Tag: Lorraine Hansberry

Categories
Papers

Abortion in the African-American Community: Sociological Data and Literary Examples

          As any English professor would, I have used several major works by African-American authors in the sixteen years that I have taught and facilitated courses for a variety of colleges and universities.  While discussing multicultural works is now standard practice in academia, my particular research interest has always been how the right-to-life issues of abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia are portrayed in American literature. Combining these two statements has resulted in the following admittedly brief paper which I presented before the Fourth Annual Annie T. Thornton Women’s Leadership Conference held at the University of Dayton on 5 March 2005.  Hopefully, this exploration of how African-American literature considers abortion will be interesting, especially when we first investigate what sociological studies have to say about the extremely high abortion rate among African-American mothers.

Sociological Data on African-American Abortions

          That the abortion rate for African-American women is significantly higher than the rates for other ethnic groups is clear.  Over the years 1972-2000, according to the Statistical Abstract of the United States, the rate of abortions for white mothers in 1972 was 11.8 per 1000, increasing to the highest rate in 1980 and 1981 of 24.3 per 1000.  Since then the rate has dropped so that it was 15 per 1000 in 2000.  For African-American and “other” mothers, however (the Statistical Abstract labels the category “Black and other”), the rate was 21.7 per 1000 in 1972. It swelled to 49.3 per 1000 in 1975, a few years after 1973 when abortion was legalized throughout the entire nine months of pregnancy by the Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton decisions.  The rate peaked in 1977 at 59 per 1000.  Although it has dropped since then, the abortion rate for African-American and “other” mothers was 45.7 per 1000 as of 2000.  These figures corroborate the popular perception–“popular” in the sense that it is an axiom of common knowledge in contemporary society–that the abortion rate for African-American mothers being three times that of white mothers is highly probable.  The trend is further illustrated in a companion table in the Statistical Abstract covering abortion data from 1990 to 2000.  The number of abortions performed on white mothers dropped from 1,039,000 to 733,000 while the number of abortions for “black and other” mothers increased from 570,000 to 580,000.

          These statistics are not new.  In his 1987 monograph Aborted Women: Silent No More David C. Reardon writes that “More than two-thirds of all abortions are done on white women.  But the remaining one-third which are performed on non-white women is a comparatively high figure, since non-whites constitute only about 13 percent of the total American population” (5-6).  Of course, though, this was said before the most recent census showed that Hispanics are now the largest ethnic group in the United States. Radha Jagannathan, a researcher who studied surveys of 1,236 welfare mothers who requested abortions in New Jersey in 1995, discovered that “White women reported about 71% of their actual abortions, whereas Black women reported only 24% of their actual abortions” (1827).  If this statistic can be extrapolated throughout the country, then the African-American abortion rate is substantially higher than is commonly known.

          Janet L. Andrews and Joyceen S. Boyle record the familiar statistic–“currently the abortion rate for African American women is more than three times the rate of abortion for European American women” (430)–and cite research conducted in 2002 by the Alan Guttmacher Institute, the research arm of the largest abortion provider in the nation, Planned Parenthood.  The National Right to Life Educational Trust Fund succinctly supplies abortion figures for both the African-American and Hispanic ethnic groups.  In a flyer titled “Abortion’s Impact on Minorities” the group notes that 263,911 abortions were performed in 2000 on Hispanic-American women, who “represented 12.8% of the U.S. population of women of child-bearing age” but “accounted for 20.1% of all abortions performed that year”.  Similarly, 416,218 abortions were performed in 2000 on African-American women, who “represented 13.7% of the U.S. population of women of child-bearing age” but “accounted for 31.7% of all abortions performed that year”.  The group cites the census Bureau and the Alan Guttmacher Institute as sources for these race-based statistics.

          Research from 2000 published by Scott Boggess and Carolyn Bradner suggest that it is not only the mothers themselves who have increasingly chosen abortion.  Apparently, African-American adolescent males are running counter to a national trend.  The researchers discovered that

                    young males in 1995 were significantly less likely than their 1988 counterparts to approve of abortion [in seven circumstances which constitute their surveys….]  By 1995, however, black males appeared to be slightly more accepting of abortion in most circumstances than either whites or Hispanics, with racial and ethnic differences tending to be larger if the abortion was for a social reason as opposed to a health reason. (120-1)

          Current primary research data since 2000 suggests the same. Andrews and Boyle obtained some significant data and opinions about abortion for their 2002 research from African-American adolescents who chose abortion at an Atlanta abortion clinic.  Although they admit that the survey sample had drawbacks (the survey population involved twelve aborting mothers in one city [430]), the researchers came to several important conclusions, encapsulated in their language that “this study helped to dispel [… the] persuasive myths about African American adolescents and pregnancy” (430).

          The first myth is that African-American adolescents “continue their unplanned pregnancies and raise the children from those pregnancies with their mothers’ or their grandmothers’ help”.  Andrews and Boyle euphemistically counter that “African American women may choose not to become mothers because they want to pursue an education and economic independence” (430).  The researchers discuss a second “controlling image […] that young women suffer psychological damage as a result of elective abortion (431).  Unfortunately, the researchers conducted second and third interviews of the aborted women “6 and 8 months after the elective abortion” (414).  It would be no surprise then, that the researchers report that “relief was the most common reaction at the second and third interviews” (431).  Reardon and others have contributed significant research about Post-Abortion Syndrome, suggesting that severe psychological problems may occur years after the abortion.

          The third and final controlling image which the researchers dispel is that African-American mothers base their abortion decisions “on what their partners want them to do” (431).  In contrast, they say, the African-American mothers aborted because they found abortion to be a vehicle for asserting “their own fertility” and that “their decisions for abortion and continuing the relationship with their partners in conception were separate albeit related” (431).  What affect does their research have on abortion policy for African-American mothers?  Andrews and Boyle conclude that “unplanned pregnancy and elective abortion can be a positive, growth-enhancing experience for African American adolescent women” (432).

          Primary research has much to say about why African-American mothers abort, and secondary research data has similarly documented and commented on this phenomenon over the past forty years.  We are fortunate that in this metropolitan area we have special interest groups which are exploring the phenomenon of the high African-American abortion rate and are seeking to educate the pubic about causes of the problem and opportunities to solve it.  For example, Dayton Right to Life has collated seminal research on this matter in its effort to educate the public on the threat of Planned Parenthood abortion efforts in the African-American community.  Dayton Right to Life’s research was conducted in collaboration with another research institution at the University of Dayton (The Center for Business and Economic Research) in collaboration with two other agencies.  Here are some conclusions which my audience found either worthy of comment or shocking:

                    [While] African Americans appear to be somewhat more pro-life than the population as a whole, the Dayton Right to Life […] study found that opinions on abortion (whether pro or con) tend to be very “soft” and easily shifted [….]  For some African Americans, the right to an abortion is viewed in the broader context of a “civil right” as opposed to a “personal right” [….]  Abortion is viewed by many African Americans as a “white problem”–particularly among men [….]  The Black Church has grown very silent on the abortion issue.  In one long-term study, we found that in the 1970’s, church attendance was cited as a primary determinant of a pro-life position.  By the 1990’s, this factor had virtually disappeared. (“Abortion Attitudes”)  [1]

          Researching this problem has primarily been the province of special interest groups and abortion activists.  For example, the correlation of abortion and slavery had been made earlier by Jack Willke in his 1984 monograph Abortion and Slavery: History Repeats.  However, recent holocaust studies scholars have argued that the persistence of abortion as a solution for untimely pregnancies in the African-American community may be attributed to pre-emancipation attitudes.  William Brennan cogently argues in his 1995 monograph Dehumanizing the Vulnerable: When Word Games Take Lives that African-American slaves during the nineteenth century in the United States were dehumanized in a variety of “work animal” metaphors (95).  “Removal of individuals from membership in the human community and re-classifying them as animals,” Brennan further suggests, “has the effect of consigning them to a lower level of existence where their victimization can be more easily rationalized” (89).

