Rick Santorum would have been the worst person in the world to Jane Austen too!

Apropos Rick Santorum proving himself the worst person in the world in terms of female reproductive rights, if Jane Austen were alive today, she'd be writing stuff about him in her novels and letters every bit as angry and sarcastic as any feminist living today 2 centuries after her death! She was a staunch enemy of men controlling women's bodies--but in her era women did not have the luxury of any reproductive rights whatsoever, so that most married gentlewomen of her era were turned into breeding cows, and were replaced by younger wives when they died (as they did all too often) in childbirth!

Start here in my blog...

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2012/01/byrne-portrait-two-abbeys-their-awful.html

and then free free to browse about 40 other posts at this blog on this general theme-just search "pregnancy" and "childbirth".

Here's how much confidence Jane Austen had in the Anglican Church, the English government and the average English husband:

""If I understand you rightly, you had formed a surmise of such horror as I have hardly words to—Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?"

This passage has been misunderstood by most Janeites for 2 centuries---Jane Austen's point really is that horrible things like serial pregnancy and death in childbirth were so "normal" in her day that nobody lifted a finger to stop it!

In the novel, Catherine Morland, at age 18, is shamed out of her suspicions about male oppression of women. How horrible that 2 centuries later, women still need to defend their reproductive rights against men like Rick Santorum.

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter