Hybrid Event: Pushback, Mary Fissell

East City Bookshop welcomes Mary Fissell to discuss her book, Pushback: The 2,500-Year Fight to Thwart Women by Restricting Abortion, in conversation with Laura Beers.

Note on Format: This hybrid event will have both an in-person component with limited seating as well as a virtual broadcast via Zoom Webinar. Both in-person and virtual attendees will be able to pose questions to the author during audience Q&A.

ABOUT PUSHBACK:

The long history of how restricting access to abortion has been used to curtail women’s advancement

Attitudes about abortion cycle between long periods of widespread tolerance, to repression, and back again. What accounts for these pendulum swings? From ancient Greece to the modern West, historian of medicine Mary Fissell argues, abortion repression springs up in response to men’s anxieties about women’s increasing independence.

In Pushback, Fissell shows that, across centuries and continents, abortion has always been commonplace, and persecuting women for ending pregnancies has been about controlling their behavior. As Protestantism de-emphasized celibacy, new abortion restrictions policed unmarried women’s sex lives. Nineteenth-century men unsettled by first-wave feminism hoped to establish medicine as a male profession, and so advocated for abortion bans to undercut women’s new roles as physicians. Fissell presents this history through the hidden stories of women committed to reproductive self-determination: holy women of the early Catholic Church whose ability to end pregnancies was considered miraculous, midwives accused of witchcraft or criminal conspiracy, and everyday women whose pregnancies threatened their livelihoods—and their lives.

Pushback is essential reading for understanding the complex history of abortion and making sense of recent crackdowns on reproductive rights.

Mary Fissell is the Mario Molina Professor in the department of the history of medicine at Johns Hopkins University. Fissell has appeared on the BBC and has been cited as an expert in the New York Times, Washington Post, Slate, and Vice. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

Laura Beers is a professor of British history at American University and the author of Orwell's Ghosts, recently named a Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She is also the author of Your Britain, and Red Ellen, which received the Stansky Award. Her writing has appeared in the New Republic and Washington Post, among other publications, and on CNN.com. She lives in Washington, DC.