For a few months I had two babies, but only in darkness. Every night, I changed my two-year-old daughter’s diaper before I went to sleep, ostensibly to keep her drier, but really so that I could feel the last breath of her babyhood. She is indomitable, strong and ambitious. Any whiff of the lingering baby in her she kept limited to when she slept: the drape of her arms, the give of her cheeks, the gentle sigh, the hips across which my palm could still stretch.
Sometimes her twin stood up in his crib. “Me change,” he mumbled softly. He waited. I lifted and held him, pressing his thin and beating chest against mine. I used to creep through the room hoping not to wake him as I changed his sister. Then, far greater than the mild accomplishment I felt if he stayed asleep, my joy swelled when he woke. I held him against my torso in the numinous dark, his crustaceous legs wiggling up and down as he grabbed me.
“The defeated,” Kay Carter, the protagonist of Emily Hahn’s 1935 novel Affair, thinks when she looks at mothers and their babies. “Placid unafraid cowlike beings.”
I laughed aloud when I read this sentence. I read Affair right around the time when I noticed this nightly ritual shifting from a chore to be completed efficiently to something softer. I looked forward to these quiet moments with my not-quite-babies.
Cowlike, yes, many times I had felt like a cow. When the twins’ older brother, my first baby, was born, I listened to mooing across the valley where we live as I nursed him in the predawn summer blue. The sound, and the parallel it implied, amused and depressed me. I was cowlike but neither unafraid nor placid. I felt tired and fearful and grateful, too. Do those states look the same to someone who stands outside of motherhood, as Hahn had been when she wrote Affair? I felt reduced even before hearing the lowing cows. I was awash in love for my son and also not sure how I could be both a parent and a person at once.
My elder son is four and a half. My twins just turned three. They are not babies anymore, not even in the dark, and they were my last. I don’t want to have any more children, though some part of me will always want more babies, too. Still: in the unlikely instance that I conceive again, I will terminate the pregnancy. That’s what Kay Carter does in Affair, what Hahn did in her life, what many women authors had done before writing the books that represent the last time abortion was a central feature of literary life.
I read Affair by fluke, while researching Hahn’s life as a reporter. In it, Kay begins to date and then sleep with Jimmy. She sinks into the microcurrents of desire and fear that course through a young woman’s first sustained experience of sex. What she really wants is a job, and what a job means: paying her own rent and looking into a stable and independent future. But the American economy has just plummeted. She is, at best, getting by. Then Kay gets pregnant. Jimmy has, like nearly everyone else they know, lost his own job. Kay envisions having the baby and does not like what she sees. The driving question of Affair is how she will terminate her pregnancy and what will happen to her life when she does.
Around that plot hover other themes: what single, childless women owe to each other, and why a young woman would want something other than what her mother, in a less liberated time, carved out for herself. Hahn did not spend much time explaining why Kay did not want to have a baby. There seemed to be little need to justify why an abortion was one woman’s best way forward. The retreat from public life that having children in the 1930s almost certainly implied was explanation enough.
The book’s world, of women engaging deeply with ambition and pregnancy with no specter of religious moralizing, thrilled me. I soon learned other novels and stories from the era evoked that world, too. A lot of them. “At the rate [abortion] is occurring as an item of the heroine’s experience in current novels,” wrote one Bookman critic in a 1933 review of a Sinclair Lewis novel, it “is likely to be looked upon as an initiation rite of our period by sociologists of the future.”
This, needless to say, did not happen. Instead, the literary community and the political right today appear to have agreed on something like an abortion-plot amnesia, forgetting that these narratives ever exerted so much power over the American imagination at all.
Religious, anti-choice conservatives insist that legal restrictions on abortion and widespread moral consensus successfully kept women from daring to have them. All the while, according to a crop of recent essays that draw attention to abortion narratives in literature and film, before Roe v. Wade no one dared speak of the abortions they did have, or certainly not in interesting ways. Abortion happened, of course, but quietly; this is why the years between the 1860s, when a wave of legislation criminalizing abortion hit the books, and the ascendance of the American women’s rights movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s are known as the “century of silence.” In these essays, on the many reading lists assembled after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, among the book clubs that read abortion-themed novels, the oldest title mentioned is usually Alice Walker’s 1976 novel Meridian.
Even as historians have begun to challenge the idea that silence reigned in this era, books like Hahn’s Affair, or Tess Slesinger’s The Unpossessed or Margery Latimer’s This Is My Body, are still rarely mentioned. Were they simply not good enough, not profound enough, not numerous enough to constitute a collective? None of this, as it turns out, is right.
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Emily Hahn was a little afraid that Affair was no good. She didn’t like the book even after it had been published. She had just turned thirty and was working toward building a career as a journalist and essayist. She published novels mostly because she wrote compulsively, every day, and because her agent asked her for novels to sell. What she really wanted to do was write essays “and get away with it,” she once wrote to her mother, but the essayists she most admired, Rebecca West and Virginia Woolf, had “worked up to it” with novels. By the time Affair came out, Hahn had moved to Shanghai, where she became the New Yorker’s China coast correspondent, writing jaunty, insightful features for the magazine for the rest of her life. From the start, Affair was different: she had felt a need to write it, not out of habit or for a paycheck, but from a search for catharsis. A few years earlier, her roommate had gotten an abortion in circumstances nearly identical to those outlined in the novel.
Its poor commercial performance confirmed Hahn’s suspicions about its quality. “If [Affair] had been a raving success I would have mistrusted my judgment,” Hahn wrote to her sister. The critics, largely, agreed. It was either too grim or too flippant about “the Shocking Thing,” as the jacket cover called abortion. Its tone was more straightforward, more stern than her usual style. Critics received the book with a sigh, a raised eyebrow or both. “Considerable social significance,” according to the New York Post; an “air of verisimilitude,” but “just another tale of young moderns,” wrote the New York Times critic, who seemed confused as to why its protagonist did not just marry her boyfriend. (Still better than the review of 1928’s Bad Girl, a pulpy bestseller about abortion that was, the reviewer grumbled, “unduly preoccupied with the matter of childbirth.”) For her part, Hahn, across the Pacific, made no real effort to promote it.