          Whether this history tendency forms the basis of current African-American thinking on abortion or not, the African-American community is becoming more supportive of abortion.  In 1993 research Janice Westlund Bryan and Florence Wallach Freed were able to claim that “Blacks and Hispanics [were] more anti-abortion than Caucasians….” (1-2).  By 2002, when they offered their research on attitudes toward abortion covering the period 1977 through 1996, Jennifer Strickler and Nicholas L. Danigelis were able to state that from 1987 onward “blacks [were] more approving of abortion than [were] whites” (197).  Moreover,

                    An examination of change […] between the first and last time periods [1977-80 and 1993-96 respectively] reveals [that] the change in race effect is statistically significant […], showing that blacks become more approving of abortion than do whites during this time period [….]  Perhaps most striking is the change in the black-white differences.  By the mid-1990s, black adults had become more supportive of legal abortion than their white counterparts, after controlling for other factors.  This pattern is consistent with other research that found the racial gap in abortion attitudes to narrow during the 1970s and 1980s. (197, 198-9)

Literary Examples of African Americans and Abortion

          What do literary examples say about the abortion experience in the African-American community?  More importantly for this brief study of African-American literature which concerns abortion, what literary evidence is there which may either support or oppose the findings of the sociological data?

          Abortion is a relatively new theme in African-American literature.  Gwendolyn Brooks’ 1945 poem “The Mother” is perhaps the first poetic literary evidence of post-abortion syndrome.  Several lines of the poem, if weaved together, constitute the complaint of the aborted mother.  “Abortions will not let you forget / [….] I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children / [….] Believe me, I loved you all. / Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you / All” (430)–all of these lines form a narrative that shows the anguish of the African-American mother who has chosen to abort.

          James Baldwin offers two works, one of which specifically mentions abortion and the other suggests the philosophical ground for the negative approach toward life.  In his 1952 novel Go Tell It on the Mountain Baldwin offers an interesting speculation: would Gabriel have wanted Elizabeth, his second wife, to have aborted her illegitimate child John (143-4)?  Secondly, in The Fire Next Time (1963) Baldwin declares that African Americans were taught that they were not worthy of life.

          Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 drama A Raisin in the Sun is the first major literary work to suggest abortion as a solution to an untimely pregnancy.  The word “abortion” is never mentioned explicitly, but the audience is aware that Ruth is seeking an abortionist.  Hansberry makes that clear when she has Mama explicitly state what this important subplot of the drama is about.  In Act II, scene i, Mama exclaims,

                    “I–I just seen my family falling apart today…just falling to pieces in front of my eyes….  We couldn’t of gone on like we was today.  We was going backwards ‘stead of forwards–talking ’bout killing babies and wishing each other was dead…” (80)

What is more important in Hansberry’s drama is an explicit assertion which has escaped critics’ notice vis-à-vis abortion.  When she confronts Walter with the possibility that Ruth will have an abortion, Mama is quite clear in her definition of the African-American race as a life-affirming people in Act I, scene iii:

                    “Your wife say she going to destroy your child.  And I’m waiting to hear you talk like him [his deceased father, Big Walter] and say we a people who give children life, not who destroys them–  [She rises]  I’m waiting to see you stand up and look like your daddy and say we done give up one baby to poverty and that we ain’t going to give up nary another one…” (62)

          There are many works from 1959 to my next example which mention abortion, but I deem these as tangential for purposes of this paper.  I proceed to a 1978 novel which manifests important aspects of the abortion mentality operating in the African-American community in the post-Roe era.  Rosa Guy’s 1978 first-person novel Edith Jackson presents events in the life of the seventeen-year-old main character almost as a counter to the hopeful elements of Hansberry’s drama.  Where the Younger family leaves the ghetto in 1959 with hope that they are on their way to achieving the American dream, by 1978 the hope as incarnated in Edith Jackson has vanished.  Although she lives in fulfillment of A Raisin in the Sun (16), Edith’s circumstances show a world for an African-American young woman devoid of the comforts of the earlier 1959 Younger family.  Unlike Travis, who had his mother to rely on, Edith’s mother died from tuberculosis.  Unlike Travis who had his father present, Edith’s father abandoned the family. Unlike Beneatha whose goals include college, Edith plans to quit school.  Edith has been sexually assaulted by a minister.  She becomes pregnant by a thirty-two-year-old man.  At this point, what options are available to her?  A social worker character had earlier informed the reader that the “luxury of choices” is denied to black children (103-4).  Her friends tell her she should abort, and so, given the beliefs in her society, Edith decides to abort.  [2]

          Herbert C. Casteel’s 1990 novel The Drums of Moloch may be didactic fiction, but it is interesting because of its iconoclastic elements.  Bob Hill is an African-American Democratic Missouri state senator whose “voting record tends to veer more and more toward the liberal side” (25).  He has the opportunity to advance his political career, but one item of his political beliefs interferes with national party operatives: he is pro-life.  Hill could advance if he would only vote against an informed consent bill before the Missouri legislature, but he refuses.  Hill eventually wins the congressional seat towards which Democratic operatives encouraged him, but only after he switched to the Republican Party and made his pro-life views known to voters.

          Robert Clark’s 1997 novel In the Deep Midwinter is interesting for one almost casual comment.  The main action concerns the plight of Anna whose abortion in 1949 affects her for the rest of her life (even at age eighty she remembers the abortion).  When she is taken to the hospital after her illegal abortion, the narrator reports that Mrs. Clay, an African-American caretaker, says she had “seen it before.  With colored girls, at least” (180).  The implication is that African-American women who abort not only have vast experience in the practice, but also can teach white mothers how to undergo abortion.

          Another 1997 example of more recent fiction concerned with abortion includes Mary Burnett Smith’s novel Miss Ophelia.  Set in an African-American community in Macon County, Virginia in 1948, eleven-year-old Belly befriends Teeny who is pregnant.  The girls know that most mothers “get rid of it” (27), and various characters have abortions for various reasons.  The novel’s main character, Miss Ophelia Love, becomes pregnant, but, unlike others in the community who resort to abortion as a solution to their imagined or real socioeconomic problems, Miss Ophelia gives birth to the baby.  The end of this novel runs counter to much late twentieth-century fiction: a conversation which starts out as moral relativism ends in moral certainty (215-6), Belly loves the baby (247-8), and another character asserts that “a good mother is a wonderful thing, especially for a child” (276).  This maxim, which may sound flaccid and self-evident at first reading, could be rejected by many feminist critics today because it restricts the freedom of the African-American mother in a torturous bond of patriarchal control.  Unfortunately for the feminist critics, Miss Ophelia Love has exercised her freedom of choice and chosen to give life to her child.

Disturbing Evidence: White Racist Attitudes Toward African Americans and Abortion

          While reexamining the literature for this paper, one feature of the literary examples is disturbing: the attitudes toward African-American pregnancy in the white community.

          Norma Rosen’s 1982 novel At the Center presents us with an abortionist, Edgar Bianky, who has one consistent fear: a mother whom he will abort would one day cause trouble for his abortion clinic.  He performs an abortion on Alexandra White, an African-American mother.  (Why is she named that?  Is this supposed to be a pun?).  Immediately, Edgar pictures her as the “Genevieve X” who would one day cause trouble for his clinic (214-7).  Earlier in the novel, a conversation that a black mother has with her lover receives significant attention (163-4).

