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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Marie Arendt |
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REPRODUCTIVE WRONGS
A Short History of Bad Ideas About Women
A bracing feminist chronicle of the history of the West told through seven texts, exposing where our most virulent ideas about women came from.
Where did damaging ideas about women originate?
The belief that granting women reproductive freedom poses a threat to the natural order and to traditional values is a myth that has long prospered in American politics, providing justification for increasing control over women's bodies and lives. This could not be further from the truth. In fact, such interventions in a family's most intimate choices have always been a radical and destructive force, playing an especially vicious role in the development of totalitarianism in the West.
In REPRODUCTIVE WRONGS, acclaimed translator and cultural historian Sarah Ruden exposes how ideologies that oppressed women and families in the service of power took hold. Beginning with two poems by Ovid, written under the aegis of Augustus, first emperor of Rome, and continuing up to today, with the memoirs of an evangelical American "abortion survivor," Ruden shows how doctrines of brutality against women were invented and propagated. In this feminist, literary history, Ruden draws on seven works that each marked a key moment of change. In the early days of Christianity, THE PASTORAL EPISTLES decreed confinement and exclusion for women. St. Augustine advanced a cult of celibacy that denied women basic dignity and protection as Roman civilization crumbled. A HAMMER AGAINST WITCHES outlined a program for demonizing women's fertility, justifying targeted torture and killing by the Catholic Inquisition. Charles Dickens' THE CHIMES cruelly glorified early marriage and unlimited fertility even for the very poor, providing moral cover for industrialists who wished to raise birth rates and thus fill a need for low-wage laborers in Victorian Britain. Scathing and vital, REPRODUCTIVE WRONGS unearths the evolution of a series of deep radicalisms that endure even today, in the 21st century when half of the US population is losing basic human rights.
The belief that granting women reproductive freedom poses a threat to the natural order and to traditional values is a myth that has long prospered in American politics, providing justification for increasing control over women's bodies and lives. This could not be further from the truth. In fact, such interventions in a family's most intimate choices have always been a radical and destructive force, playing an especially vicious role in the development of totalitarianism in the West.
In REPRODUCTIVE WRONGS, acclaimed translator and cultural historian Sarah Ruden exposes how ideologies that oppressed women and families in the service of power took hold. Beginning with two poems by Ovid, written under the aegis of Augustus, first emperor of Rome, and continuing up to today, with the memoirs of an evangelical American "abortion survivor," Ruden shows how doctrines of brutality against women were invented and propagated. In this feminist, literary history, Ruden draws on seven works that each marked a key moment of change. In the early days of Christianity, THE PASTORAL EPISTLES decreed confinement and exclusion for women. St. Augustine advanced a cult of celibacy that denied women basic dignity and protection as Roman civilization crumbled. A HAMMER AGAINST WITCHES outlined a program for demonizing women's fertility, justifying targeted torture and killing by the Catholic Inquisition. Charles Dickens' THE CHIMES cruelly glorified early marriage and unlimited fertility even for the very poor, providing moral cover for industrialists who wished to raise birth rates and thus fill a need for low-wage laborers in Victorian Britain. Scathing and vital, REPRODUCTIVE WRONGS unearths the evolution of a series of deep radicalisms that endure even today, in the 21st century when half of the US population is losing basic human rights.
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Published 2026-03-01 by Liveright |