Cora Unashamed

At the start of the 20th century, abortion was outlawed in every state in the United States, though the practice continued illegally. Many underground abortions were unsafe and often resulted in the mother’s death. The Great Depression (1929-1939) further decreased people’s resources and ability to care for children, spurring an increase in abortions and subsequent maternal deaths.

Along with the criminalization of abortion, the stigma surrounding it grew. Professor Karen Weingarten’s book Abortion in the American Imagination: Before Life and Choice, 1880-1940 explores the literary discourse on abortion during the period in which “Cora Unashamed” is set. She quotes a 1905 speech by Theodore Roosevelt in which he called children a supreme blessing. He went on to say, “But the man or woman who deliberately foregoes these blessings, whether from viciousness, coldness, shallow-heartedness, self- indulgence […] deserves the utmost contempt” (Weingarten, Karen. Abortion in the American Imagination: Before Life and Choice, 1880-1940. Rutgers University Press, 2014). At the same time, Roosevelt and others applauded the emerging eugenics movement, which advocated for increasing the birth rates of so-called superior people and races while suppressing the birth rates of others. Throughout the 20th century, eugenics policies resulted in compulsory sterilization campaigns that targeted people with disabilities, incarcerated people, people living in poverty, immigrants, and nonwhite people. In “Cora Unashamed,” this philosophy results in Jessie’s involuntary abortion, as her lover is a Greek immigrant; Mrs. Studevant is invested in whiteness, and abortion in this context becomes “a marker of class, privilege, and, ironically, public respectability” (Weingarten, 140).

Compulsory sterilization, forced abortions, and other eugenics policies were the latest in a long history of white society controlling Black women’s reproduction. Enslaved Black women had no control over when, how, or by whom they became pregnant; they were considered property, and slaveholders forced them to have children to either work on plantations or be sold for profit. Many of these children were conceived through rape by plantation owners and overseers, and Hughes alludes to the enduring threat of rape when speaking about Cora’s sisters, writing that “There was something about the cream-and-tan Jenkins girls that attracted the white farmhands” (6). Black women in the United States had never had full reproductive autonomy, and the 20th century marked a shift from them being forced to have children to being prevented from having wanted children.

“Cora Unashamed” presents anti-abortion viewpoints; Jessie dies from her abortion, and Cora’s actions and statements promoting the value of life are consistently juxtaposed with Mrs. Studevant’s callousness. However, it is important to distinguish between abortion through a 1920s lens and the current American debate on abortion, which emerged in the late 20th century after Roe v. Wade. Hughes was famously nonreligious, and religious arguments often did not factor into conversations about pregnancy during this time. Cora’s opinions about Jessie’s pregnancy signal a deeper belief in reproductive autonomy. In writing “No trouble having a baby you want” (6), Hughes insists on the value of a wanted pregnancy and the hope provided by creating new life, especially in the face of new threats like eugenics.