          John Irving’s 1985 novel The Cider House Rules is primarily concerned with abortion, even though the film adaptation makes it seem as though the subject and themes concern orphans, one’s place in life, and rules by which people live.  What precipitates the “hero” character, Homer Wells, into his lifelong career as an abortionist is the predicament of Rose Rose, the daughter of a dictatorial African-American father who not only keeps his fellow apple pickers in line but also rapes his daughter.

          Naomi Ragen’s 1994 novel The Sacrifice of Tamar depicts the anguish of an Orthodox Jewish woman who has been raped by a black man.  She carries her pregnancy to term, and the fear that the child would be born as one of color is avoided.  However, when that child in turn marries another Jewish white woman, becomes a father, and his child is born black, the racial fears resurface and almost tear the family apart.

          Finally, Stephen Dixon’s Gould: a Novel in Two Novels involves the exploits of Gould Bookbinder, whose sexual exploits crosses racial boundaries.  When Gould impregnates his black lover, she wants an abortion (34).  In fact, helping Lynette with obtaining an abortion “was certainly the more than decent thing to do” (40).

Literary Criticism and African-American Abortion

          Discussion among humanities scholars of the African-American abortion rate may not necessarily be within their province, but certainly reviewing the evidence of abortion attitudes in the literature should be, and some scholars have dared to approach the subject.  Some literary critics are quite clear about the effect of abortion on African-American mothers.  In her now famous 1986 essay “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion” Barbara Johnson writes that “the world that has created conditions under which the loss of a baby becomes desirable must be resisted, not joined.  For a black woman, the loss of a baby can always be perceived as a complicity with genocide” (36).  What Johnson says is not new–for pro-lifers, at least.  Abortion as a tool for Black genocide is a claim that Erma Clardy Craven first enunciated in her seminal 1972 essay whose main title is “Abortion, Poverty and Black Genocide”.

          Interestingly, what I have found is that some critics are hesitant to mention abortion at all as a subject of inquiry in African-American literature.  For example, while he comments on Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun as an endorsement of “patriarchy not at the expense of female strength or female governance [since] Manhood in A Raisin in the Sun is wholly compatible with feminism” (779), Anthony Barthelemy chooses not to reflect on the decision about abortion made in the drama.  Similarly, Darlene Clark Hine, editor of the 1993 monograph Black Women in America: an Historical Encyclopedia, argues that “Indeed, a revisionist reading of [Hansberry’s] major plays reveals that she was a feminist long before the women’s movement surfaced” (528).  If this is true, then, since she specifically eliminated abortion as a solution to Ruth’s untimely pregnancy, Hansberry would be philosophically closer to Feminists for Life than she would be to other feminist organizations.  [3]

          Unfortunately, some literary critics do not help the discussion of abortion in African-American literature when they offer to academics or the reading public works which can be classified into two categories: the merely distorted or the polemical.  In her 1990 work Abortion, Choice, and Contemporary Fiction: The Armageddon of the Maternal Instinct Judith Wilt offers her unique perception of the “right-to-life issues of the 1950s and 1960s: save the Rosenbergs, ban the bomb, feed the black children of Mississippi.  And give life to women dying from botched abortions” (92).  The phrase “right-to-life issues” as used here is anachronistic since it is customarily associated with the three issues which concerned the pro-life movement since the mid-1960s: abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia.

          To illustrate the second category, I suggest that Carol Mason’s 2000 article is more polemical than an examination of cultural differences.  The title alone (“Cracked Babies and the Partial Birth of a Nation: Millennialism and Fetal Citizenship”) is freighted with distortions of key terms used in the pro-life movement.  “Cracked babies” is an almost horrible attempt at punning; I find nothing humorous about children born to crack-addicted mothers.  The “partial birth of a nation” is a clever way to deflect attention from the gruesome practice of third trimester abortions much perfected by an abortionist of note in the Dayton metropolitan area.

          Furthermore, Mason’s claim that abortion can be considered a social good for two groups can be easily countered by historical evidence.  She argues that whites consider abortion as a social good because “‘crack babies’, who are explicitly presumed to be black, are routinely portrayed as impure, tainted, and polluted babies who are a liability to society and from whom the tax-paying citizenry should be saved”.  Secondly, she claims that “legal disputes [on abortion] may be seen as unwittingly reinscribing the racialist tenets of far-right groups that consider abortion to be the apocalyptic end times of white America” (35).  Refuting the racist charges requires another paper, but noting the work of volunteers and paid staff in pregnancy support groups as they assist mothers with untimely pregnancies–many of whom are African American–should suffice.

Four Questions for Future Research

          How do I end this conference paper?  Last week I ran several searches in the MLA International Bibliography database, an online compendium of research since 1963 by humanities professors on substantial issues and works of literature.  For this paper I consulted the database to determine current scholarship on the issue of abortion in African-American literature.  The first search I entered was just the word “abortion”, which resulted in 121 hits.  I then searched for instances of “African American”, which yielded 7,206 hits, and “black”, which totaled 10,784 hits. I then combined search results.  “Abortion” and “black” produced zero hits.  “Abortion” and “African American” yielded one result–a paper titled “`We a People Who Give Children Life’: Pedagogic Concerns of the Aborted Abortion in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun” which was presented before the National Association of African American Studies and the National Association of Hispanic and Latino Studies at its annual conference in Houston in 1997.

          I remember Houston in February 1997.  It was a lovely city and hot, despite the downpour that greeted us as our plane landed.  While I should feel proud that the only combined literary research on the issue of abortion involved my study of Hansberry’s drama, I think that we can all agree that being able to cite a dated work may be unacceptable for today’s students.  Where are the other researchers who are considering the right-to-life issues of abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia in African-American literature?

          The literature is there.  While conducting research for a paper on poetry on the life issues, several works were found in African-American full-text literature databases.  Similarly, I have written on abortion in rap music.  The songs that I focused on, which were composed and performed by African-American rappers, all condemn abortion as a practice because it either resulted in the dissolution of the relationship between lovers or contributed to the genocide of the African-American race (“Abortion and Rap Music”).

          If the corpus of scholarly interest in this topic is so scant, then there is great opportunity for literature professors and students to investigate deeper into the sociological phenomenon which provoked this paper and the literary evidence which gives the sociological data a human face.  I offer the following four questions for students to explore in their future research.

          First, why is there such silence regarding abortion as a theme in African-American literature?

          Second, is Baldwin correct when he writes that blacks were taught that they weren’t worthy of life and does this philosophical base drive the high abortion figures?

          Third, why do African-American mothers, when faced with untimely pregnancies, presume that abortion is the preferred solution?

          Finally, where is the literature–the stories, the poems, the dramas–which show how pregnancy support groups such as Birthright or the Women’s Network (in Clark County) have helped vast numbers of African Americans?  Susan K. Ridley’s 2002 work Relieved but Deceived is one contribution which expresses the anguish that abortion causes in the African-American community.  Where are the others?

          It is my greatest hope that, perhaps in ten years if not sooner, we will study life-affirming works as much as we now study Baldwin, Brooks, or Hansberry.

                                                     Works Cited

Andrews, Janet L. and Joyceen S. Boyle. “African American

          Adolescents’ Experiences with Unplanned Pregnancy and

          Elective Abortion.” Health Care for Women International 24

          (2003): 414-33.

Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. New York: Dial, 1963.

—. Go Tell It on the Mountain. 1952. New York: Modern Library,

          1995.

Barthelemy, Anthony. “Mother, Sister, Wife: A Dramatic

          Perspective.” The Southern Review 21 (summer 1985): 770‑789.

Boggess, Scott and Carolyn Bradner. “Trends in Adolescent Males’

          Abortion Attitudes, 1988-1995: Differences by Race and

          Ethnicity.” Family Planning Perspectives 32.3 (May/June

          2000): 118-23.