Hahn had an abortion herself when she was in her early twenties, though details of the event are scarce. The most poignant references to Hahn’s termination are fleeting and buried in archives, in her letters to her good friend, the journalist John Gunther, who had helped her arrange the procedure in Paris in the late 1920s, and the notes he took. Gunther wanted to write a “cruel little story in 5 or 6 parts, each one short and sharp, ending with a line of spoken meditation or dialogue by the heroine.” He drew on Hahn’s experience as he outlined it: she said she’d have kept the baby but she wasn’t sure which of her lovers was the father, he wrote. “Don’t you think your former lovers make your best friends?” she asked him. Gunther never published the story. As for Hahn, she had, she told him in a letter after the procedure, “an easy stomach and no emotions.” Then Hahn dropped the bravado. “For three days I’ve been thinking,” she wrote to Gunther, plotting the next steps of her career and how to “be free of people.” She felt the aimless adolescence that had stretched into her twenties ending. She began to plot the trip to the Belgian Congo that would launch a more serious chapter of her career.
When Hahn later wrote a nonfiction account of her roommate’s abortion, she titled it “Kathy, Not Me.” She first published it in the New Yorker in 1965, in what was then known as the “Casuals” section. “Casuals” were somewhere between fiction and nonfiction: they were edited by the fiction department but often took the form of reminiscences, in which authors like Hahn and John McPhee published loosely written autobiography without caveat or clarification. Hahn included the piece in her memoir-in-essays, Times and Places, in 1970. She did not mention her own abortion in either version.
But abortion continued to be a source of literary and personal fascination for Hahn. In “Kathy, Not Me,” she frames the story of her roommate’s abortion within the solipsism and confusion of living in New York in 1930. There is a relentlessness to Affair and its single-minded focus on relationships and their consequences—the lovers, the roommates—amid the onrushing panic of dire times. Thirty-five years later, having given birth to two children, Hahn was able to tease the threads of that panic apart: the individual, and the abortion, occurs within a broader climate of fear and uncertainty. “We talked about ourselves constantly,” she wrote, but young Americans did not clearly see themselves within the momentousness of the Great Depression. All around Hahn, newly unemployed women boarded trains back home to their mothers. Kathy learned she was pregnant around the time that she lost her college scholarship. “She did not intend to have it; outside of books and movies, girls in her predicament never did. Both of us knew that much but very little more, except that the operation was illegal,” Hahn wrote. The boyfriend, after being persuaded that the abortion was “a matter that involved him as well as Kathy,” found the doctor, paid for part of the operation, and showed up at their apartment on the day of the appointment, floridly drunk. Hahn took Kathy to the doctor. When they returned, the two women limped up the stairs past him. Hahn lived with Kathy’s crying for two weeks, until she helped her board a train back home to the Midwest.
Hahn’s depression worsened even though Kathy wrote to tell her she was fine, now. In the aftermath, Hahn accepted dates, a manic carousel of them, just to get out of the apartment in which her roommate’s ghostly crying still seemed to float. “Though it was past, and though it was Kathy, not me, someone had gone through all that cruelty,” she wrote.
“All that cruelty.” The physical—the abortion, the green cast of Kathy’s face when she came home from what Hahn knew was a terribly painful operation. The emotional—that callous, drunk boyfriend, who needed convincing to take any responsibility. The societal—those trains taking women back to the past, to live their mothers’ lives. The historical—the past to which they traveled. Hahn took a handful of sleeping pills and immediately vomited them up. (In Affair, Hahn gave this half-hearted suicide plotline to the roommate.)
In “Kathy, Not Me,” abortion offered the titular cruelty, and yet what finally lifted Hahn out of her depression was a glimmer of the misogyny and paternalism that was the source of that cruelty. A boyfriend she didn’t really like insisted he would pay for the psychoanalysis he’d tried to convince her to do before her suicide attempt. She had to admit that she needed it, he said, she just had to. “Nobody pays for me,” she fumed, her ambition reignited with purpose.
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If in earlier literature female characters who got abortions died tragic deaths—as fallen women, the victims of male rapacity or their own sexuality or both—the 1930s abortion plots centered on what it means to live with her choice. In these stories, in other words, the woman has her abortion and moves on: often with contemplation, sometimes with gratitude and excitement, sometimes with pain and thoughtful if not totalizing regret.
In Tess Slesinger’s 1932 short story “Missis Flinders,” possibly the first mainstream publication of a story explicitly about abortion, the procedure itself represents the lack of choice. It’s “a D and C between friends,” Margaret Flinders calls it, brittle with the pain of a termination she didn’t really want to have. All the women in the story have had choice wrested from them: by men, by biology, by simple tragedy. One woman offers her husband another daughter, a disappointment to him; another gives birth to a stillborn baby. Margaret gets an abortion, pressed into the surgery by her own political hesitations—how could she and her husband, leftist intellectuals, make real social change while providing for an infant?—but mostly by her husband. She had wanted to keep it.
Other stories addressed the choicelessness of abortion, too—Margery Latimer’s This Is My Body, a 1930 novel that shared an editor with William Faulkner, and so explicit about both sex and abortion that people wrapped it in brown paper to read on the subway. Or they focused on social sympathy, as in Dorothy Parker’s euphemism-laden 1924 story, “Mr. Durant,” in which a twenty-year-old stenographer, “in trouble” via her cruel 49-year-old boss, is “fixed up” by a more sophisticated coworker; another Parker story, “Lady with a Lamp,” published in 1932 in Harper’s Bazaar, revisits social hypocrisy and shame around abortion. Together, they revealed the quiet prevalence of surgical terminations and abortion pills. In Kay Boyle’s 1934 novel My Next Bride, a yawning woman, filing her nails, talks about which friend can find a woman the right doctor, and a shop clerk takes pills and then miscarries while her customers peruse the wares. Black women writers like Angelina Weld Grimké and Georgia Douglas Johnson, for their part, addressed a far more harrowing landscape in their fictional narratives, writing not about abortion but about women who killed their newborns rather than enlist them into a life of racial violence.
