks) assumption was that married men did not want their wives to have abortions, because the wife’s body and fertility were the husband’s property and his to control. So the assumption on the part of doctors, ministers, and writers was that a married woman’s desire to abort was an attempt to escape her natural duty. For a married man to not want a child was also thought either selfish or unmanly.
Or was it that an unmarried woman felt she needed more support, while a married woman was assumed to have the right to access “women’s mysteries”, including abortion?
I don’t know about this, really, I’m just kicking a few thoughts around.
Doctor Science, I guess that the partners of the unmarried women were very invested in seeing to it that their girlfriends/mistresses got the abortion. In fact, I remember Bill Baird saying once that one of the main reasons public opinion swung toward abortion rights was that so many men were forcing women into back alley abortions, especially married men having affairs.
Doctor, it seems to me from this book that the reason was that there was an acceptable social space for married women to attend to reproductive matters for themselves, but unmarried women were especially reliant on their sex partners, because they couldn’t confide their pregnancies with their female relatives and friends as much.
But on the surface it makes no sense for the partners of unmarried women to be *more* invested in abortion than were men who’d be living with the woman and raising the kid. The only explanation I can think of is that it was in some way unmanly or shameful for a married man to want his wife to abort, more shameful than for a man to admit he’d gotten a woman pregnant out of wedlock.
Doctor Science, it seems to me that one likely explanation is that the married women in question were getting abortions that they suspected were not their husband’s kid.
You’d be wrong, Leonard. In the court transcripts that were collected, most of the married men were aware of and approved of the abortions. They just didn’t actually go to the doctor. It wasn’t hidden. It was just treated like a woman’s personal business, like any other gynocological appointment. If I had an abortion, I can’t imagine my boyfriend actually going with me, unless they said I needed a ride or something.
DS, the two women are in very different circumstances. A woman who has 6 kids already, even if her husband can afford to support more and wants her to have more, may resent having to do it again and seek an abortion without telling him. Or he could be abusive and she did not want to put another child under his control. Divorces were hard to come by, and it’s entirely understandable that a woman in a bad marriage would just take matters into her own hands to minimize further conflict.
A single woman and her boyfriend, on the other hand, have very clear and congruent reasons to want her to have an abortion; neither one of them wishes to support a child, and their relationship could end at any time. Also, an unmarried woman might have less access to money, and so need him to pay the bill.
Until the middle of the Depression, many states had bastardy laws on the books. A man who got a woman pregnant out of wedlock could go to jail. The purpose of the bastardy laws, like alimony, was to keep women from going on relief. Enforcement pretty much fell into disuse with massive unemployment and the ease with which men could disappear. Married women with children were abandoned by their husbands during this period also.
I can recommend another book along these lines, although it’s probably no longer in print: “Abortion Rap.” It consists largely of depositions in a lawsuit, filed before Roe v. Wade, that sought to overturn the abortion laws of New York State. Women tell in their own words what it’s like to go through an unwanted pregnancy or undergo an illegal abortion. Harrowing.
Does she deal with the (barely-)subtext in early 20th-c anti-abortion discussion of anti-semitism, in which it’s presented as Those Sinister Jewish Doctors trying to kill off Our WASP Babies? It’s *still* there in anti-abortion movement discourse, only it’s a lot better hidden, because plenty of conservative Christians *would* react badly if they realized they were being played that way. But it’s there, the way “Hollywood Liberal” & “New York Liberal” & “Secular Humanist” are simultaneously two sets of coded tropes…one reading “corrupt City Slickers/Godless Atheists” for the rank and file, another reading “Hollywood Jew/New York Jew/Godless Commie Jew” for the Gnostic insiders of the Old Guard.
I always note that the fundies try to change the subject when you start talking about how to penalize abortion should it be outlawed. Who should go to jail, for how long, if it is murder should there be a death penalty.
A few points that I got that were very interesting were:
1) the conceptualization of anything before quickening as a “menstrual problem” and therefore completely in the woman’s sphere, even to the point of (largely) being accepted by husbands and significant others. This occurred even after scientific advances were able to demonstrate that the fetus exists before quickening.
2) The link between the medicalization of pregnancy and birth and the rise in prosecutions for abortions.
3) The lack of data available for the experiences of women of color.
There are a lot of implications to mull over here. I’m not quite finished with the book, but so far, I’ve had a lot of eye opening experiences.
Nice review Amanda … I love bringing up history to anti-choice nuts, because it’s fairly obvious they’ve never read/hear about it.
However:
I do clinic escorting (doing it again this coming weekend; no weekend sleep-in for me saturday) to ensure that women are not harassed and can get through to the clinic. The clinic requires that women bring someone with them, because a) you shouldn’t drive after, and b) you can need someone after (though more the former).
I see a lot of mums, and other female family members, but I also see boyfriends/husbands.
ooh… and the race eugenics issue. Almost forgot. Really nasty stuff. I have some books my grandmother had about the turn of the century and eugenics and anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism. In the context of some of that stuff, this recent “breed white babies for God” crap from the fundies is just old news.
Amanda:
— and to get help from their female relatives and friends.
Comparing my own experience with that of my mother, there was then (pre-60s) more of a sense that all married women were part of a club within which matters of sex & ob/gyn could be discussed freely, but which was closed off to both men and unmarried women.
By comparison, now there are two clubs: one for all women, who can discuss gynecological topics, and one for parents regardless of sex, who can talk about obstetrics (because most of the fathers were present for all or part of births).