Brennan, William. Dehumanizing the Vulnerable: When Word Games

          Take Lives. Chicago: Loyola UP, 1995.

Brooks, Gwendolyn. “The Mother.” Literature for Composition:

          Essays, Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. 5th ed. Eds. Sylvan

          Barnet, Morton Berman, William Burto, William E. Cain, and

          Marcia Stubbs. New York: Longman, 2000. 430.

Bryan, Janice Westlund, and Florence Wallach Freed. “Abortion

          Research: Attitudes, Sexual Behavior, and Problems in a

          Community College Population.” Journal of Youth and

          Adolescence 22.1 (Feb. 1993): 1‑22.

Casteel, Herbert C. The Drums of Moloch. Joplin, MO: College

          Press, 1990.

Clark, Robert. In the Deep Midwinter. New York: Picador, 1997.

Craven, Erma Clardy. “Abortion, Poverty and Black Genocide: Gifts

          to the Poor?” Abortion and Social Justice. Eds. Thomas W.

          Hilgers and Dennis J. Horan. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1972.

          231-43.

Dayton Right to Life. “Abortion Attitudes in the African American

          Community: Key Findings of a Study Conducted by Dayton Right

          to Life in Dayton, Ohio.” [n.p.]: Dayton Right to Life,

          [n.d.].

Dixon, Stephen. Gould: a Novel in Two Novels. New York: Henry

          Holt, 1997.

Guy, Rosa. Edith Jackson. New York: Viking, 1978.

Hansberry, Lorraine. A Raisin in the Sun: a Drama in Three Acts.

          New York: Random, 1959.

Hine, Darlene Clark, ed.. Black Women in America: an Historical

          Encyclopedia. Brooklyn: Carlson, 1993.

Irving, John. The Cider House Rules. Toronto: Bantam, 1985.

Jagannathan, Radha. “Relying on Surveys to Understand Abortion

          Behavior: Some Cautionary Evidence.” American Journal of

          Pubic Health 91.11 (Nov. 2001): 1825-31.

Johnson, Barbara. “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion.”

          Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 16:1 (1986):

          29‑47.

Koloze, Jeff. “Abortion and Rap Music: a Literary Study of the

          Lyrics of Representative Rap Songs.” Life and Learning XIII:

          Proceedings of the Thirteenth University Faculty for Life

          Conference at Georgetown University 2003. Washington, DC:

          University Faculty for Life, 2004. 103-18.

—. “Adolescent Fiction on Abortion: Developing a

          Paradigm and Pedagogic Responses from Literature Spanning

          Three Decades.” Life and Learning IX: Proceedings of the

          Ninth University Faculty for Life Conference. Ed. Joseph W.

          Koterski. Washington, DC: University Faculty for Life, 2000.

          347‑384.

—. “…’We a People Who Give Children Life'”: Pedagogic

          Concerns of the Aborted Abortion in Lorraine Hansberry’s A

          Raisin in the Sun.” Lifeissues.net. 7 December 2003

          <http://lifeissues.net/writers/

          kol/kol_08raisininthesun.html>.

Mason, Carol. “Cracked Babies and the Partial Birth of a Nation:

          Millennialism and Fetal Citizenship.” Cultural Studies 14.1

          (2000): 35-60.

National Right to Life Educational Trust Fund. “Abortion’s Impact

          on Minorities.” [Washington, DC: n.d.].

Reardon, David C. Aborted Women: Silent No More. Westchester, IL:

          Crossway Books, 1987.

Ridley, Susan K. Relieved but Deceived. Blacklick, OH: Susan J.

          Ridley, 2002.

Rosen, Norma. At the Center. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982.

Smith, Mary Burnett. Miss Ophelia. New York: William Morrow,

          1997.

Statistical Abstract of the United States. 4 Mar. 2005

          <http://www.census.gov/prod/2004pubs/04statab/vitstat.pdf>.

Strickler, Jennifer and Nicholas L. Danigelis. “Changing

          Frameworks in Attitudes Toward Abortion.” Sociological Forum

          17.2 (June 2002): 187-201.

Willke, J. C. Abortion and Slavery: History Repeats. Cincinnati:

          Hayes, 1984.

Wilt, Judith. Abortion, Choice, and Contemporary Fiction: The

          Armageddon of the Maternal Instinct. Chicago: U of Chicago

          P, 1990.

                                                 Works Consulted

Cohn, Rachel. Gingerbread. New York: Simon & Schuster Books for

          Young Readers, 2002.

Dayton Right to Life. The Question: What Is the Leading Cause of

          Death in the African American Community? Dayton: Dayton

          Right to Life, [2002].

Dryer, Bernard V. The Torch Bearers. New York: Simon and

          Schuster, 1967.

Emecheta, Buchi. Kehinde. African Writers Ser. Oxford: Heinemann,

          1994.

Evans, John H. “Polarization in Abortion Attitudes in U.S.

          Religious Traditions, 1972-1998.” Sociological Forum 17.3

          (Sept. 2002): 397-422.

Furlow, Akua, and Thomas Strahan. “African‑Americans and Induced

          Abortion.” Lifeissues.net. 2000‑2002. 30 May 2003

          <http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/air/

          air_vol6no1_19931.html>.

Gallagher, Maria. “New Film Shows How Abortion Hurts Black

          Women.” Lifenews.com. 25 Mar. 2004. 29 Mar. 2004

          <http://www.lifenews.com/nat401.html>.

Gifford, Barry. Night People. New York: Grove P, 1992.

Hentoff, Nat. “Pro Choice Bigots.” 30 November 1992. 27 December

          2000 <http://www.ocf.org/ca3/ProChoiceBigots.html>.

Hilgers, Thomas W., and Dennis J. Horan, eds. Abortion and Social

          Justice. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1972.

Holmes, Marcelle Christian. “Reconsidering a ‘Woman’s Issue:’

          Psychotherapy and One Man’s Postabortion Experiences.”

          American Journal of Psychotherapy 58.1 (2004): 103-15.

Johnson, Allan A., M. Nabil El-Khorazaty, Barbara J. Hatcher,

          Barbara K. Wingrove, Renee Milligan, Cynthia Harris, and

          Leslie Richards. “Determinants of Late Prenatal Care

          Initiation by African American Women in Washington, DC.”

          Maternal and Child Health Journal 7.2 (June 2003): 103-14.

Keyssar, Helene. “Rites and Responsibilities.” Feminine Focus:

          the New Women Playwrights. Ed. Enoch Brater. New York:

          Oxford UP, 1989. 226-240.

Lott, Bret. Jewel. New York: Washington Square P, 1991.

Pernick, Martin S. The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of

          “Defective” Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures

          Since 1915. New York: Oxford UP, 1996.

Ragen, Naomi. The Sacrifice of Tamar. New York: Crown, 1994.

Tindall, Gillian. The Youngest. London: Secker & Warburg, 1967.

    [1]  Andrews and Boyle provide another example of racist attitudes towards adoption.  African-American mothers may choose abortion over adoption because they view it as a “white” practice (431).

    [2]  The example of Edith Jackson’s experience with abortion runs counter to a paradigm that I formulated when I reviewed many similar abortion novels directed toward an adolescent and young adult reading audience in other research.  In “Adolescent Fiction on Abortion: Developing a Paradigm and Pedagogic Responses from Literature Spanning Three Decades”, I considered how white teenaged and young adult mothers considered many more choices besides abortion.  I found that, towards the end of the 1980s and early 1990s, the decision to abort was neither the first choice of white mothers nor the ultimate resolution of the problem posed in these novels.  My comments on this fiction can be found either in the hardcopy of the conference proceedings or on the web at http://uffl.org/vol%209/koloze9.pdf.

