Studies in Women Literature

The choice to bear or aborta fetus is a persistent theme in women’s history and feminist literature. In September 1871, the journalist Victoria Woodhli, and her sister, Tennessee Tennie Claflin, publishers of Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, held a spotlight to society’s hypocrisy with regard to abortion. They declared the demand for abortion top be an economic and gender issue rather than a religious or moral concern. On September 23, the paper states: some woman has been hound coffined in a trunk, her remorseful seducer has committed suicide, an abortionist has been arrested, another case occurs the next day, and the next, a whole bevy of women are hunted to bay in a doctor’s shop of that order.