The list, once you begin to compose it, grows large and unwieldy, simultaneously restless with disagreement about what to make of abortion and rich with consideration of the experience. Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, Josephine Herbst, Jessie Redmon Fauset, as well as male authors like Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis and others: all took up the theme, in varied terms and from varied perspectives, for all kinds of audiences.
Some filled a pedagogical gap. In the absence of sex ed or how-to guides, a few books offered practical instruction: most pills will make you sick, not un-pregnant; doctors might sexually assault you with an air of perfunctory ceremony before an examination; the women in hospital beds alongside you will have experienced these varieties of pain; here is how much it might cost, and, for what it’s worth, the price will be easier to negotiate if you wear old clothes.
Others addressed broader questions of what pregnancy and its termination meant to the people who chose it. Examined together, these writers made visible the many ways men tried to control women’s bodies and depicted the moral choices around bringing a child into the world that connected pregnancy with class mobility, racism, women’s liberation, the failures of capitalism. When amassed, they become a chorus grappling aloud with how to talk about abortion in the public sphere. Hemingway’s famous euphemism in “Hills Like White Elephants” looks a little different when it’s set between “Mr. Durant,” which Parker published three years before, and “Missis Flinders,” which came five years after it.
The abortion narratives of the late 1920s and 1930s responded to their own recent historical currents: the nineteenth-century movement to restrict the legality of abortion, for one. Before then, people and institutions alike—the Catholic church among them—agreed that human life did not begin before “quickening,” a subjective time frame that relied upon when a fetus could be felt in a childbearing body, and which proved hard to shake: even into the twentieth century, consensus and state court systems often considered pre-quickening abortion an obviously lesser offense. The leaders of the anti-abortion movement openly admitted that their goal was to keep women tied up at home. “The true wife” does not seek “undue power in public life … [or] privileges not justly her own,” wrote Dr. Horatio R. Storer, the leader of the medical campaign against abortion. Enough people knew, by the 1920s, what bunk Storer sold. They’d just lived through the First World War, and the fight for women’s suffrage, and Prohibition, which cracked open, with its lawless speakeasies, women’s public social lives.
And still, “only a woman knows how large a part of life is played by this matter of pregnancy,” Hahn wrote the third and last time she addressed abortion in writing, on a single page of her 1974 book Once Upon a Pedestal, an informal history of American women’s movements from the women who landed at Jamestown to abolitionist sisters to suffragists and on to Roe and the founding of the National Organization for Women. “It affects, or used to affect, everything, not only in herself but the way she was treated by the world.”
For Hahn, abortion was a consequential act, both personally and socially. In Once Upon a Pedestal, she described accompanying her friend to get an abortion in the 1930s. In a clean apartment on Riverside Drive, Hahn had stood while her friend “gripped my hand and screamed” in the center of a large oval room partitioned by hospital screens. When it was over, Hahn retired behind one of those screens and listened, amid the scent of antiseptic and blood, to the voice of the next woman to enter, and then the next, and the next.
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Over the years, these books mostly disappeared. Much intervened: another world war, a retrenchment of domestic roles, a women’s movement that, as many revolutions have done, elided both the achievements and mistakes of the feminist efforts that came before. Besides, in many of these stories, the choice to have an abortion can’t serve a pat narrative for either the right or the left. It has a lasting impact, it does not disappear entirely; at the same time, a protagonist does not apologize for or regret it. Moving on is bittersweet or it’s triumphant, but it is also often ambivalent. A termination is the kind of momentous choice that accrues over time. Within the lives of these stories’ protagonists, abortion is limned with the hesitant, complicated certainty I feel when I know that I do not want more babies.
Hahn wrote a bestselling memoir of her life in China on the cusp of World War II, and continued to write journalism from far-flung destinations for the New Yorker for decades. Affair, meanwhile, is long out of print. Its subject matter and tone remained more intimate than most of what she wrote afterward. Other books faded from view, too. Slesinger’s The Unpossessed, the novel that grew out of her short story, was printed four times within a month of its 1934 publication and then dropped out of print after the war. It received some attention in the early 2000s when New York Review Books Classics reissued it. Last year, the Lost Ladies of Lit podcast highlighted the book’s exceedingly contemporary theme of whether it is possible to be a political radical and also have a happy home. But overall, despite the vogue today for reviving underappreciated writers, especially women, few critics or academics have championed these books and stories, or asked how they might change our understanding of American literary history. Where they have been read and contextualized, it has been in isolation.
This is, in a way, surprising. In their day, these abortion stories were understood to speak in some measure of unison, even if their power faded quickly. Thirty years after the Bookman critic noted the prevalence of abortion in contemporary literature, a character in William Goldman’s 1964 bestseller Boys and Girls Together says of an upcoming play, “There better not be a big abortion scene—I’m bored with them already.” Only ten years later, French writer Annie Ernaux wrote in the 1974 novelization of her own abortion, Cleaned Out, “books are silent on this topic.”
Last year, in a London Review of Books lecture and essay, the literary critic Clair Wills asked, referencing Ernaux, why books have been silent on “the reality of women’s sexual lives.” She wasn’t entirely unaware of the abortion plot, or the existence of abortion in fiction before the 1960s. Rather, for Wills, the problem was that the novelistic tradition seemed inherently incapable of putting the subject center stage. That’s why the few that did, she argued, departed from narrative convention, subsuming the moral frameworks we now expect beneath the challenges of logistics: “Abortion stories, as a genre, haven’t been terribly interested in questions of morality. Before legalisation in the 1960s and 1970s, abortion stories subordinated profound moral questions over the personhood, or potential personhood, of the foetus to the problem of access.” What she wants is not more moralistic fiction but literary forms more up to the task of capturing the experience of abortion as lived by most women, she writes: “These are stories about bodies, not feelings, and that is one of the reasons they don’t fit the realist novel’s dining room scenario.”