For instance: in my generation (born in the mid-50s) and younger, fathers as well as mothers will participate in the “compare our labor stories” conversations. My father was almost the only guy in his generation who was present for the birth of a child.
On the other hand, my mother says that one of the best things about the feminist revolution of the 60s was that it became possible to ask any random stranger in the lady’s room if she had a spare pad/tampon on her.
they bought into the belief that abortion was caused by men who couldn’t keep it in their pants and didn’t spend much time considering the fact that women might actually want to terminate pregnancies for their own reasons
I would think it had more to do with the fact that patriarchy still had a strong legal component; it wasn’t as though a married woman was thought to have the right to control her body, and make decisions about “his” children. In an age before paternity tests and child-support databases, “it’s not mine” and abandonment were pretty routine. If you could beat your wife or girlfriend and have the law look the other way, forcing her to abort or to choose an abortion lest you leave her destitute were very real problems.
No, bellatrys, because she focuses on the Chicago area. That said, it seems to me that a lot of the red-baiting that surrounded abortion had that issue in it.
Well, sure, mythago, but it’s not an either/or thing. They saw abortion as a male-driven phenomenon, which is ironic because at the same time suffragists were framing abortion as the fault of men, the male medical establishment was using abortion to shut down their female competition of midwives. Abortion is a strange thing—people who condemn it see it always as something Other People do, and that those other people are the bad guys of their own imagination. I think that goes a long way to explaining how people can be anti-choice and still get abortions, since their abortions aren’t the kind that Those People get.
But it’s true that a lot of early feminists had a tendency to demonize male sexuality. They almost had to, in order to get the vote. Remember that the argument for the vote was that women deserved it because they were morally superior to men. Apparently, merely equal was not enough.
I have yet to read the book, but I have a quick question: Does the book at all go into the horrible orphan problem at the turn of the century? I’ve read only precious little about such things as the orphan trains and so on. When fundies do all that handwringing on how many children have been “lost” to abortion, I wonder how often they give half a thought to how many of those kids would end up in the social services system. Part of the reason we don’t really have these sort of Dickensian orphanages as much anymore lies in the fact that a lot of states have a low enough number of kids needing homes whereby they can use a foster care system (which is less than perfect I realize). I was wondering if Leslie Reagan has any material on that topic in the book.
Abortion will almost certainly become illegal again. The courts have already been gamed by the culture of rape to ensure this occurs. I am sorry for the women who will seek illegal abortions because they will be unsafe procedures offered by less than professional providers. I would suggest those concerned about this start planning now on ways to provide clean, safe and inexpensive black market abortions. Now is the time to purchase the equipment, recruit sympathetic providers, and plan for clandestine locations. After the laws are changed, it will be much more difficult and dangerous to organize, so the logistical plannning needs to be done now.
Not reallly, stekatz. It’s a book about abortion when abortion was legal, not about situations where abortion was an option that apparently didn’t happen.
What did you learn from the book that startled you the most?
I already knew that people thought of it as “bringing on menses” rather than something more medical, but I thought it was particularly interesting to read all the different ways they would try to abort. I also was interested in the reporters in 1888 that went undercover, as a way that the media actually affected how doctors could treat their patents. I also thought it was interesting how the female doctors were the most upset about the midwives- and that there were so many female doctors!
Any quarrels with Reagan’s ideas or history?
It seemed well researched. I know it was a difficult topic to cover, since its a social history that is less recorded unless there is a problem. I appreaciated how complete the research was.
What do you think of her strategy of focusing just on the Chicago area?
I enjoyed this, being a Chicago girl myself. I also thought that because she mainly focused on one area, it was easier to keep track of trends then if I was trying to keep track of different movements all over the country. Then again,
Other thoughts:
While its not a book I enjoyed reading, because it was painfully parallel to today, I liked how complete it was, covering not just the abortions but the midwives, etc. It was also painful to read about how society was prior to reliable birth control- even today, there is a chance the bc will fail, but I feel a hell of a lot happier knowing I have my NuvaRing then trying to not have hetersexual PIV sex with a husband.
And I forgot to complete a sentence.
As to the Chicago thing:
Then again, I realize that Chicago is not representative of everywhere, and I would have loved to read about what poor women on farms did- but that would probably be even harder to find information on, since there was probably more illiteracy and even less resources available to the women.
So there’s the ‘glom’, she tells us…
“an overall capitalist, racist, patriarchal package
that they feel abortion bans promote.”
Excellent.
Every piece of that package of STUFF going to entitlement, privilege, identity, station
authority, perq`s…, the power-list goes on and on.
Most importantly, they really DO totally! package.
I recently dipped into a ca. 1900 medical book, looking up “abortion”. It referred only to spontaneous abortion (and used that term, not “miscarriage”), simply ignoring the topic of induced abortion.
Whgat really interested me was that it referred to what we would now call an embryo as an “ovum” which had not yet grown into a fetus. I suppose this terminology ties in with the idea of “quickening” as a major transition.
“Then again, I realize that Chicago is not representative of everywhere, and I would have loved to read about what poor women on farms did-”
Probably variants on what young women and girls who’d been impregnated and left did–theoretically non-lethal doses of poison, abdominal trauma, folk remedies like pennyroyal. There’s been speculation that a number of apparent prostitute suicides from overdose on laudanum back in the 1800s were actually attempts to abort, but I’m not entirely sure how much evidence there is to back that up.
I know my great-grandmother tried to induce a miscarriage by starting contractions through sheer force of will. Needless to say, it didn’t accomplish anything, and they were too poor and too far away from major cities for her to risk anything more drastic.
