Susan B. Anthony abortion dispute
Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906) is widely known for her dedication to three issues: women's suffrage, abolition and temperance. She was raised by abolitionist Quaker parents, later attending Unitarian churches and becoming an agnostic.
As a young woman she worked in the temperance movement and as a speaker and organizer for the American Anti-Slavery Society. She is known primarily, however, for her leadership in the women's suffrage movement, a cause to which she devoted most of her life. The Nineteenth Amendment, which guarantees the right of women to vote, has been called the Susan B. Anthony Amendment because of her efforts to achieve its passage.
In 1979 she was honored as the first American woman to be represented on U.S. currency, the Susan B. Anthony dollar.
Susan B. Anthony abortion dispute
A 2006 article by Allison Stevens for "Women's eNews" said "a scholarly disagreement ...is growing into a heated skirmish over the famous suffragist's position on reproductive rights." Stevens said pro-choice activists were "outraged over what they say is an unproven claim and concerned that their heroine is being appropriated by a community led by the very people Anthony battled during her lifetime: social conservatives." Nora Bredes, the director of the Susan B. Anthony Center for Women's Leadership at the University of Rochester in New York and a pro-choice Democratic politician, said that she wished to "reclaim" Anthony's legacy. In the anti-alcohol Temperance speech "Social Purity", which Anthony gave repeatedly in the 1870s, she includes "infanticides and abortions" among the examples of "perpetual reminders of men's incapacity to cope successfully with this monster evil of society," meaning drunkenness which leads to licentiousness. However, Anthony scholars Lynn Sherr and Ann Gordon contend that Anthony expressed her disapproval of an abortion only once, privately in a diary entry which is open to other interpretations, and that she did not publicly or politically work against abortion.