    [3]  I have written on the matter of critical reception of the abortion theme in Hansberry’s drama elsewhere.  I presented a paper titled “`We a People Who Give Children Life’: Pedagogic Concerns of the Aborted Abortion in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun” before the National Association of African American Studies and the National Association of Hispanic and Latino Studies at its annual conference in 1997.  The full text can be located either in conference proceedings or at <http://lifeissues.net/writers/kol/kol_08raisininthesun.html>.

Categories
Papers

“…We a people who give children life”: Pedagogic Concerns of the Aborted Abortion in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun

     “Would Mama be a member of the National Right to Life Committee?”  To stimulate discussion, as well as to guarantee that my students attend their classes, I assign daily writing assignments which consist of a ten-minute response to an often outrageous question anchored in some aspect of the play or poem assigned for that day.  This question greeted my students on one of the days when we discussed Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun.  While I intend to focus on the woman most immediately concerned with the abortion subplot in the play, we must first acknowledge the affirmation-of-life framework established by the matriarch of the family.

     Mama’s life-affirming statements come in two categories: first, descriptions of the love which the deceased patriarch of the family had for children; and secondly, her own definitions regarding the black race’s role in preserving life.

     “He was one man to love his children…crazy ’bout his children!” she relates of Big Walter, the deceased patriarch (Hansberry, Raisin 29).  When she says this in act one, scene one, Mama is recalling the abject poverty into which she and her husband raised their family.  Mama narrates to Ruth how frequently Big Walter would come home from work and, after staring miserably at his poor surroundings, find solace in his children.

     At the pivotal moment when Ruth’s plans for having an abortion are revealed, Mama states emphatically in the very next segment of the play (act one, scene two), again using the royal plural, that “we a people who give children life, not who destroys them” (Hansberry, Raisin 63).  In this statement of black self-definition, Mama challenges not so much her daughter-in-law, over whom she appropriately seems to have no absolute control.  (Ruth is still, like her Old Testament namesake, a foreigner, an outsider, to the immediate Younger family).  Mama’s challenges are directed more to the thirty-five year old male who still apparently has not become a man: her son, Walter (note that he is a character handicapped by being contrasted against his father; often, Mama calls him “Brother”).  His reaction to his mother’s urging that he stand up in support of life like his father before him is typical of a man faced with an untimely pregnancy.  Able only to utter his wife’s name, Walter finds no other words to say; he walks out the door, symbolically abandoning both women (Ruth and his mother) who need him to affirm the human life whom he generated.

Ruth’s Statements

     The scant critical attention Ruth receives from literary critics is virtually always in connection with her causal effect (as opposed to any emotional affect) on Walter or as the stimulus for Mama’s bold initiative to purchase a house for the Younger family.  [1]  Ruth’s attitude toward abortion, if not an accurate assessment of her attitude toward her unborn child, positions her as one who is oppressed in two ways: being a woman, and being a black woman.  [2]  Much like mothers today who are faced with economic uncertainties, Ruth seems ineluctably drawn to abortion as a solution to the “problem” of an untimely pregnancy.

     And yet, she is terribly aware of what we would now identify as post-abortion syndrome, the symptoms of psychological, physical, and emotional distress which many women who have had abortions experience, if not immediately, then years after their abortions.  [3]  “Ain’t nothin’ can tear at you like losin’ your baby,” Ruth proclaims in sympathy as Mama relates the story of how she and Big Walter lost one of their already-born children, “little Claude.”  It would be unfortunate if our students did not realize that, behind the overt sympathy, Ruth may also be thinking about the abortionist’s curette tearing at her own baby.  [4]

     Moreover, similar to those who would contemplate suicide, or women who have had abortions who may be suicidal, Ruth’s initial, halting steps toward pursuing abortion function like a cry for help.  Psychoanalytical literary theorists can best address whether Ruth’s lapsus linguae was either intentional or a dramatic torque necessary to advance the abortion subplot.  Our students, however, should be encouraged to consider not only this slip of the tongue, but more importantly the ensuing mild interrogation which follows.  Ruth does not fight against the matriarch’s queries.  [5]  She is submissive to Mama’s probings.  Moreover, at the crucial moment closing act one when Walter tries to reassure more himself than his mother that “You don’t know Ruth, Mama, if you think she would do that,” Ruth herself returns to the stage and affirms the opposite, significantly in two sentences which combine the future possibility of the abortion with her past action of the down payment made to the abortionist: “Yes I would too, Walter.  I gave her a five-dollar down payment” (Hansberry, Raisin 62-3).

Life-Affirming Authorial Intention

     Conjecture about the life-affirming purposes of A Raisin in the Sun leads to the inevitable problem of determining with accuracy Hansberry’s position on the issue.  Was it Hansberry’s intention to present such a life-affirming drama?  Addressing this question can easily lead into a diatribe on the politics of abortion.  I will avoid such a confrontation and focus instead on the historical and literary evidence of Hansberry’s own words.

     First, of course, it is interesting to note that recent scholarship maintains that A Raisin in the Sun is in reaction to an earlier play which espoused a Marxist political approach to the problems of black America.  [6]  The play functions quite conservatively, seeking not only “to correct [black playwright Theodore] Ward’s representation of black women,” but also “sets as a goal for black America not the Marxist revolution proposed by Big White Fog but the attainment of equality in bourgeois America” (Barthelemy 770, 777).

     Several sources outside the play can attest to Hansberry’s intention of promoting the play’s life-affirming principles.  Hine states that “in this play [A Raisin in the Sun] and in her second produced play, Hansberry offered a strong opposing voice to the drama of despair.  She created characters who affirmed life in the face of brutality and defeat” (527).  [7]

     Textual evidence that the play is inherently life-affirming is most philosophically supportable by reviewing what I call Hansberry’s masterpiece of epideictic, The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality.  It is this book more than any other work by Hansberry which can demonstrate the practicality of using both cultural criticism and New Historicism approaches toward student appreciation of A Raisin in the Sun.  For example, what is most striking about the photographs in this book is that, while Hansberry fought against racial segregation, today’s pro-lifers are fighting an even deeper segregation, an artificial legal construction erected by Supreme Court cases which attempt to distinguish the rights of a “wanted” unborn child from those of an “unwanted” unborn child.

     Hansberry’s commentaries on what were, as of the printing of the book in 1964, “the devotions of our culture–traditional Christianity…and more recently, Islam” have echoes in today’s pro-life movement (Movement 46).  Today’s pro-lifers constitute another majority fighting for civil rights for a different class of oppressed people, a majority that votes for certain candidates, donates to pregnancy support groups, and participates in marches and demonstrations all quite legally, quite peacefully within their First Amendment rights.  Hansberry’s text surrounding a photo of a man teaching nonviolent tactics is similar to the methodology used by abortion protestors who, before the Freedom of Choice Act suppressed their demonstration rights, blocked abortion clinic doors (Movement 107).  Moreover, when Hansberry states that “it (the rise of Islam among Negroes and Muslim `separation’) is, nonetheless, an important indicator of the anguished frustrations of a people” (Movement 48), her words could very well be applied to those in the more militant sector of the pro-life movement who advocate less than peaceful means to stop abortion.  [8]

     Finally, since Hansberry made much of the 1963 March on Washington on 28 August, one wonders how she would have reacted to the fact that for every year since 1974, the first anniversary of the Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton abortion decisions, tens of thousands of pro-lifers have gathered in Washington, D.C. every 22 January.  March For Life, the organization which coordinates the annual demonstrations, has estimated this year’s crowd to be “at over 100,000” (Andrusko 22).  In 1990, the National Right to Life Committee orchestrated a “Rally for Life.”  According to a Committee spokeswoman, “The National Park Service first estimated the crowd to be 60,000.  After hearings on the hill, they changed the number to 200,000” (Kelly).  If Hansberry thought it was significant to comment on the one march that sparked renewed interest in the fight for civil rights for blacks, what would she have said about that rally and the annual peaceful marches of pro-lifers every year on behalf of the first of the Declaration of Independence’s inalienable rights, the right to life?