What immediately popped into my mind while reading what I could of this last night (yeah, I know, I know. Anyway…) was the “What do you expect when you kill 40 million workers?” reason given for the immigration issues we have today.
Seems to me, according to Reagan’s research, there were many, many more abortions prior to the Roe v. Wade decision due to it being the only form of reliable birth control there was. And yet there were still plenty of peons to do the dirty work then.
Also, I found it strange that the birth control advocates were also anti-abortion people. Now, it’s the exact opposite. I found that to be an odd combination.
[…] Wrong. The history of attempted state control over women’s reproduction is a long one, and one which has impacted women of all races — but black and brown women in particular have had their rights compromised and attacked in ways that white women and wealthier women simply haven’t had to face. […]
But on the surface it makes no sense for the partners of unmarried women to be *more* invested in abortion than were men who’d be living with the woman and raising the kid.
Two reasons spring to mind:
i, The boyfriend has a lot invested in ensuring that the woman goes through with the abortion. Providing encouragement (or coercion?) seems like a logical response when the alternative to the woman saying “no” is a shotgun marriage, eighteen years of child support and/or prosecution.
ii, Unmarried pregnant women tend to be younger than married pregnant women.
*sigh* Have to read the book. Now in the middle of “The Greatest Story Ever Sold” by Frank Rich, due back in a few days, and grinding through textbooks and material on remuneration systems.
It’s pretty frustrating being one of the few people who apparently bothered to actually read the book, using the interval of about a month that we’ve had to do so, and having so little time on the Internet the day it is discussed!
I don’t recall ever being startled actually, but I guess this is just because I’ve accepted the surprising details Reagan offers. (Yes, it’s a little squicky to attribute anything intelligent, sensitve, or wise to anyone named “Reagan.” Such is the awesome power of a stupid example, sustained over a lifetime, even though I know that some of Ronnie’s offspring are decent people.) I’ve learned as a history student that whenever you look into historical details, it gets surprising–the simplified categories we use to grasp distant, vaguely perceived details break down, and that is in the hypothetical case that no one then or now has deliberately manipulated facts to spin their case–which is just about never of course.
I was startled, or interested anyway, to learn how many women sought abortions, of all classes and categories, and how little shame or guilt they felt about it (or would have if all went well and they didn’t get caught, as most of Reagan’s data came from cases where something went wrong from the POV of the women and the practitioners.) It seemed weird how readily MDs, whom I understood had worked so hard to criminalize abortion, fell in line with the preferences of their female patients in practice.
We can interpret this several ways, depending on our inclinations. Anti-choice “moralists” will no doubt frame it all in terms of hypocrisy and general moral deficiency. A simple-minded theory of patriarchy as a conscious and cynical conspiracy or Foucaultian “discourse” would no doubt see the doctors, or the boyfriends who brought their pregnant girlfriends to the abortionists (or the husbands who did not show up but knew of their wive’s decision and supported it, morally and financially) as smug hypocrites also, happy to reap the fruits of terrorizing their womenfolk into submission so they could then play the indulgent authority.
But I saw these doctors, boyfriends, and husbands as a parade of people nearly as bewildered and beaten down by a system that inexplicably imposed hardship on them all. This is because I see systems like patriachy as not being so much situated in discourse or conscious conspiracy, but in the structural demands of an exploitive system many people subscribe to (while others subvert) but no one set out to create as such. Insofar as these individuals might have in the past, the future, or on other stages helped create the patriachy that had them now sneaking about to do something they had no personal qualm against, I don’t think the connection was transparent in their minds, even in some cases (such as the MDs, who presumably supported the general concept of “professionalization” of medicine and the corrolary persecution of midwives) where it should have been.
I guess another surprise for me was how the few women MDs in the interim between the 1870s and 1940s who did get on record on abortion issues were so overwhelmingly on the more reactionary side. Sad, but upon reflection not that unlikely. The very few women the patriachial medical system allowed to filter through would have been keenly aware of constant male scrutiny, and held to an absurdly high standard, and while I bet they did harbor some entirely justified resentment I imagine they all internalized the judgements cast on them. After all the flip side of an absurdly high standard is that being judged to have passed it, one has grounds for looking down on others. Knowing they had after all been able to navigate the tight straits meant they could hold other women to the same standards, never mind how dysfunctional that might be for society if actually attempted. And even women who did not internalize the harsh standards knew they were on thin ice with their male “peers” and had better be seen and heard being more patriarchial than the patriachs.
I think a similar dynamic lay under the Victorian mode of feminism, that emphasized the essentially “passionless” nature of female sexuality. In the case of this much more massive movement (relative to the voices of a few female MDs I mean; outspoken “first wave” feminists were still a minority) there was a lot more range of nuance and subversiveness. But basically if it is a biological fact that sex for women (with men anyway, which it seems many women like) has a certain chance of leaving them pregnant, and the only options are a risky abortion or an equally or more risky birth, then I suppose that would indeed cast a pall over sexuality for them.
Parallel to the division between the early birth control advocates who aussidiously avoided the charge they included abortion as BC (even as their public coming to them tended to make that very equation) I picked up, in Reagan’s closing words, on the evolution of Planned Parenthood. Reagan highlighted how the doctrine of “family planning” grated on poor folk who might not frame their desire for access to either BC or abortion in terms of a “family plan,” and how this class-based controversy is useful to abortion and BC opponents in dividing its supporters.