Affair and “Missis Flinders,” “Mr. Durant” and My Last Bride hovered in my mind as I read Wills’s essay. She is not the only contemporary scholar to elide the existence of these stories. Other recent essays have addressed the “literary breakthroughs,” as an essay in the Nation put it, of Walker and Ernaux’s depictions of abortion, or the euphemism that reigned in some of these novels and stories. “American literature took a while to say the unsayable,” one critic wrote in a recent New Yorker piece, until a proliferation of philosophical debate around abortion in the 1950s.
“The thought nobody dares think. The word nobody dares whisper. The act nobody dares admit. Abortion!” reads the back cover of my copy of Affair, a 1951 edition, its final printing.
These critics are, to some extent, right: many of these books do use some measure of euphemism, and they do not dwell much on questions of fetal personhood. But that doesn’t mean that they’ve been silent, or that moral questions can’t speak to the reality of women’s sexual lives at all. Instead, the fact that they are so easily overlooked by present-day critics points toward a more slippery complexity. “It was only after legalisation that storytelling became bound up with abortion’s moral economy,” Wills writes. “Once power over life was delegated to individuals—women especially—making physiologically and psychologically healthy choices became a new kind of obligation.”
And yet some of these women wrote about the choices their protagonists made long before legalization, and their potential hazards for physical bodies and mental states. If their storytelling resisted binding itself to abortion’s moral economy as we now understand it, it’s because they insisted on a more expansive understanding of morality. Many of these stories seemed to assume that a fetus might mean a different thing to different people. They did not set out to change that. At the same time, their authors seemed to understand that eventually, every human life born from a human body would bring similar threats and potentials, challenges and joys.
These stories do not clear away the moral questions around abortion in favor of the gritty realities of logistics: they add to them. This is why the characters, scenes and questions from these stories have stuck with me. The men in Dorothy Parker’s stories who impregnate the women with a willful oblivion depressingly like that of some men I’ve known. The shoppers at the store who move around Kay Boyle’s miscarrying shopkeeper, cradled within the intense quiet of early pregnancy and loss. The unpredictability of childbirth in “Missis Flinders,” and the true ambivalence of a politically engaged couple considering children in a cruel world. What is a man’s responsibility for an unwanted pregnancy if a woman claims the right to terminate it? What does the resounding quiet of early pregnancy do for the body that experiences it? Can I hope to raise children who will become resilient, revolutionary and also satisfied and playful adults, and where do my own goals fit into that hope?
Some of these stories leaned maudlin for my taste. A few, I admit, were not really that good. Yet even then, their universe gave me an abiding sense of relief. There was no debating why an abortion felt necessary, what it could do for a woman’s life, and no need to grapple with potential personhood—and at the same time, no denial of the gravity of the event, the pain or ambivalence it could bring, or any other physical repercussion or emotional feeling. The stories brought to the center two profound truths: a fetus does not need to be a life for it to impact the human who made it, and you do not need to regret a choice for it to lurk in your mind and heart.
“I feel things differently,” Kay says in Affair, after her abortion. The pregnancy had made her feel hopeless, and brave, too. On the train uptown to the doctor she had been afraid, but also “terribly interested—not interested in just me, but in everything… it was marvelous.” The world appeared different after she had chosen to live in it alone for a little longer. Nearly fifty years later, Alice Walker, in “The Abortion,” expressed a strikingly similar sentiment. An abortion had generated the understanding that life is only ever the life being lived, which “seemed a marvelous thing to know,” she wrote. There is abiding wonder for a woman in choosing a fuller commitment to a life lived without children, or in choosing the selfhood she has carved around children she already loves deeply, or in choosing not to have another baby to focus on those living children whose personhood is not negotiable.
Truth be told, Kay’s sentiment is my emotional landscape much of the time, as a mother: I feel things differently than I have before, both hopeless and brave at once, terribly interested in my children and the world in which we dwell and everything in it. But if motherhood has changed me as a person at all, those transformations began much earlier than when I gave birth to my first son. They started when I really considered having children, the way the experience of making that choice changes Kay, too.
Having children is unplannable; unthinkably, brutally, sometimes beautifully so. I got two babies when I thought I’d maybe have one second child. I disliked being pregnant and I’d always dreamed of three children. My gratitude is immeasurable. But more often these days, that unpredictability is cruel, with a stupid, blunt violence for which our language is paltry and painful: infertility, stillbirths, unwanted pregnancy, miscarriage, abortion. The public conversation around these experiences often compounds their private violence. What does difficulty with conception mean? Why is a baby born dead? Will a fetus that a body creates without a brain feel pain at termination or birth? Whose responsibility is an unwanted pregnancy? Where can or should a state intervene? Some of these questions are unanswerable. Others are not. Science only helps so much.
There’s no use idealizing a time when abortions were expensive, dangerous, performed in parlors and back rooms with no anesthesia—“all that cruelty,” as Hahn wrote. Perhaps, though, in acknowledging the complexity of the experiences around abortion, the books written in this era do better at addressing the paltriness of the language used around it and the cruelty it lets in, without offering that cruelty a political or religious foothold. As the onslaught of recent anti-choice legislation clarifies, debates about abortion’s legality have never been about fetuses, babies or mothers. They are always about power slamming into the confounding, awe-inspiring reality of creating human life. To consider the nuances of that reality—and I want to consider and understand them, because I want that power, all the “undue power” for myself, my daughter, every childbearing body in the world—a reexamination of these books would be a good place to start.
