Reproductive Wrongs: A Short History of Bad Ideas About Women

St. Augustine’s advocacy of celibacy to avoid the dangers of female sexuality and Charles Dickens’s cautioning against putting off marriage for economic reasons are among the questionable pieces of literary advice about women on offer in this expansive study. Classicist Ruden (Perpetua) surveys seven influential, repressive writings about women’s bodies, reproductive rights, and motherhood that span more than two millennia. The works are astonishing in their own right; they include Heinrich Kramer’s “lunatic” 15th-century guide to witch-hunting, the Malleus Maleficarum, and family planning pioneer and eugenicist Marie Stopes’s Radiant Motherhood, a 1920 primer for pregnant women that advises them to wear diaphanous silk “so lightly hung that a butterfly can walk the length of her body without tearing its wings.” But the book’s greatest strength lies in Ruden’s wry criticism of the texts’ weirdness—she notes that Stopes prefers a mother to “glow like enriched uranium”—and her trenchant breakdowns of the authors’ motivations. Ovid’s antiabortion poems, for instance, are likely an attempt to curry favor with Emperor Augustus, who had recently issued new Roman morality laws, and early Christian writings restricting women’s sexuality also served to isolate them from those outside the home who might question Christian doctrine. Ruden also points to similarities between the older texts and today’s antiabortion movement (the last work she analyzes is a popular 1995 biography of antiabortion advocate Gianna Jessen). The result is a biting, revelatory overview of misogyny’s long literary history. (Mar.)