You know, I wish I had more time, but I have an Equinox Dance to help set up now.
Y’all slackers, read the book! It’ll be good for you. (If often depressing–still, I found the general evidence of broad support of abortion and BC throughout history hidden behind the National Party Line of press and professions rather encouraging.)
I’m almost done with College Girls by now. Thinking about the general issue of women’s sexuality in the USA in this same time period (1850s-now) I think the two books have some weird intersections and parallels that should be discussed. See you next month, or tomorrow if this thread is still live by then.
I don’t know, maybe I’m off topic, if so forgive me. I’m old enough to remember when abortion really was a crime and the question of why women had abortions was secondary, in my mind at the time, to the reality of illeagal abortion. I still remember reading the short impersonal articles on the inside pages of the KC Star reporting the bodies of women found abandoned (in empty apartments and empty lots and, yes, in back alleys) whose death was the result of a botched abortion and wondering to myself, ‘how can people let this happen? What kind of society creates a situation where a woman is forced to choose ostracism or risk death?’ and apparently risk of death was often preferred. What a stupid, stupid, useless, insane attitude towards women and sex.
What did you learn from the book that startled you the most?
I think probably the one thing that surprised me the very most was the prosecution of unmarried men. Also, just how much the “official” morality differed from public morality in the early years. The sheer frustration of the medical establishment when the official position had little to no impact on the importance the public placed in the “quickening”, the one male juror in the 20s who couldn’t understand why the fact that the woman who had the abortion in question didn’t want any more children would fail to make any difference to the court…
Any quarrels with Reagan’s ideas or history? What do you think of her strategy of focusing just on the Chicago area?
No, I was amazed to surprised to realize just how much evidence she’d been able to uncover. I liked the focus on Chicago, in that it gave the book and the daunting task of researching abortion practice over several decades a reasonable geographic scope, while still allowing Reagan the opportunity to gather evidence on the varied abortion experiences and attitudes of women and men of different classes, races and ethnicities living in the urban area, at least as far as records existed. It would be interesting to find out more about the experiences of women of color and rural women with abortion if the accounts are out there.
One thing I didn’t expect was how absolutely furious the book would make me. I mean, I knew some of these things going in, but reading about how women were coerced into giving dying declarations, septic abortion wards, and the racist and sexist anti-abortion arguments (that aren’t all that different from the ones that are still being used) that made these completely preventable deaths a reality was overwhelming. I would up putting the book down and not picking it up again for days at least twice before I finished it.
I was most surprised by the idea that abortion was considered almost universally as a woman’s “issue” before the medical doctors attempted to force out midwives. As opposed to today, where it is becoming increasingly common for absolute strangers to interfere with an individual’s medical treatment and care.
I was most surprised that men, and not women, were more demonized for pre-marital sex and resulting pregnancies. I was somewheat surprised and saddened to learn that women were still not afforded personal agency in matters of sex and reproduction, hence the demonization of the men. Now, it has just shifted to women.
I was not surprised that safe abortions still rested on class and/or race. The wealthier, the safer. Desperate women are desperate women, regardless of class, it’s just safer and somewhate easier for those with money or access to money. I was not surprised to learn that the same reasons women aborted in the past are the same reasons they abort now but it saddens me because it evidences we haven’t really progressed. Women still abort for financial and educational/professional reasons. For less wealthy women, limiting the size of their family ensures a better outcome for survival. However, wealthier women tend limit their families in order to utilize and maximize the resources they expend. How is one more valid than the other when essentially they are the same?
I thought that the revelation of new scientific information and advances regarding pregnancy had little effect on women seeking abortions in the past was fascinating. I think that the same rhetoric is used today (look at the blob on the sonogram! how could you be so heartless, look at the baby!), and I believe that is the one thing that anti-choicers cannot comprehend. Women know they are ending a life and at the end of the day, women who abort are choosing something other than that life. And that fact scares the crap out of them because that life could always have been one of them.
As I black woman, I am not surprised at the lack of data regarding black women. I tried once as a class project to create a family tree and pretty much get blocked around the time of the Civil War, as did most of the other African-Americans (I make this distinction only because we had other black people in the class who were not American, though were obviously descended from Africa). Those sorts of records simply weren’t kept for blacks given their status in society. Additionally, notwithstanding abortion, black women have historically had few choices regarding their reproduction. In order to increase the slave population, they were encouraged to “breed” and were also subject to frequent sexual assaults, which resulted in additional pregnancies.
After the Civil War, black women were less encouraged to reproduce and that trend has been the “norm” for the last 100+ years. As blacks gained more civil rights, the right to reproduce has become increasingly politicized for black women leaving them with less choices than white or other minority women. We KNOW that our babies are not desirable in the adoption market for ANYONE in ANY COUNTRY at ANY TIME. In fact, a common practice among blacks in the US was for other family members to adopt the unwanted child and, that allowed the child to remain in the family though not with its birth mother. I have 4 family members adopted this way, including my mother.
The book was enlightening because given the time I live in, the fight to retain the right to safe abotion is even more important given its past and the very real possibility that we are in danger of losing safe abortion for not only ourselves, but our daughters. However, I really cannot help but conclude that women will continue to abort regardless of the legality or illegality as long as social and economic constraints make that more attractive than the alternative.