Pedagogic Concerns

     My main focus continues to be the pedagogic concerns of teaching this play in the late 1990s.  We can begin our list of historical problems by informing our students that Hansberry was marginalized in her time for several reasons including a perceived reliance on “Jewish support.”  [9]

     More importantly, some did not immediately accept Hansberry as a playwright merely on the basis of their perception of the play’s quality, often evidenced by omitting her works from major compilations.  [10]  Suffering the ad hominem attacks of being “labeled old-fashioned, bourgeois, and assimilationist by various critics” (Logan 284), other critics were more focused in their negative criticism, reducing the play to one which “abounds in stock characters,” Ruth especially becoming merely Walter’s “exasperated and long-suffering wife” (Oliver 31).  J. Charles Washington documents another controversial opinion from Harold Cruse: “even more damaging and unsound is [his] evaluation…that the play is `the most cleverly written piece of glorified soap opera’ he has ever seen” (109-110).  While the 1950s and 1960s were historically crucial decades for African nations newly liberated from colonial powers, Keppel reports that “the African subtheme [was dismissed] as `impotent chatter'” (182).  [11]  Finally, some critics may have damned the play with the praise that it was merely another one of those which “conformed…to the story lines of previous ethnic dramas of arrival” (Keppel 182).

     Teaching A Raisin in the Sun thirty-eight years after its Broadway premiere presents specific contemporary pedagogic problems to the literature instructor, not the least being that the play may have lost some of its force for today’s students as an exercise in race relations.  The plight of a poor black family moving into a lily-white suburban community is not fraught with the same anxiety as it once was.  And yet, there must be something about the play which maintains popular interest to the point that at least one critic demarcates the play as a continental divide of sorts in black drama, asserting that the play maintained its dominance for at least thirty years:

          Not until Richard Wesley’s The Talented Tenth (1989) was there a significant follow-up to Lorraine Hansberry’s introduction into Black Experience drama of the theme of class and heritage as principal constituents of African American life. (Hay 48)

     The play has dramatic power beyond its historical situation and can address the most critical issue for today’s students, even though an entire generation of students exists whose lives are circumscribed by the historical fact that abortion is legal throughout the nine months of pregnancy for any reason whatsoever. I cannot account for why the abortion subplot in A Raisin in the Sun was not discussed itself in 1959 and immediately after until, in the opinion of the experts, the play’s hegemony decreased around 1989.  [12]  Perhaps the silence surrounding discussion of this theme in the play stems from the fact that in 1959 abortion was not yet on the national agenda.  Bringing the awareness of abortion in the play to the attention of today’s students is our responsibility.

     We are confronted pedagogically with a more difficult philosophical problem in addressing this matter: whether or not Hansberry was herself a “feminist” as we in 1997 have had the word interpreted for us.  Wilkerson qualifies her affirmation that Hansberry would fit the modern definition: “were she writing today, she would be called a feminist.  The term, however, would merely obscure her special vision” (235).  Moreover, although Wilkerson does admit that “none of her plays focuses exclusively on issues of conflict between the sexes,” Hansberry’s feminism can be based on the fact that “the relationships between men and women are an important dynamic” in Hansberry’s dramas (238).

     Significantly, Wilkerson’s article does not address a keystone issue in the feminist movement.  The absence of the mention of abortion may either mean that more research is needed into Hansberry’s thought or that the playwright did not view the issue as a solution to the problems of African Americans.  That Hansberry may not have considered abortion as essential to the equality of women may be based on the character of Beneatha who scholars agree has

          traditionally been treated as Hansberry’s alter ego, the vehicle for the expression of her creator’s Pan-Africanism, and little else. However, Beneath [sic] also expresses Hansberry’s feminism–her frank questioning of traditional male-female sex roles and of the assumption, prevalent in the fifties, that a young woman’s first job was to “catch” a “good” husband and make a “good” marriage. (Keppel 293-294, footnote 57).

Other critics maintain that the passion for abortion in today’s feminism and, more importantly, Hansberry’s depiction of the issue facing one of her characters, immediately qualifies her to fit the feminist definition.  “With the growth of women’s theater and feminist criticism,” Hine writes:

          Hansberry has been rediscovered by a new generation of women in theater.  Indeed, a revisionist reading of her major plays reveals that she was a feminist long before the women’s movement surfaced…  Hansberry’s portrayal of Beneatha as a young Black woman with aspirations to be a doctor and her introduction of abortion as an issue for poor women in A Raisin in the Sun signaled early on Hansberry’s feminist attitudes. (528)

     Naturally, some who use feminist literary criticism openly admit their own feelings of discomfort on reading (or distorting) the life-affirming purpose of the play.  “More than a decade ago, when I first attempted to write about A Raisin in the Sun,” writes Helene Keyssar,

          I found myself in a struggle with the text…. Among those troublesome, marginalized issues, the pregnancy of Walter’s wife, Ruth, the topic of which is raised intermittently throughout the drama, is especially disconcerting.  Ruth does not, in the end, have an abortion, and her fierce declaration at the end of the play—“I’ll strap my baby on my back if I have to and scrub all the floors in America and wash all the sheets in America if I have to–but we got to move….  We got to get out of here”–serves as the dramatic resolution to her previous conflict.  But Hansberry has allowed Ruth to speak enough of her misgivings about bringing another black child into the world that in the festive ambiance of the play’s ending, it is Ruth whose utterances are least convincing of all the characters’. (230-231)

Of course, this is one person’s estimation that the words may be a version of paralipsis.  [13]  Someone who supports the choice which Ruth has made would conclude that her words are persuasive, finding Ruth’s decision entirely consistent with the ethic of affirming life.

     Moreover, to help appreciate that Ruth’s statements should not be interpreted as sites for the deconstruction of meaning, it would be helpful for our students to understand important new research regarding how women are presented on the stage.  Scolnikov’s work on women in the theater helps us understand not only the urgency behind Ruth’s desires to move, but also how such a seemingly disconnected, non-abortion-related matter in the plot can affect her abortion decision.  “In terms of the theatrical space, the house is clearly used as a spatial metaphor for the womb,” Scolnikov writes (44).  Although she uses her analysis of the house to explicate Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, the following extract can approximate both Ruth’s and Lena’s concerns almost exactly: “the close association between woman and her house and its implication for the family group and for society at large form both the framework and the inner core of The Cherry Orchard” (116-117).  And, we can say, for A Raisin in the Sun.  Mama makes a down payment on the house expressly because

          We was going backwards ‘stead of forwards–talking ’bout killing babies and wishing each other was dead…When it gets like that in life–you just got to do something different, push on out and do something bigger….” (Hansberry, Raisin 87)

Ruth is insistent, almost maniacally, that the family move.  “Praise God!” is her first reaction to the possibility of moving out of their apartment (Hansberry, Raisin 83).  Then, towards the end of act two, scene one, Ruth’s exuberance becomes frenzied; Hansberry’s stage directions are, again, clear regarding how Ruth should perform her gyrations around the apartment:

          She laughs joyously, having practically destroyed the apartment, and flings her arms up and lets them come down happily, slowly, reflectively, over her abdomen, aware for the first time perhaps that the life therein pulses with happiness and not despair.  (Hansberry, Raisin 86)

     If abortion as a barometric reading of one’s feminism is the standard, then other critics cannot find evidence in the record to justify such a broadening of the term “feminist” for Hansberry.  Anne Cheney’s research into Hansberry’s early journalistic writing shows that “in her articles [in Freedom] about women, Lorraine Hansberry seemed a feminist only in the most general sense: she praised the accomplishments of women” (17).

