Overview

The belief that granting women reproductive freedom poses a threat to ""traditional"" values is a dangerous myth that has long prospered in American politics, providing justification for increasing control over women's bodies and lives. How did such damaging ideas arise? In Reproductive Wrongs, acclaimed translator and cultural historian Sarah Ruden exposes how ideologies that oppress women and families in the service of power took hold. Ruden traces a sweeping history through her trenchant analysis of seven pieces of literature that, she argues, marked key inflection points across two thousand years. From propagandistic poetry written by Ovid in the early Roman Empire to the biography of an evangelical American ""abortion survivor,"" Ruden lays bare how doctrines of control over women were invented and propagated. The New Testament's Pastoral Epistles introduced near-totalitarian measures to force childbearing in the early days of Christianity. In the late fifteenth century, The Hammer of Witches outlined a program that demonized women's fertility, justifying mass torture and killing. And Charles Dickens's The Chimes glorified the virtues of large families among the very poor, playing into their suffering and exploitation in industrialized Victorian Britain. Scathing and vital, Reproductive Wrongs unearths the evolution of a right-wing radicalism that endures to this day, when half of the US population is once again threatened with the loss of basic human rights and totalitarian law.

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9781324075905

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Reviews

Bold and brilliant, witty and original, a revelation. Ruden's energy lights up her subjects and makes them crackle. If you love women and history, this book is for you.--Rosalind Miles, author of Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women's History of the World With the right mix of humor and outrage, Sarah Ruden takes us on a sobering tour of western culture's ever more sinister arguments for controlling women's fertility. This is a bracing reminder of what we are up against in the fight for reproductive rights.--Sheila Murnaghan, Alfred Reginald Allen Memorial Professor of Greek at University of Pennsylvania

Author Information

Sarah Ruden is a leading translator of the ancient literature of the West. She received her PhD in classical philology from Harvard University and has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, among other honors. She lives in Connecticut.

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