Sorry I didn’t come across this thread sooner. I should check in to Pandagon more often! I read Reagan’s book years ago, and am glad to have occasion to revisit it. Only time for a couple of observations. Concerning her focus on the Chicago area, I suspect that’s an artifact of the book’s origin as a doctoral dissertation (at my beloved alma mater, the U of Wisconsin). A problem one faces in selecting a dissertation topic is to choose one of general importance while keeping it manageable in terms of the amount of source material to master. Focusing on a particular geographic area is a standard way of doing that. Zeroing in on Chicago was, I think, a good choice for her.
I can’t say there was much in the book that was really surprising to me, other than the clarity with which the late 19th and early 20th century medical literature shows how woven into the fabric of everyday life abortion was before the prohibitionist regime really took hold. At one point, Reagan quotes a physician complaining that any doctor who refused to perform abortions or help his female patients obtain them would rapidly lose patients to doctors who would. The 1888 newspaper expose described in chapter 2 likewise shows that the medical profession accepted the need for abortion services, whatever the criminal law or the official ideology of medicine said. Criminalization of abortion was imposed on the public slowly, with great difficulty and resistance. Only when childbirth shifted from home to hospital did it become possible to police women’s reproductive lives with anything like the thoroughness the prohibitionists aspired to, and even then there were ways around the barriers (”therapeutic” abortions), though these were accessible mainly to the more affluent, resourceful, and assertive.
In historical perspective, Reagan shows very clearly that the prohibitionist regime that came to an end in 1973 is anomalous, and that the post Roe v. Wade liberalization is in fact a reversion to the long-term historical norm–a revival perhaps of a common-sense folk morality. Criminalization of abortion begins in the US during the post-Civil War and Reconstruction iron age, not coincidentally when apartheid was riveted on the south and capitalist discipline on the north. The system of control was never perfect and always met with resistance, but did achieve a sort of hegemony. What we are experiencing now is an effort to recast and reimpose the hegemonic system first developed in the latter 19th century. which was weakened during what Eric Hobsbawm calls the post-WWII golden age (1945-1973). Re-criminalization of abortion, as Amanda rightly points out, is part and parcel of this larger authoritarian drive. Its leaders are the ruling class (the “bourgeoisie,” to use an old-fashioned word) and its shock troops are the defenders of “religion” and “morality,” the “christofascists” (to use a new-fashioned word).
One thing that surprised me was the great variety of methods used by doctors and midwives to induce abortions. Plugs and pastes and then finally in the 30s/40s (at least that was my impression) the vastly superior D&C, performed by trained physicians. The medicalization of the procedure seems to have had benefits as well as costs.
I was also surprised by the number of women who had problem-free abortions. Certainly Reagan admits we don’t have records, but it is easy to get an impression that pre-Roe, abortions were necessarily deadly.
On a more personal note, I was moved by the discussion of doctors who were trained in the 1930s and their increasing desire to improve outcomes for women who were seeking abortion. My father and I have our differences, but our positions on abortion are aligned because he was one of those doctors who was trained in the late 30s. He is a man of few words and I felt like I got to know him a little better by reading that chapter.
Thanks for doing this and I hope more people come in tomorrow (maybe a reminder would help, this post had dropped out of my feed-reader by the time I checked it today). I still have a couple of chapters, but am really glad I am reading this book. I have also had to do the put down for a couple of days here and there, especially at bits where the rhetoric and arguments of abortion opponents are exactly the same ones people are making today.
One thing, Amanda, in light of one commenter’s statement that those who hadn’t read the book were “slackers”. After the book was announced I had to wait until my next payday to order it, and Amazon took their usual sweet time getting it to me, so over two weeks of the month allotted to reading it were used up in delivery. On top of that, this month has been an unusually busy month both personally and professionally, leaving very little time for reading for pleasure. I still haven’t quite finished it, though I have read the majority of it.
I can’t have been the only participant to run into these troubles. Might I suggest six weeks for the next reading period?
Thanks, Mark, for going into that. I agree that Reagan made an awesome case for how the patriarchal is systematic, and while it privileges men over women it still is not a system chosen by the men in it, and often men are caught in the system, too. The arrests of men who knocked women up was a startling example of this.
Actually, the way I see it, the patriarchy, any patriarchy, is not set up for all men. It’s set up for the few, the tip-top, which in our culture is rich, white, Anglo-Saxon men. Having 3 out of 4 of those is not enough. So, the patriarchy is almost as subjugating for most (lesser?) men as it is for all women.
Therefore, the way the husbands, boyfriends and other males behaved did not surprise me a bit.
Amanda: I, also, was not able to read the entire thing yet and I can’t blame Amazon–I downloaded it and printed it for free from a scholarly publication website. But I do work two jobs, have a home and two kids and an injured husband and so not a lot of help in any of the household stuff and so just don’t have time to read much these days.
However, I ask that you do not accomodate me and my troubles in your next choice of reading period. My problems are not your problems, and certainly are not problems for every-darn-body else involved in the Book Club and I don’t feel so entitled that I think everyone else should have to wait for me. Thank you.
Herm. I’m always nervous when people think of the patriarchy (or any other model of oppression) as being deliberately crafted. I believe that such things just happen. I think the reason they appear more crafted is that mutually reinforcing ideas end up blending together.
John, I think when people say the patriarchy is crafted/is for, etc. it’s the same linguistic shortcut as linguistically treating evolution as an actor. To say the evolution produced the eye is to say that a series of events in a system that we call evolution led to eyes existing, but it’s simpler.
