Abortion in the American Imagination: Before Life and Choice, 1880-1940

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgments The support of many colleagues and friends made this book possible, and I am grateful for their belief in me and my work. I owe particular thanks to the institutional support I received from Queens College , City University of New York, and from the PSC-CUNY Research Foundation, whose grants made much of my summer work and travel possible. I am also thankful to the Woodrow Wilson Women’s Studies Fellowship, which funded this project at an early stage. I hope the fellowship will be available to many more young scholars in women, gender , and sexuality studies. I am grateful for the help of several archives and libraries, including the Wertheim Room at the New York Public Library and especially the support of Jay Barksdale, the Sophia Smith Archives at Smith College, the UCLA film and television archive, the Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Performing Arts Library at the New York Public Library, and the library at the New York Academy of Medicine. An earlier version of chapter 2, “The Inadvertent Alliance of Anthony Comstock and Margaret Sanger,” was published in Feminist Formations 22, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 42–59, and a shorter version of chapter 3 was published as “Bad Girls and Biopolitics: Abortion, Popular Fiction, and Population Control” in Literature and Medicine 29, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 81–103. My expanded discussion of abortion rhetoric in Edith Wharton ’s Summer, which I briefly touch on here in chapter 1, was published as “Between the Town and the Mountain: Abortion and the Politics x / acknowledgments of Life in Edith Wharton’s Summer” in Canadian Review of American Studies 40, no. 3 (Autumn 2010): 351–72. The editors of all three journals and the anonymous reviewers gave me invaluable advice and insight that ultimately helped shaped the entire manuscript. They were examples of how peer review works at its very best. Ultimately, I owe the biggest thanks to individual people who guided me along the way. I couldn’t ask for better colleagues and friends at Queens College. Amy Wan, Gloria Fisk, Kevin Ferguson, Jason Tougaw , Caroline Hong, Carrie Hintz, Talia Schaffer, Steven Kruger, and Glenn Burger either read pieces of the manuscript or gave me invaluable advice along the way. I’ve also been fortunate to work with Andrea Walkden, Annmarie Drury, Sian Silyn Roberts, Veronica Schanoes, Seo-Young Chu, Nicole Cooley, Kimiko Hahn, Ryan Black, John Weir, Harold Schechter, Hugh English, and Miles Grier at Queens College. I am grateful to have such a welcoming and supportive work environment . Outside of Queens, I can’t say enough to express my gratitude and appreciation for the members of my writing group, Lauren Klein, Sarah Blackwood, and Kyla Schuller. I could not wish for a smarter and more dedicated group of writing friends. I also owe many thanks to David Kazanjian, Hildegarde Hoeller, and David Reynolds for helping me at various stages along the way. My dear friend and colleague Diana Colbert isn’t alive to see this book in print, but my conversations with her echo in its pages. My community of academic friends, now scattered across North America, has also been invaluable to this process. There are so many people to thank, but in particular Karen Weiser, Lily Saint, Heather Latimer, and Rebekah Sheldon are models for me of intelligence, kindness, and political commitment to making the world a smarter, more thoughtful place. Dale Bauer’s and the anonymous reader’s comments on the manuscript in its later stages were also invaluable and made this book better. Katie Keeran at Rutgers University Press has been a model editor. I owe her innumerable thanks for bringing this project to fruition. Finally, at the end stages of this project, where detail matters, I am grateful for the careful attention provided by Tim Roberts and Carol Sickman-Garner. My family, spread across the Atlantic, on the other coast, and up north in Canada, has cheered me on and only occasionally pestered me with the question, “So when will that book be done?” I am so grateful for their love and support. I also owe so much to many friends who cheered me up and cheered me on. Joanna Sondheim, Laura Davis, Tali Horowitz, Olivia deBree, MK Babcock, Arielle DePaolo, Solvej Schou, Lilla Töke, acknowledgments / xi and Aman Gill deserve a special thank you for their love and support. For...