     Barthelemy tries to address the issue of Hansberry’s feminism, directly basing his thinking on authorial intention:

          It may seem strange to say Hansberry’s intentions were feminist, if at the play’s end Lena seems to surrender and lovingly endorses the idea of patriarchy.  But the play endorses patriarchy not at the expense of female strength or female governance.  Manhood in A Raisin in the Sun is wholly compatible with feminism.  Lena does not surrender judgment to Walter simply because he is a man; she acquiesces because Walter is right.  Manhood cannot be achieved until Walter demonstrates the pride and dignity that the women already possess. (779)

     These examples show that whether Hansberry satisfies the politically-correct definition of a “feminist” is, therefore, still open to debate.

     Today’s instructor should also acknowledge a final pedagogic problem: Hansberry is a prophet crying in an African-American economic wilderness.  Hansberry’s hopes for the black race in America have not been fulfilled.

     Numerous facts of contemporary African-American life testify to the dream not having been fulfilled.  The numbers of abortions among African-American mothers surpasses their total numbers within the United States.  Reardon, a premiere researcher in post-abortion syndrome, reports that, while

          more than two-thirds of all abortions are done on white women…the remaining one-third which are performed on non-white women is a comparatively high figure, since non-whites constitute only about 13 percent of the total American population. (5-6)

Moreover, according to federal government research covering abortion statistics for the last year available (1991), the abortion rate for African-American mothers is 65.9% per thousand–more than three-and-a-half times larger than the rate of 17.9% for white mothers (U.S. Bureau of the Census 84).

     If viewing her as a prophet, today’s students should find that Hansberry’s hopes that African-American men will aid their wives and their children so that the black family can be as strong and unified as it should be are also not yet fulfilled.  The numbers of African-American men who assume responsibility for the care of the children they engender is staggeringly low contrasted with other racial groups in the population.  Research shows that the ratio of African-American men who reside with their wives and children remains much lower than for white men.  In 1980, nearly 40% of African-American children resided in one-parent matriarchal families (Chadwick 117).  By decade’s end, that number increased to 55.2% (Horton 345).  [14]

     How can I summarize my ideas that A Raisin in the Sun can still be as controversial for today’s students as it was in 1959? Perhaps it would be best to answer the first rhetorical questions posed: “Would Mama be a member of the National Right to Life Committee?”  The obvious answer is “yes.”  More importantly, however, Ruth, the woman who was most in danger of having an abortion, would also be a member of the Committee.  It is she who intimates most immediately the horror of abortion and the hope which springs from new life given the opportunity of a new environment.  Hopefully, our students will benefit from a discussion about the placement of a controversial and contemporary issue in one of our most beloved dramas of all time.

                          Works Cited

Andrusko, Dave. “H. Clinton, Gore Embrace NARAL Blocks from

     March for Life.” National Right to Life News 30 Jan. 1997:

     1+.

Barksdale, Richard and Keneth Kinnamon. Black Writers of

     America: a Comprehensive Anthology. New York: Macmillan,

     1972.

Barthelemy, Anthony. “Mother, Sister, Wife: A Dramatic

     Perspective.” The Southern Review 21 (summer 1985): 770‑789.

Carter, Steven R. Hansberry’s Drama: Commitment amid

     Complexity. Urbana: U of Illinois, 1991.

Chadwick, Bruce A. and Tim B. Heaton. Statistical Handbook

     on the American Family. Phoenix: Oryx Press, 1992.

Cheney, Anne. Lorraine Hansberry. Boston: Twayne, 1984.

Cooper, David O. “Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun.”

     Explicator 52.1 (1993): 59‑61.

Hansberry, Lorraine. The Movement: Documentary of a

     Struggle for Equality. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964.

—. “Original Prospectus for the John Brown Memorial

     Theatre of Harlem.” Black Scholar 10.10 (1979): 14‑15.

—. A Raisin in the Sun: a Drama in Three Acts. New York:

     Random, 1959.

Hay, Samuel A. African American Theatre: an Historical and

     Critical Analysis. New York: Cambridge U P, 1994.

Hine, Darlene Clark. Black Women in America: an Historical

     Encyclopedia. Brooklyn: Carlson, 1993.

Horton, Carrell Peterson, and Jessie Carney Smith, eds.

     Statistical Record of Black America. 2nd ed. Detroit: Gale

     Research, 1993.

Kelly, Tracy. Email to the author. 10 Feb. 1997.

Keppel, Ben. The Work of Democracy : Ralph Bunche, Kenneth

     B. Clark, Lorraine Hansberry, and the Cultural Politics of

     Race. New York: Harvard U P, 1995.

Keyssar, Helene. “Rites and Responsibilities.” Ed. Enoch Brater.

     Feminine Focus: the New Women Playwrights. New York: Oxford U

     P, 1989.  226-240.

King, Martin Luther. “Declaration of Independence from the

     War in Vietnam.” Negotiating Difference: Cultural Case

     Studies for Composition. Eds. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce

     Herzberg. Boston: Bedford Books, 1996.  850-859.

Logan, Rayford W. and Michael R. Winston, eds. Dictionary

     of American Negro Biography. New York: Norton, 1982.

McKelly, James C. “Hymns of Sedition: Portraits of the

     Artist in Contemporary African‑American Drama.” Arizona

     Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and

     Theory 48.1 (1992): 87‑107.

Montgomery, Lori. “15% of black men lack right to vote:

     convictions change face of electorate.” Houston Chronicle 30

     Jan. 1997: 2A.

Nemiroff, Robert, and Charlotte Zaltzberg. Raisin. New

     York: Samuel French, 1978.

Oliver, Clinton F., and Stephanie Sills. Contemporary Black

     Drama: from A Raisin in the Sun to No Place To Be Somebody.

     New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971.

Patterson, Lindsay. Black Theater: a 20th Century

     Collection of the Work of Its Best Playwrights. New York:

     Dodd, Mead, 1971.

Reardon, David C. Aborted Women: Silent No More.

     Westchester, Ill.: Crossway Books, 1987.

Sadoff, Dianne F. and William E. Cain. Teaching

     Contemporary Theory to Undergraduates. New York: Modern

     Language Association of America, 1994.

Scheader, Catherine. Lorraine Hansberry. Chicago: Campus

     Publications, 1978.

Scolnikov, Hanna. Woman’s Theatrical Space. New York:

     Cambridge U P, 1994.

Tal, Kali. Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of

     Trauma. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1996.

U.S. Bureau of the Census. Statistical Abstract of the US:

     1996. 116th ed. Washington: [GPO], 1996.

Washington, J. Charles. “A Raisin in the Sun Revisited.”

     Black American Literature Forum 22.1 (1988): 109‑124.

Wilkerson, Margaret B. “Lorraine Hansberry: The Complete

     Feminist.” Freedomways 19 (1979): 235‑45.

    [1]  Cheney’s biography of Hansberry demonstrates how Ruth’s characterization is intertwined with Walter’s.  Although admittedly one of the “three strong, human women” with which Hansberry has populated the drama, “at thirty, Ruth is caught between the ideas of the new and the old.  She is a full-time domestic, but she values her roles as a wife and mother” (60).  Furthermore:

          As exhausted as Ruth is from domestic work for whites, her pregnancy, and her tension with Walter Lee, she does not share Walter Lee’s monomania about money, business, and social position.  She would be satisfied with a peaceful home life and an adequate income.  But as she begins to understand the compulsion of Walter Lee’s dream, their relationship becomes closer.  Even Ruth’s unselfish willingness to have an abortion shows her understanding of Walter Lee’s plight: she does not want to add to the financial burden or to crowd the apartment with one more person. (70)

     Barthelemy’s otherwise comprehensive article treats Ruth quickly in one main page (775); there is, however, no reflection made on her possible abortion.