News Today: Heartbreak and Lies Edition…
You’ve likely heard by now that Elizabeth Edwards’ cancer has come back, but that both she and John have decided that his campaign will continue. Damn. I think nyceve put it best, we’d be hard pressed to do better than……
Dear Odanu,
Sorry I used such harsh language. I was thinking mainly of a certain Phoenician who said last week “oops, I’ve had the book all month but I’ve been so busy, hee hee!”
It was a bit of a hassle for me to get the book from my library system, but I did it, and I read it. This despite being distracted by the easier-to-read College Girls which I had purchased outright.
In the matter of intention versus “it just growed” re patriarchy and other human social systems that emerge “behind the backs” of human beings, it’s inherently tangled.
In my fusty manner I then started a long rambling OT epic on how it is tangled. Rather than post that here I suppose it is best to just urge people to read the book already. Maybe Amanda will do a reprise discussion when more people have read it?
A few other thoughts:
This book shows some fine examples of what it is I object to in so-called “Libertarian” thought. We’ve got all these people focused on government, and government alone, but in fact the oppression of women throughout this period was the outcome of an interlocking system of private and public entities. MDs used public law to carve out turf for themselves, campaigning to discredit the pre-existing layer of health care associated with non-degreed midwives and folk remedies in general. But having established laws criminalizing abortion that happened out of their control, in practice they not only looked the other way but actively carried out abortions themselves. Not only that, many practitioners established ties with midwives, forming a network of care. Well and good, but it all happened under the radar of public discourse.
Then other players in the game of public discourse sought to emphasize the criminality of MDs as well as their original targets, the midwives, as enablers of “public immorality,” and the effect of this was to drive abortion practice all the more thoroughly into the hands of MDs. Meanwhile, the increasing centralization of medical practice into hospitals and the rise of Ob/Gyn as a distinct specialty made the quiet medical practice of therapeutic abortion, which enabled reasonably well-off and socially connected women to get abortions almost on demand, subject to increasingly public scrutiny and punitive regulation. In the latest phases of criminalized abortion, the pressure was on hospitals themselves to regulate what was and was not “therapeutic” by establishing review boards. Private or hospital-affiliated MDs were supposed to submit proposals to perform abortions to a committee which would judge on whether or not the grounds submitted were suitably “medical” to pass as legal; this greatly constricted the options of doctors, who began to resent this interference. Reagan noted that no other medical procedure was subjected to ethical scrutiny in this way. The upshot was that the period between WWII (the legal crackdown on MDs as well as women having abortions stepped up during the war, with police department raids on known, long-established urban clinics being used not only to track down the female clientele but the MDs and nurses who made referrals as well) and the court decisions that decriminalized abortion was a time of greatly increased hazard for women, as reasonably safe if clearly illegal clinics and practices were shut down, making the practice far more dangerous for all concerned. The darkest images, of women being blindfolded and taken to quacks who were drunk or smoking cigars while handling them, not to mention desperate attempts with coathangers etc, were much more typical of the 1950s than the 1930s. One reason the radical solution of general decriminalization in the courts won out over “moderate” reforms was that reforms in the 50s and 60s often resulted in overall even tighter regulation; another was that the nation was in a severe and unprecedented public health crisis due to the triumph of McCarthyite moralistic reactionaries.
The book, without belaboring the point, brings out that indeed, the underlying logic of all these modes of regulation boiled down to patriarchy–to the silencing of the “radical notion that women are people too.” The Victorian trope of women as “morally superior” in the sense that they would more diligently uphold patriarchial standards than men would was based on women being silent, certainly in public, about their own sexual desires and their desire to decouple sex from reproduction. In order to be allowed to speak in public at all, Victorian feminists had to distance themselves from the charge of being sexually libertine, and indeed since the polarization of Victorian hypocrisy condemned male lust but refused to do anything effective to discourage it, I daresay many thoughtful Victorian women did harbor some well-founded resentment, and many well-intentioned and sympathetic men could not argue against the suggestion that abstinence was the moral thing to do if birth rates were to be controlled. Hence the recruitment of both feminists and those women who managed to become MDs in the 19th century to the cause of sexual repression in general. After all, without very sophisticated forms of BC and advanced medical technique for abortion, women could hardly enjoy sex as freely as men without running risks men simply do not face, so equalizing in the direction of general freedom would hardly have seemed fair; the alternatives were to try to crack down on men as hard as women to enforce a general repression, or to accept a double standard. The only way I can see for it to have been otherwise would have been to stand for a very radical revision of society indeed–to argue for sexual freedom as an end in itself and to try to compensate for the asymmetrical risks women ran by being very positive in supporting women–to offer the widest range of BC and abortion options, and to also underwrite a pregnant woman’s decision to have a child with positive social support for her and her baby, with no shaming. Such radical views were the hallmark of “extremists” such as Socialists and people even farther to the left–in fact most respectable Social Democratic parties of the pre-WWI era would reject such “extremes” leaving them for anarchists and the advocates of the most violent forms of revolutionism. Keeping that association in place was of course a major strategy of reactionaries, and helps explain why the pro-BC movements were so persecuted and why when they did fight their way into respectability they sought to distinguish themselves from a general support of free love and abortion.
But in fact, the morality of the overwhelming majority of women and their lovers, legally recognized or not, was far more liberal, at least in concrete cases. The fact then that this general idea that women should indeed be able to control their own reproduction and not be told to simply keep their legs crossed could not find a legitimate public voice until the 1960s shows how important the repression of sexual freedom is to our system. When sexual liberation as an end in itself finally could be heard, it was indeed taken as a radical threat, and was listened to largely because the repressive messengers were so morally bankrupt, due in large part to having succeeded in their experiment of national, systematic repression, with disastrous results.