Image credit: Misery and Fortune of Women (1930)
For a few months I had two babies, but only in darkness. Every night, I changed my two-year-old daughter’s diaper before I went to sleep, ostensibly to keep her drier, but really so that I could feel the last breath of her babyhood. She is indomitable, strong and ambitious. Any whiff of the lingering baby in her she kept limited to when she slept: the drape of her arms, the give of her cheeks, the gentle sigh, the hips across which my palm could still stretch.
Sometimes her twin stood up in his crib. “Me change,” he mumbled softly. He waited. I lifted and held him, pressing his thin and beating chest against mine. I used to creep through the room hoping not to wake him as I changed his sister. Then, far greater than the mild accomplishment I felt if he stayed asleep, my joy swelled when he woke. I held him against my torso in the numinous dark, his crustaceous legs wiggling up and down as he grabbed me.
“The defeated,” Kay Carter, the protagonist of Emily Hahn’s 1935 novel Affair, thinks when she looks at mothers and their babies. “Placid unafraid cowlike beings.”
I laughed aloud when I read this sentence. I read Affair right around the time when I noticed this nightly ritual shifting from a chore to be completed efficiently to something softer. I looked forward to these quiet moments with my not-quite-babies.
Cowlike, yes, many times I had felt like a cow. When the twins’ older brother, my first baby, was born, I listened to mooing across the valley where we live as I nursed him in the predawn summer blue. The sound, and the parallel it implied, amused and depressed me. I was cowlike but neither unafraid nor placid. I felt tired and fearful and grateful, too. Do those states look the same to someone who stands outside of motherhood, as Hahn had been when she wrote Affair? I felt reduced even before hearing the lowing cows. I was awash in love for my son and also not sure how I could be both a parent and a person at once.
My elder son is four and a half. My twins just turned three. They are not babies anymore, not even in the dark, and they were my last. I don’t want to have any more children, though some part of me will always want more babies, too. Still: in the unlikely instance that I conceive again, I will terminate the pregnancy. That’s what Kay Carter does in Affair, what Hahn did in her life, what many women authors had done before writing the books that represent the last time abortion was a central feature of literary life.
I read Affair by fluke, while researching Hahn’s life as a reporter. In it, Kay begins to date and then sleep with Jimmy. She sinks into the microcurrents of desire and fear that course through a young woman’s first sustained experience of sex. What she really wants is a job, and what a job means: paying her own rent and looking into a stable and independent future. But the American economy has just plummeted. She is, at best, getting by. Then Kay gets pregnant. Jimmy has, like nearly everyone else they know, lost his own job. Kay envisions having the baby and does not like what she sees. The driving question of Affair is how she will terminate her pregnancy and what will happen to her life when she does.
Around that plot hover other themes: what single, childless women owe to each other, and why a young woman would want something other than what her mother, in a less liberated time, carved out for herself. Hahn did not spend much time explaining why Kay did not want to have a baby. There seemed to be little need to justify why an abortion was one woman’s best way forward. The retreat from public life that having children in the 1930s almost certainly implied was explanation enough.
The book’s world, of women engaging deeply with ambition and pregnancy with no specter of religious moralizing, thrilled me. I soon learned other novels and stories from the era evoked that world, too. A lot of them. “At the rate [abortion] is occurring as an item of the heroine’s experience in current novels,” wrote one Bookman critic in a 1933 review of a Sinclair Lewis novel, it “is likely to be looked upon as an initiation rite of our period by sociologists of the future.”
This, needless to say, did not happen. Instead, the literary community and the political right today appear to have agreed on something like an abortion-plot amnesia, forgetting that these narratives ever exerted so much power over the American imagination at all.
Religious, anti-choice conservatives insist that legal restrictions on abortion and widespread moral consensus successfully kept women from daring to have them. All the while, according to a crop of recent essays that draw attention to abortion narratives in literature and film, before Roe v. Wade no one dared speak of the abortions they did have, or certainly not in interesting ways. Abortion happened, of course, but quietly; this is why the years between the 1860s, when a wave of legislation criminalizing abortion hit the books, and the ascendance of the American women’s rights movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s are known as the “century of silence.” In these essays, on the many reading lists assembled after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, among the book clubs that read abortion-themed novels, the oldest title mentioned is usually Alice Walker’s 1976 novel Meridian.
Even as historians have begun to challenge the idea that silence reigned in this era, books like Hahn’s Affair, or Tess Slesinger’s The Unpossessed or Margery Latimer’s This Is My Body, are still rarely mentioned. Were they simply not good enough, not profound enough, not numerous enough to constitute a collective? None of this, as it turns out, is right.
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Emily Hahn was a little afraid that Affair was no good. She didn’t like the book even after it had been published. She had just turned thirty and was working toward building a career as a journalist and essayist. She published novels mostly because she wrote compulsively, every day, and because her agent asked her for novels to sell. What she really wanted to do was write essays “and get away with it,” she once wrote to her mother, but the essayists she most admired, Rebecca West and Virginia Woolf, had “worked up to it” with novels. By the time Affair came out, Hahn had moved to Shanghai, where she became the New Yorker’s China coast correspondent, writing jaunty, insightful features for the magazine for the rest of her life. From the start, Affair was different: she had felt a need to write it, not out of habit or for a paycheck, but from a search for catharsis. A few years earlier, her roommate had gotten an abortion in circumstances nearly identical to those outlined in the novel.
Its poor commercial performance confirmed Hahn’s suspicions about its quality. “If [Affair] had been a raving success I would have mistrusted my judgment,” Hahn wrote to her sister. The critics, largely, agreed. It was either too grim or too flippant about “the Shocking Thing,” as the jacket cover called abortion. Its tone was more straightforward, more stern than her usual style. Critics received the book with a sigh, a raised eyebrow or both. “Considerable social significance,” according to the New York Post; an “air of verisimilitude,” but “just another tale of young moderns,” wrote the New York Times critic, who seemed confused as to why its protagonist did not just marry her boyfriend. (Still better than the review of 1928’s Bad Girl, a pulpy bestseller about abortion that was, the reviewer grumbled, “unduly preoccupied with the matter of childbirth.”) For her part, Hahn, across the Pacific, made no real effort to promote it.