    [2]  Carter records a conversation Hansberry had which expands on her concern for the oppressed.  “As she noted in an interview with Studs Terkel: `Obviously the most oppressed group of any oppressed group will be its women, who are twice oppressed.  So I should imagine that they react accordingly: As oppression makes people more militant, women become twice militant, because they are twice oppressed'” (5).

    [3]  When discussing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Tal omits a vital new area of research connected with this feminist-inspired movement: that mothers who have had abortions react in the same ways as victims of sexual and war trauma.  Victims of post-abortion syndrome should be included with the “large percentages of traumatized populations, including Holocaust, Atomic bomb, rape, incest, prison camp, refugee camp, and natural disaster survivors” (119).  Since she omits the large numbers of mothers who have had abortions, readers must supplement Tal’s study of the “worlds of hurt” with Reardon’s exclusive work with post-abortion women.  It may be especially important to understand post-abortion syndrome in minority communities.  Reardon claims that, although

          racial minorities, and the poor in particular, were (and are) generally more accepting of unplanned pregnancies, and are more likely to be opposed to abortion on ethical grounds than is the population as a whole…minorities today are facing increased social and financial pressures to abort against their wills. (6)

    [4]  Since Hansberry herself thought that a solution to poverty was home ownership (stating in a 1963 interview “`I think housing is so important I wrote a play about it'”; Carter 48-9), it is significant that she did not consider abortion to be a solution to the “problem” of more black children.  Four years later Dr. Martin Luther King may have thought about how the experience of poverty can determine whether an unborn child will live or die when he compared the amount of money financing the Vietnam war to “some demonic, destructive suction tube” in his 1967 essay “Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam” (851).  He goes on to say that he “was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such” (851)–much as Hansberry attacked poverty through her writings.  Moreover, we in 1997 must recall that the vocabulary describing the technology of abortion in the late 1950s was not as diverse as today.  The “curette” and “suction tube” were often metaphors for the one method which was synonymous with abortion, dilation and curettage.

    [5]  Some critics view Mama’s intercession on behalf of the unborn child purely negatively.  Wilkerson states that Mama “meddles in her daughter-in-law’s personal affairs by urging that she and Walter produce another baby” and that “she feels that another child for Ruth and Walter will heal their shaky marriage” (239).  Certain words in such criticism (“urging” and “produce” especially) may give the impression that Mama has more control over her daughter-in-law than is demonstrated in the play.

    [6]  The issue of Hansberry’s Marxism has been as slippery an issue for critics as her feminism.  “Hansberry herself,” writes Carter,

          although generally Marxist in her views on life and art, could never accept the more dogmatic Marxist argument that art should be used only as an instrument of the class struggle, just as she shunned the position that art existed for its own sake totally apart from social concerns. (89)

Some evidence, however, that Hansberry herself believed in a strict demarcation between political beliefs and artistic expression can be found in her strongly-worded “Original Prospectus for the John Brown Memorial Theatre of Harlem”:

          It [the Theatre] shall be bound by no orthodoxy…no beholden posture to the commercial theatre of its time, nor to the idle, impotent and obscurantist efforts of a mistaken avant garde. (15)

McKelly disputes that such a neutral position is possible, arguing that, while

          she [Hansberry] brings to light a fundamental tension between art and politics…this tension, as if it were not debilitating enough, is complicated by an additional catch-22 unique to minority artists whose work is in any way dependent upon the institutions or technologies of artistic production in a capitalist mass culture.  The degree to which their art receives its life-giving promotional attention and cultural exposure depends upon what the arbiters of commercial aesthetic culture estimate to be its potential acceptance in the dominant culture…. (89)

    [7]  Her drawing of a “Black Madonna” while still in college (depicting a woman holding a child) can be incorporated here as further evidence of her artistic fascination with the life-giving qualities of mothers (Scheader 29).

    [8]  Apparently, Hansberry’s views on activism were very close to those of pro-life activists today.

          She argued that blacks `must concern themselves with every single means of struggle: legal, illegal, passive, active, violent and non-violent….they must harass, debate, petition, give money to court struggles, sit-in, lie-down, strike, boycott, sing hymns, pray on steps–and shoot from their windows when the racists come cruising through their communities. (Carter 11)

    [9]  Tal reports that

          among his contemporaries, [black intellectual Harold] Cruse [whom Tal identifies as “certainly an antisemite”] criticized Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin for their alleged reliance on Jewish support [arguing] that the post-World War II American Jew bore no resemblance to the idealized Jews of black mythology [because] Jews have not suffered in the United States….  They have, in fact, done exceptionally well on every level of endeavor. (29-30)

    [10]  A striking example involves Richard Barksdale and Keneth Kinnamon’s 1972 work, Black Writers of America: a Comprehensive Anthology.  Many minor works were contained within the 917-page volume, yet neither the entire text of Hansberry’s most important contribution to American theater nor excerpts from her other works were included.  Sometimes even professional publications for English faculty omit discussion of this major playwright.  Hansberry is not considered in Dianne F. Sadoff and William E. Cain’s 265-page Teaching Contemporary Theory to Undergraduates (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1994).  None of her works are listed in the various “Works Cited” for any of the essays; her name does not appear among the estimated five hundred names in the “Index”.

    [11]  Just as I argue that the abortion subplot for students in 1997 can be more interesting than other subplots in the drama, others have had differing opinions about the more important scenes of the play throughout the years.  Cooper notes that “the penultimate scene between Asagai and Beneatha Younger [is] a scene that Robert Nemiroff, who produced and adapted many of Hansberry’s works, describes as capturing `the deeper statement of the play–and the ongoing struggle it portends'” (59).  Agreeing with Nemiroff’s estimation, Patterson notes in his Black Theater: a 20th Century Collection of the Work of Its Best Playwrights that, while “Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun [is] one of the most perfectly structured plays ever to appear on Broadway,” it is more significant in that it “presents among other innovations, the search and acceptance of the African heritage” (ix).

    [12]  Nor can I account for the fact that Nemiroff’s 1978 adaptation of the play as the Broadway musical Raisin does not include the abortion subplot–beyond the surmise, that is, that there never has been anything essentially funny, musical, or entertaining about abortion.

    [13]  The inability of some critics to connect with the text may be due perhaps to a development in theater which Scolnikov describes: “As woman has gradually lost her privileged position in the home, she has also freed herself from its confining space…hence the dwindling interest in the house and the room” (159).  Hansberry’s play goes against that modern dramatic trend.

     It should also be noted that Keyssar’s depreciation of Ruth’s rhapsody may be faultily predicated on the assumption that her words are to be spoken prima facie happily.  The stage directions for this particular episode in act three, scene one are clear: Ruth’s repetitious affirmations of her willingness to increase her work load are “words pouring out with urgency and desperation” (Hansberry, Raisin 129).  Nemiroff’s later adaptation of this scene in the Broadway musical Raisin specifies that Ruth “is near hysteria” (93).

    [14]  It would be interesting to conjecture what Hansberry would have thought about the following quote in the Houston Chronicle a couple of weeks ago: “A study released Wednesday found that 1.46 million black men–nearly one in seven of voting age–have lost their right to vote because they have been convicted of a crime” (Montgomery 2A).  Such men are as doubly-oppressed as the African-American woman, having lost not only economic, but also political power.