Reproductive Wrongs:
A Short History of Bad Ideas About Women
by Sarah Ruden (W. W. Norton & Company)
This book is about anti-abortion arguments in Western civilization. The author uses the term propaganda and it suits. It is about the control of women, focusing on different texts, starting in Ancient Rome and ending in contemporary United States. The arguments differ as the social conditions and specific intentions of the authors differ, but the shape of it is that the sexual autonomy of women is bad and needs to be stopped. This is usually in the pursuit of turning women into breeding stock, and is usually about erasing anything that does not fit that image.
If you want a bitchin’ polemic, get a Classicist. The number of professional pundits and philosophers, almost exclusively on the political right, who think that they write like this, and do not, is all of them. In other hands this would be an indictment of the West as a concept, except that it is written by someone who loves it and lives it, knowing it better than you do.1
The strongest argument here is on Saint Augustine. This is also the funniest argument. It takes Augustine’s ecclesiastical moves and rereads them through a biographical critique, putting Our Man in Hippo on the psychoanalyst’s couch to take his doctrinal writings and do pathology on them. You can imagine the movie of this view of the saint’s life, a sort of Shakespeare in Love meets Life of Brian where Catholic doctrine arises out of a rom-com.2 It is a sort of argumentation that customarily goes wrong, but it is so amazing well-stitched here I cannot deny its persuasiveness.
A more general strength of the author in the text is her ability to work within the original sources, and do all her own translations. This leads to some revelations on their own.
The weakest argument is the chapter on Marie Stopes’ Married Love. The chapter on Charles Dickens tends to print the legend and accept the Victorians at face value in an (admittedly weird) Dickens story. But the eugenics chapter is Texas Sharpshooter in finding the propaganda that fits the premise of a top-down, anti-women structure. It is not like Margaret Sanger et al is more humanist, but the arguments in other Feminist eugenicists either lack or invert the meaning of the argument around this semi-patriarchy.
The opening quip is intended as an opening quip, but after writing it, I started to feel the stick to it. It is the weakness, or at least the complication, of this book. There is a much larger discourse that this book floats on the surface of. On the principle of charity, that is strategic rather than ignorant. But I repeat myself; I wrote it was a polemic.
However, more than a lot of books I review, I wonder about the reception on this one. The reviews will be a referendum on abortion rights, probably without reading the text. Which is a mistake. Not many books leave me charting my favorite one-liners in the text.3 But there is light to the heat here, with a few lines of thought worth better exploration, even if I remain uniquely confident that zero people are going to. Culture war is a tar pit.
My thanks to the author, Sarah Ruden, for writing the book, and to the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, for making the ARC available to me.
CITATION HEEDED 