Hahn had an abortion herself when she was in her early twenties, though details of the event are scarce. The most poignant references to Hahn’s termination are fleeting and buried in archives, in her letters to her good friend, the journalist John Gunther, who had helped her arrange the procedure in Paris in the late 1920s, and the notes he took. Gunther wanted to write a “cruel little story in 5 or 6 parts, each one short and sharp, ending with a line of spoken meditation or dialogue by the heroine.” He drew on Hahn’s experience as he outlined it: she said she’d have kept the baby but she wasn’t sure which of her lovers was the father, he wrote. “Don’t you think your former lovers make your best friends?” she asked him. Gunther never published the story. As for Hahn, she had, she told him in a letter after the procedure, “an easy stomach and no emotions.” Then Hahn dropped the bravado. “For three days I’ve been thinking,” she wrote to Gunther, plotting the next steps of her career and how to “be free of people.” She felt the aimless adolescence that had stretched into her twenties ending. She began to plot the trip to the Belgian Congo that would launch a more serious chapter of her career.
When Hahn later wrote a nonfiction account of her roommate’s abortion, she titled it “Kathy, Not Me.” She first published it in the New Yorker in 1965, in what was then known as the “Casuals” section. “Casuals” were somewhere between fiction and nonfiction: they were edited by the fiction department but often took the form of reminiscences, in which authors like Hahn and John McPhee published loosely written autobiography without caveat or clarification. Hahn included the piece in her memoir-in-essays, Times and Places, in 1970. She did not mention her own abortion in either version.
But abortion continued to be a source of literary and personal fascination for Hahn. In “Kathy, Not Me,” she frames the story of her roommate’s abortion within the solipsism and confusion of living in New York in 1930. There is a relentlessness to Affair and its single-minded focus on relationships and their consequences—the lovers, the roommates—amid the onrushing panic of dire times. Thirty-five years later, having given birth to two children, Hahn was able to tease the threads of that panic apart: the individual, and the abortion, occurs within a broader climate of fear and uncertainty. “We talked about ourselves constantly,” she wrote, but young Americans did not clearly see themselves within the momentousness of the Great Depression. All around Hahn, newly unemployed women boarded trains back home to their mothers. Kathy learned she was pregnant around the time that she lost her college scholarship. “She did not intend to have it; outside of books and movies, girls in her predicament never did. Both of us knew that much but very little more, except that the operation was illegal,” Hahn wrote. The boyfriend, after being persuaded that the abortion was “a matter that involved him as well as Kathy,” found the doctor, paid for part of the operation, and showed up at their apartment on the day of the appointment, floridly drunk. Hahn took Kathy to the doctor. When they returned, the two women limped up the stairs past him. Hahn lived with Kathy’s crying for two weeks, until she helped her board a train back home to the Midwest.
Hahn’s depression worsened even though Kathy wrote to tell her she was fine, now. In the aftermath, Hahn accepted dates, a manic carousel of them, just to get out of the apartment in which her roommate’s ghostly crying still seemed to float. “Though it was past, and though it was Kathy, not me, someone had gone through all that cruelty,” she wrote.
“All that cruelty.” The physical—the abortion, the green cast of Kathy’s face when she came home from what Hahn knew was a terribly painful operation. The emotional—that callous, drunk boyfriend, who needed convincing to take any responsibility. The societal—those trains taking women back to the past, to live their mothers’ lives. The historical—the past to which they traveled. Hahn took a handful of sleeping pills and immediately vomited them up. (In Affair, Hahn gave this half-hearted suicide plotline to the roommate.)
In “Kathy, Not Me,” abortion offered the titular cruelty, and yet what finally lifted Hahn out of her depression was a glimmer of the misogyny and paternalism that was the source of that cruelty. A boyfriend she didn’t really like insisted he would pay for the psychoanalysis he’d tried to convince her to do before her suicide attempt. She had to admit that she needed it, he said, she just had to. “Nobody pays for me,” she fumed, her ambition reignited with purpose.
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If in earlier literature female characters who got abortions died tragic deaths—as fallen women, the victims of male rapacity or their own sexuality or both—the 1930s abortion plots centered on what it means to live with her choice. In these stories, in other words, the woman has her abortion and moves on: often with contemplation, sometimes with gratitude and excitement, sometimes with pain and thoughtful if not totalizing regret.
In Tess Slesinger’s 1932 short story “Missis Flinders,” possibly the first mainstream publication of a story explicitly about abortion, the procedure itself represents the lack of choice. It’s “a D and C between friends,” Margaret Flinders calls it, brittle with the pain of a termination she didn’t really want to have. All the women in the story have had choice wrested from them: by men, by biology, by simple tragedy. One woman offers her husband another daughter, a disappointment to him; another gives birth to a stillborn baby. Margaret gets an abortion, pressed into the surgery by her own political hesitations—how could she and her husband, leftist intellectuals, make real social change while providing for an infant?—but mostly by her husband. She had wanted to keep it.
Other stories addressed the choicelessness of abortion, too—Margery Latimer’s This Is My Body, a 1930 novel that shared an editor with William Faulkner, and so explicit about both sex and abortion that people wrapped it in brown paper to read on the subway. Or they focused on social sympathy, as in Dorothy Parker’s euphemism-laden 1924 story, “Mr. Durant,” in which a twenty-year-old stenographer, “in trouble” via her cruel 49-year-old boss, is “fixed up” by a more sophisticated coworker; another Parker story, “Lady with a Lamp,” published in 1932 in Harper’s Bazaar, revisits social hypocrisy and shame around abortion. Together, they revealed the quiet prevalence of surgical terminations and abortion pills. In Kay Boyle’s 1934 novel My Next Bride, a yawning woman, filing her nails, talks about which friend can find a woman the right doctor, and a shop clerk takes pills and then miscarries while her customers peruse the wares. Black women writers like Angelina Weld Grimké and Georgia Douglas Johnson, for their part, addressed a far more harrowing landscape in their fictional narratives, writing not about abortion but about women who killed their newborns rather than enlist them into a life of racial violence.
