Women couldn’t vote in the United States until 1920 (fifty years after African-American men), and until 1936 they could lose their citizenship if they married a foreigner and lived abroad. As for their children, citizenship was conferred by the father, not the mother. Until 1968, job ads could specify whether men or women would be hired, and that year women were paid on average 58 cents for every dollar earned by men. Remarkably, women could be denied credit without a man’s signature until 1974, and until 1978 they could be fired from their jobs if they became pregnant.
Not surprisingly, controlling sexuality and reproduction was central to keeping women in their place. For most of the country’s history, motherhood was considered women’s highest calling. They were expected to submit to their husbands sexually, and marital rape did not become a crime in all states until 1993. Abortion was illegal in most of the country for most of its history. Desperate women would take various folk remedies to end a pregnancy, try to end it themselves with some contrived implement, or find an illegal abortionist—all risky. There are no reliable figures for how many women died from illegal abortions but almost certainly there were many. [...]
According to Haugeberg, the initial public opposition to abortion, which began even before Roe v. Wade, came from priests and bishops in the Catholic Church, as well as Catholic women, often nuns, whose opposition frequently grew out of their general reverence for life (many had been involved in antiwar activities in the 1960s). It was only later that the term “pro-life” became more a political label than a statement of purpose, since it tended no longer to encompass the loss of life from wars or executions. [...]
By the 1980s, the antiabortion movement had undergone another major shift. It became dominated not by Catholics but, over time, by evangelical Protestants, and its methods increasingly included direct confrontations at abortion clinics to block access. The movement also became increasingly associated with the right wing of the Republican Party, which as far back as the Eisenhower administration had set out to win over religious and social conservatives. The 1980 Republican platform called for a constitutional amendment to protect the life of the unborn, and the new president, Ronald Reagan, who, like Trump, had once favored abortion, now, like Trump, opposed it.
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