The data Reagan offers then illustrate a dialectical evolution rather than one of simple progress (or regress, from a repressive POV). I think it is a good thing that the sacrifice of a few generations of women, and the people who cared about them, has at least brought into the open arguments and voices that should have been freely heard from the beginning. It is tragic and a historic crime that these voices could only be heard after so much bloodshed, but apparently that is what it took in the land of the free.
Let us not forget what they had to say.
Amanda:
That makes sense, and thanks for explaining, and Christina, I’m sorry I misunderstood you.
(I had more to say, about the nature of good and evil, and how I feel that evil is mostly based in indifference (but noting how little difference there is between indifference and ignorance in practical effect), and how malice is actually less dangerous than indifference (it’s easy to avoid one single person who wants to kill you; it’s much harder to avoid a thousand fools who aren’t thinking about what might happen if they, e.g., drive recklessly), but I decided it could get confusing. Which makes it different from the rest of what I say *how*?
)
Yes, that is what I meant, thank you, Amanda. And no problem, John.
I actually have an example of this very thing going on with a friend of mine right now. Her son hates hunting, HATES. But, her ex insists that he go hunting anyway, b/c somehow shooting a furry woodland creature will make a man out this child. The child is more the video game type.
To make it clear, if this kid were growing up in the 80’s when I did, he would’ve been very, very into Dungeons and Dragons. Not the hunting type.
Dad loves his son, no doubt about it and wants to keep him from being thought a “sissy” and protect him from being teased. (We’re talking Texas, here, folks. Watch some King of The Hill, if you aren’t familiar.) And so, he perpetuates the masculine gender norms in order to protect his kid.
On Topic: I found it quite interesting how the AMA began lobbying the government for oversight, made a pact with the devil so to speak in the beginning of this movement, in order to get rid of competition. Then, the government turned on them, and they ended up being afraid to NOT report to the government. The one who thought they could dictate to the goverment as a superior force ended up being controlled by them.
“Probably variants on what young women and girls who’d been impregnated and left did–theoretically non-lethal doses of poison, abdominal trauma, folk remedies like pennyroyal. There’s been speculation that a number of apparent prostitute suicides from overdose on laudanum back in the 1800s were actually attempts to abort, but I’m not entirely sure how much evidence there is to back that up.”
preyingmantis and others who may be interested, I highly recommend Eve’s Herbs by John M. Riddle. http://www.amazon.com/Eves-Herbs-History-Contraception-Abortion/dp/067427024X
Riddle traces the lost herbal knowledge about birth control and abortion. He discusses at length the patent medicines such as Lydia Pinkham’s sold as heath tonics but in reality “menses regulators.”
I agree, Amanda, that the married/single situation had much to do with social network. Once initiated into the sisterhood of marrieds, women had access to a vast network of family, friends, friends of family, families of friends. Single women were not supposed to even know about sex and that had to present a huge barrier to finding information about birth control or abortion.
Re: Chicago focus. I liked that Reagan could go so into depth with court records. While Chicago might not be universally representative, I think it’s close enough to get a good notion of prevailing zeitgeist. I was most struck by the unfeeling way women were treated through the legal process.
The legislature of my home state, South Dakota, considered four bills relating to abortion in this legislative session. Thankfully, all were deferred to the 41st day. The session is only 40 days.
For a real scare, here’s the language used. Try not to hurl.
FOR AN ACT ENTITLED, An Act to regulate the performance of certain abortions, to reinstate the prohibition against certain acts causing the termination of the life of an unborn human being, and to prescribe a penalty therefor.
BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF SOUTH DAKOTA:
Section 1. The Legislature finds:
(1) That a pregnant mother possesses certain inherent rights, that these are natural intrinsic rights which enjoy affirmative protection under the Constitution of the United States, and under the Constitution and laws of the State of South Dakota, and that among these rights are the fundamental right of the pregnant mother to her relationship with her child, her fundamental right to make decisions that advance the well-being and welfare of her child, and her interest in her own health;
(2) That the pregnant mother’s relationship with her child is inherently beneficial to the mother; that a mother’s unique relationship with her child during pregnancy is one of the most intimate and important relationships, and one most worthy of legal protection; that the history and tradition of our nation has recognized this relationship as one that has intrinsic beauty and benefit to both the mother and the child; and that this relationship is recognized as one of the touchstones, and at the core, of all civilized society;
(3) That all induced abortions, whether surgically or chemically induced, terminate the life of an entire, unique, living human being, a human being separate from his or her mother, as a matter of scientific and biological fact, and terminate that pregnant mother’s existing natural relationship with her child;
(4) That a physician performing an abortion terminates the life of one of the physician’s patients to whom the physician owes a professional and legal duty, which duty is extinguished, under existing law, by the exercise of a written consent to an abortion by the pregnant mother of the unborn child;
(5) That a large percentage of the decisions made by pregnant mothers to give up their rights and interests in their relationship with their children by submitting to an abortion, are not truly informed and voluntary; that there are inherently coercive aspects to the abortion procedure; and that often the uninformed and difficult nature of the decision is seriously compounded by the practices of abortion providers;
(6) That an abortion is an unworkable method for a pregnant mother to give up, surrender, or waive her fundamental right to her relationship with her child;
(7) That in the majority of cases there is no normal or traditional physician-patient relationship or counseling between a pregnant mother contemplating submitting to an abortion and the physician who performs the abortion;
(8) That submitting to an abortion subjects the pregnant woman to significant health risks; that the abortion procedure is inherently dangerous to the psychological and physical health of the woman; that an abortion places most women at greater risk for psychological distress, depression, suicidal ideation and suicide than carrying her child to full term and giving birth;
(9) That the State of South Dakota possesses a duty to protect, and it is a legitimate exercise of the State’s power to protect, the natural intrinsic rights and interests of a pregnant mother in her relationship with her child; in her ability to protect the well- being of her child; and her own health;
(10) That the State of South Dakota possesses a duty to protect, and it is a legitimate exercise of the State’s power to protect, the life of each human being within its borders, including those human beings living in utero;
(11) That it is neither practical nor possible for the State to simultaneously protect these fundamental rights and interests of pregnant mothers and the lives of their children, and, at the same time, provide legal authority or protection for the act of a physician who terminates the lives of these mothers’ unborn children by an abortion; that protection of these rights of the mothers are in conflict with protection of the act of the physician which terminates these rights by terminating the life of the unborn child;
(12) That the right and duty of the State to protect and preserve the life of the unborn child cannot co-exist with a law that authorizes the termination of that life by the physician;
(13) That it is now clear that the State of South Dakota can either protect the mother’s fundamental natural intrinsic rights, or protect the physician’s act that terminates and adversely affects them, but that the State cannot effectively protect both; and that the State’s duty is to protect the natural and intrinsic rights of the pregnant mother and the life of her unborn child, and must, therefore, prohibit physicians from terminating these rights and interests by the performance of abortions, to the fullest reasonable extent federal law shall permit, consistent with the provisions of this Act.