The list, once you begin to compose it, grows large and unwieldy, simultaneously restless with disagreement about what to make of abortion and rich with consideration of the experience. Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, Josephine Herbst, Jessie Redmon Fauset, as well as male authors like Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis and others: all took up the theme, in varied terms and from varied perspectives, for all kinds of audiences.
Some filled a pedagogical gap. In the absence of sex ed or how-to guides, a few books offered practical instruction: most pills will make you sick, not un-pregnant; doctors might sexually assault you with an air of perfunctory ceremony before an examination; the women in hospital beds alongside you will have experienced these varieties of pain; here is how much it might cost, and, for what it’s worth, the price will be easier to negotiate if you wear old clothes.
Others addressed broader questions of what pregnancy and its termination meant to the people who chose it. Examined together, these writers made visible the many ways men tried to control women’s bodies and depicted the moral choices around bringing a child into the world that connected pregnancy with class mobility, racism, women’s liberation, the failures of capitalism. When amassed, they become a chorus grappling aloud with how to talk about abortion in the public sphere. Hemingway’s famous euphemism in “Hills Like White Elephants” looks a little different when it’s set between “Mr. Durant,” which Parker published three years before, and “Missis Flinders,” which came five years after it.
The abortion narratives of the late 1920s and 1930s responded to their own recent historical currents: the nineteenth-century movement to restrict the legality of abortion, for one. Before then, people and institutions alike—the Catholic church among them—agreed that human life did not begin before “quickening,” a subjective time frame that relied upon when a fetus could be felt in a childbearing body, and which proved hard to shake: even into the twentieth century, consensus and state court systems often considered pre-quickening abortion an obviously lesser offense. The leaders of the anti-abortion movement openly admitted that their goal was to keep women tied up at home. “The true wife” does not seek “undue power in public life … [or] privileges not justly her own,” wrote Dr. Horatio R. Storer, the leader of the medical campaign against abortion. Enough people knew, by the 1920s, what bunk Storer sold. They’d just lived through the First World War, and the fight for women’s suffrage, and Prohibition, which cracked open, with its lawless speakeasies, women’s public social lives.
And still, “only a woman knows how large a part of life is played by this matter of pregnancy,” Hahn wrote the third and last time she addressed abortion in writing, on a single page of her 1974 book Once Upon a Pedestal, an informal history of American women’s movements from the women who landed at Jamestown to abolitionist sisters to suffragists and on to Roe and the founding of the National Organization for Women. “It affects, or used to affect, everything, not only in herself but the way she was treated by the world.”
For Hahn, abortion was a consequential act, both personally and socially. In Once Upon a Pedestal, she described accompanying her friend to get an abortion in the 1930s. In a clean apartment on Riverside Drive, Hahn had stood while her friend “gripped my hand and screamed” in the center of a large oval room partitioned by hospital screens. When it was over, Hahn retired behind one of those screens and listened, amid the scent of antiseptic and blood, to the voice of the next woman to enter, and then the next, and the next.
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Over the years, these books mostly disappeared. Much intervened: another world war, a retrenchment of domestic roles, a women’s movement that, as many revolutions have done, elided both the achievements and mistakes of the feminist efforts that came before. Besides, in many of these stories, the choice to have an abortion can’t serve a pat narrative for either the right or the left. It has a lasting impact, it does not disappear entirely; at the same time, a protagonist does not apologize for or regret it. Moving on is bittersweet or it’s triumphant, but it is also often ambivalent. A termination is the kind of momentous choice that accrues over time. Within the lives of these stories’ protagonists, abortion is limned with the hesitant, complicated certainty I feel when I know that I do not want more babies.
Hahn wrote a bestselling memoir of her life in China on the cusp of World War II, and continued to write journalism from far-flung destinations for the New Yorker for decades. Affair, meanwhile, is long out of print. Its subject matter and tone remained more intimate than most of what she wrote afterward. Other books faded from view, too. Slesinger’s The Unpossessed, the novel that grew out of her short story, was printed four times within a month of its 1934 publication and then dropped out of print after the war. It received some attention in the early 2000s when New York Review Books Classics reissued it. Last year, the Lost Ladies of Lit podcast highlighted the book’s exceedingly contemporary theme of whether it is possible to be a political radical and also have a happy home. But overall, despite the vogue today for reviving underappreciated writers, especially women, few critics or academics have championed these books and stories, or asked how they might change our understanding of American literary history. Where they have been read and contextualized, it has been in isolation.
This is, in a way, surprising. In their day, these abortion stories were understood to speak in some measure of unison, even if their power faded quickly. Thirty years after the Bookman critic noted the prevalence of abortion in contemporary literature, a character in William Goldman’s 1964 bestseller Boys and Girls Together says of an upcoming play, “There better not be a big abortion scene—I’m bored with them already.” Only ten years later, French writer Annie Ernaux wrote in the 1974 novelization of her own abortion, Cleaned Out, “books are silent on this topic.”
Last year, in a London Review of Books lecture and essay, the literary critic Clair Wills asked, referencing Ernaux, why books have been silent on “the reality of women’s sexual lives.” She wasn’t entirely unaware of the abortion plot, or the existence of abortion in fiction before the 1960s. Rather, for Wills, the problem was that the novelistic tradition seemed inherently incapable of putting the subject center stage. That’s why the few that did, she argued, departed from narrative convention, subsuming the moral frameworks we now expect beneath the challenges of logistics: “Abortion stories, as a genre, haven’t been terribly interested in questions of morality. Before legalisation in the 1960s and 1970s, abortion stories subordinated profound moral questions over the personhood, or potential personhood, of the foetus to the problem of access.” What she wants is not more moralistic fiction but literary forms more up to the task of capturing the experience of abortion as lived by most women, she writes: “These are stories about bodies, not feelings, and that is one of the reasons they don’t fit the realist novel’s dining room scenario.”
