One of the strongest suffragist voices for the rights of the unborn in the 19th century was Eleanor Kirk, a novelist whose husband deserted her after a decade of physical abuse and infidelity. In both her novel and in her essays, Kirk castigated abortion doctors and argued passionately for the rights of women workers. Eleanor Kirk […]

Fannie Lou Hamer The example of Fannie Lou Townsend Hamer shows that “pro-life” does not mean acting as if life begins at conception and ends at birth. During the 1960s and ‘70s, this indomitably nonviolent African-American sharecropper from the Mississippi Delta was a moving spirit of the civil rights and women’s movements. She often asserted:

Isabella Beecher Hooker (1822-1907) went unrecognized as a feminist until long after her single book, Womanhood: Its Sanctities and Fidelities, appeared. While sisters Harriet Beecher Stowe and Catherine Esther Beecher gained notoriety authoring Uncle Tom’s Cabin and advocating women’s education, Hooker’s unwavering support of free speech earned her universal derision; she refused to denounce Woodhull

WRITER ANGELINA WELD GRIMKE was part of the Harlem Renaissance, the great 1920s flourishing of African-American culture that included Duke Ellington, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston. The only child of the marriage between Boston residents Sarah Stanley, a white woman, and Archibald Grimke, who was biracial, she was named after her great-aunt Angelina Grimke