“But I saw these doctors, boyfriends, and husbands as a parade of people nearly as bewildered and beaten down by a system that inexplicably imposed hardship on them all. This is because I see systems like patriachy as not being so much situated in discourse or conscious conspiracy, but in the structural demands of an exploitive system many people subscribe to (while others subvert) but no one set out to create as such.”
I read it the same way Mark. As is happening now, the few decided what was best for the many without any consideration of the individual situations of the many.
What are red-baiters?
Kathy: the few didn’t even decide omnisciently or with omnipotence for the many. They just did something that seemed likely to get them something in the short run, and damn the detailed ramifications.
Of course it is always that way, in the end. No one can untangle the full consequences of what they do. But I think that things done in good faith, with proper consideration of the welfare of everyone you would obviously be affecting, will have less nasty unintended consequences. Whereas the medical profession’s campaign to discredit midwives and elevate themselves, for instance, obviously was going to hurt the midwives at least, and possibly women and hence families in general, hence all of society, if actually those folk practitioners knew a thing or two that the MDs might overlook. The right thing for them to do, if people were at all altruistic, would have been to attempt to form alliances with the midwives, and not launch a proto-McCarthyite smear campaign against them and by the way abortion. But no, they were empire-building.
Note that once the MDs had established themselves as especially legitimate, with de facto powers in society, they did indeed often form these very kinds of alliances with midwives, mediated by the preferences of the families they catered to. But meanwhile they’d set in motion a social dynamic of purity crusading. Well, that’s a bit much to blame just on the MDs–American society has always been given to fits of evangelistic reformism, in which lofty language often cloaks yet another attack on the independence of poor people in the name of making the world better for them. The MDs just started one of their own, or maybe took advantage of a general social current in favor of “professionalism” over wild competition in all fields. In any event, Reagan got a lot of her early data from the outcomes of newspaper crusades against abortion (as part of a crusade against sexual “big city corruption” in general). And the later crackdowns on liberal interpretations of what constituted “therapeutic” abortion were driven, I gather, by political movements outside medicine–though connected to and enabled by the ongoing integration of medicine into a centralized system of specialists and away from family practice.
I think that on the whole, it is a good thing that women have gotten to the point of openly asserting their inherent right to control the decisions around pregnancy, no matter how benign certain phases of the old quasi-legal order of therapeutic abortions freely construed may have been. It isn’t a decision that should ever have been vetted by some third party, no matter how sympathetic he might have been.
danny asked:
Am I the only one who thinks this is one weird question?
I have been astonished that lately when I talk about “Est” only people of a distinctly older generation seem to know what I’m talking about; perhaps this is good since Est is best forgotten. (My understanding is, they just changed their name though, so we aren’t out of the woods yet on that score.)
I might hope similarly that people don’t know what “red-baiting” is anymore because it has become a thing of the past, except that we have so damn much of it just on Pandagon threads lately.
In case you actually don’t know this, danny, for something close to a century now it has been a commonplace rhetorical maneuver to attempt to discredit people and ideas, especially liberal or progressive ones, by accusing them of either being secret Communists or in sympathy with Marxism or dupes of a Communist conspiracy. Since “everyone knows” Communists and Marxists are just plain evil, and deceitful too, it isn’t then necessary to engage with the merits of the case at hand, since anything Marxists would endorse must be bad, QED.
Stick around, danny, and you’ll see it happen here. “I think you’re all a lot of Marxists anyway” or “This is pure unadulterated Marxism.”
If you read the book this thread is about, you’ll find that the specific accusation that advocates of either contraception or abortion were in fact carrying out a Red agenda from Moscow was thrown around to discredit them from the 1920s on, and that the general atmosphere of the McCarthy era put any kind of nonconformism whatsoever under a microscope and caused people to “play it safe” by hastening to pass the most conservative scrutiny they feared being under, conscience and personal judgement be damned. This is why reactionaries red-bait.