Affair and “Missis Flinders,” “Mr. Durant” and My Last Bride hovered in my mind as I read Wills’s essay. She is not the only contemporary scholar to elide the existence of these stories. Other recent essays have addressed the “literary breakthroughs,” as an essay in the Nation put it, of Walker and Ernaux’s depictions of abortion, or the euphemism that reigned in some of these novels and stories. “American literature took a while to say the unsayable,” one critic wrote in a recent New Yorker piece, until a proliferation of philosophical debate around abortion in the 1950s.
“The thought nobody dares think. The word nobody dares whisper. The act nobody dares admit. Abortion!” reads the back cover of my copy of Affair, a 1951 edition, its final printing.
These critics are, to some extent, right: many of these books do use some measure of euphemism, and they do not dwell much on questions of fetal personhood. But that doesn’t mean that they’ve been silent, or that moral questions can’t speak to the reality of women’s sexual lives at all. Instead, the fact that they are so easily overlooked by present-day critics points toward a more slippery complexity. “It was only after legalisation that storytelling became bound up with abortion’s moral economy,” Wills writes. “Once power over life was delegated to individuals—women especially—making physiologically and psychologically healthy choices became a new kind of obligation.”
And yet some of these women wrote about the choices their protagonists made long before legalization, and their potential hazards for physical bodies and mental states. If their storytelling resisted binding itself to abortion’s moral economy as we now understand it, it’s because they insisted on a more expansive understanding of morality. Many of these stories seemed to assume that a fetus might mean a different thing to different people. They did not set out to change that. At the same time, their authors seemed to understand that eventually, every human life born from a human body would bring similar threats and potentials, challenges and joys.
These stories do not clear away the moral questions around abortion in favor of the gritty realities of logistics: they add to them. This is why the characters, scenes and questions from these stories have stuck with me. The men in Dorothy Parker’s stories who impregnate the women with a willful oblivion depressingly like that of some men I’ve known. The shoppers at the store who move around Kay Boyle’s miscarrying shopkeeper, cradled within the intense quiet of early pregnancy and loss. The unpredictability of childbirth in “Missis Flinders,” and the true ambivalence of a politically engaged couple considering children in a cruel world. What is a man’s responsibility for an unwanted pregnancy if a woman claims the right to terminate it? What does the resounding quiet of early pregnancy do for the body that experiences it? Can I hope to raise children who will become resilient, revolutionary and also satisfied and playful adults, and where do my own goals fit into that hope?
Some of these stories leaned maudlin for my taste. A few, I admit, were not really that good. Yet even then, their universe gave me an abiding sense of relief. There was no debating why an abortion felt necessary, what it could do for a woman’s life, and no need to grapple with potential personhood—and at the same time, no denial of the gravity of the event, the pain or ambivalence it could bring, or any other physical repercussion or emotional feeling. The stories brought to the center two profound truths: a fetus does not need to be a life for it to impact the human who made it, and you do not need to regret a choice for it to lurk in your mind and heart.
“I feel things differently,” Kay says in Affair, after her abortion. The pregnancy had made her feel hopeless, and brave, too. On the train uptown to the doctor she had been afraid, but also “terribly interested—not interested in just me, but in everything… it was marvelous.” The world appeared different after she had chosen to live in it alone for a little longer. Nearly fifty years later, Alice Walker, in “The Abortion,” expressed a strikingly similar sentiment. An abortion had generated the understanding that life is only ever the life being lived, which “seemed a marvelous thing to know,” she wrote. There is abiding wonder for a woman in choosing a fuller commitment to a life lived without children, or in choosing the selfhood she has carved around children she already loves deeply, or in choosing not to have another baby to focus on those living children whose personhood is not negotiable.
Truth be told, Kay’s sentiment is my emotional landscape much of the time, as a mother: I feel things differently than I have before, both hopeless and brave at once, terribly interested in my children and the world in which we dwell and everything in it. But if motherhood has changed me as a person at all, those transformations began much earlier than when I gave birth to my first son. They started when I really considered having children, the way the experience of making that choice changes Kay, too.
Having children is unplannable; unthinkably, brutally, sometimes beautifully so. I got two babies when I thought I’d maybe have one second child. I disliked being pregnant and I’d always dreamed of three children. My gratitude is immeasurable. But more often these days, that unpredictability is cruel, with a stupid, blunt violence for which our language is paltry and painful: infertility, stillbirths, unwanted pregnancy, miscarriage, abortion. The public conversation around these experiences often compounds their private violence. What does difficulty with conception mean? Why is a baby born dead? Will a fetus that a body creates without a brain feel pain at termination or birth? Whose responsibility is an unwanted pregnancy? Where can or should a state intervene? Some of these questions are unanswerable. Others are not. Science only helps so much.
There’s no use idealizing a time when abortions were expensive, dangerous, performed in parlors and back rooms with no anesthesia—“all that cruelty,” as Hahn wrote. Perhaps, though, in acknowledging the complexity of the experiences around abortion, the books written in this era do better at addressing the paltriness of the language used around it and the cruelty it lets in, without offering that cruelty a political or religious foothold. As the onslaught of recent anti-choice legislation clarifies, debates about abortion’s legality have never been about fetuses, babies or mothers. They are always about power slamming into the confounding, awe-inspiring reality of creating human life. To consider the nuances of that reality—and I want to consider and understand them, because I want that power, all the “undue power” for myself, my daughter, every childbearing body in the world—a reexamination of these books would be a good place to start.
Image credit: Misery and Fortune of Women (1930)
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.